How I Helped Make Falcons CS2 The (Un)Official Team Of The LGBT Community

Today, a dumb story from a dumb business... An exercise in exposing hypocrisy in an industry driven exclusively by the morally bankrupt.

A change from the usual today on Substack. Instead of a report about the usual liars, thieves and hypocrites that have packed esports in a Saudi state owned suitcase, I’ll instead tell you a funny story. If you’re a Counterstrike fan you will have probably noticed that if you watch Falcons games on Twitch the chat has become a wasteland of deleted comments with moderators sniping down anything that even looks like a rainbow from their watchtowers. Well, I’m going to tell you how and why that’s happening. Before that let me do some moral grandstanding for a few paragraphs.

Just to explain my beliefs simply I obviously support LGBT people having equal rights to everybody else because they’re people like everybody else. I also believe that performative support for causes in countries where it is safe to espouse that support is fundamentally worthless and occurs in most cases to benefit the performer. In relation to matters LGBT this has led to the annual ritual of companies, in a bid to win what we call the “pink pound” in the UK, of posting rainbows in June and telling the LGBT community how much they care. That message is somewhat undercut if you then do vast amounts of lucrative business with a regime that persecutes, prosecutes and executes that same community. Sounds kind of obvious and yet you’d be amazed at just how many fail the profit versus principles test.

I also urge all of you reading this, particularly those in the LGBT communities, to pay close attention to who all those who fail and remember who they are. They may at some points again take to social media to lecture you all. If they call you a bigot just reply with the picture of them embracing an oil baron. If they criticise a company for not doing enough their cause of the day, just cite the human rights watch reports about their business partners. If they say they care just tap the Saudi sign. They’ve surrendered away their smug self-righteousness forever and that’s the best thing to come out of the whole mess. They don’t get to use you anymore.

This is the only upside of the great esports Saudi takeover but what we’ve given up in exchange are fundamentals that no amount of money should outweigh. We’ve executives openly saying that we can’t guarantee the safety of gay or trans competitors if they compete in these countries. Those that don’t say it openly tacitly admit it by saying “we won’t make our players compete anywhere they don’t want to.” Even if you could guarantee the safety of those individuals what would it say about the situation morally that an entirely different set of standards were applied to Western visitors while the indigenous population were still being persecuted for the same things? It’s a compromise rotten to its core and if you happen to be in one of those persecuted groups one that would make you a traitor to your own.

All of which is to say that this current iteration of esports is perhaps the biggest disappointment of my adult life. I had to suffer through the Trump years where every single American person involved in esports would not shut the fuck up about the imaginary fascists in the room and even compared one of the greatest esports events ever to a MAGA Rally. Despite having made many great sacrifices to help grow this industry I was denied enjoyment of the fruits of that labour by the endless histrionics of people who called me a Nazi and threatened to have me murdered. Then when the time came to really show that purity of spirit the same people sold off all the major parts of the industry to China and Saudi Arabia all while accepting sponsorship deals from war criminals and unregulated gambling sites. How could anyone be an esports fan these days?

Fortunately for my sanity I have a pretty healthy Discord community of approximately 4000 people who I like to think are lapsed esports fans like myself. We’ve watched a combination of cheapskate fans, short-sighted organisation owners and unethical developers deliver the games we love into the hand of some of the most poisonous regimes around the globe. We’ve collectively come up with our own patented therapy for living in that reality. We shitpost.

So when Falcons, a Saudi Arabian esports organisation funded by “anonymous backers,” was airlifted into the upper echelons of Counter-Strike by a combination of their business partnerships and spending, we wanted to shitpost about that too. Somewhere along the way we decided that it’d be funny if we were able in some way to tie Falcons to the LGBT community their country criminalises, that way whenever they played people on some level would have to acknowledge that reality. I believe the wokerati call it “starting a discussion.”

“How about Let’s Go Bird Team as a chant” suggested someone.

“Too subtle but a good start”

“Even if we put parentheses around the first letter of each word?”

“Fuck off”

Then one of the resident memeologists posted the Falcons logo in the rainbow colours. Given that in the Summer of 2022 the Saudi Arabian state did a mass seizure of rainbow coloured toys and clothes as part of a “crackdown” on homosexuality it was pretty fucking perfect. So I tweeted it out and waited to see if it took.

Yes, I don’t use Dark Mode

While I can’t claim that it went viral – it only earned about 250 reposts and close to 3000 likes – it did enough. The replies were as you’d expect, a combination of same sex relationship interactions and people demanding that the “filth” and “smut” be kept out of the “lovely” game where law enforcement and terrorists shoot each other in the face. It then spread to other forums, including Reddit, where it was deemed by the majority to be funny enough to copy and I was declared “based” after the usual preceding qualifier of “Richard Lewis is a piece of shit but…”

Since then the Twitch chat in Falcons matches have become a battle ground of those who support LGBT rights and those who are scared that BIG GAY™ is going to get them if they stare at a rainbow for too long. The resultant shitshow has been heartening to watch as it suggests that there are many more people in on the joke than I originally thought. And just to spell it out the joke is that esports can no longer present itself as an inclusive space and the people who made that so were and are the ones still trying to cash in on that buzzword in Western markets. That’s what this spam is actually saying whether everyone deploying it realises it or not and it’ll be brought up again and again every time they play. Esports fans don’t boycott or vote with their wallets because they don’t spend at all. This is as good as it gets so I’ll take it.

Now you see it…

Now you don’t.

Huh

I also want to make it clear, I’m not a maniac. I would find it obnoxious if I was watching football with my friends and someone came in and shouted “WOMEN’S RIGHTS” or whatever over and over while I was sipping my beer. I’ve talked publicly and often about how tiresome it is to be constantly lectured by the media I consume. One difference with this is that chat is optional and if we’re honest is absolute dogshit anyway. The real key difference is that I’m not a powerful political entity that is oppressing women or anyone else. The same cannot be said for the owners of ESL and most likely Falcons. The people who built esports to be for everybody have been pushed out by this new controlling force that explicitly discriminates and that feels worth complaining about. Or, you know, I was a hypocrite the whole time. You decide what works.

What has surprised me are the lengths that ESL, a company that uses the phrase “GG for all” to promote their women’s leagues, have gone in order to obfuscated what is happening. It’s to be expected that the ESL moderators have taken to adding some of the more common spams variations to their banlist, including ones that use Twitch’s site-wide emotes. I emailed Twitch about this asking how they felt about a business partner timing out their users for using their global emotes that they have promoted annually as part of their own evolution into becoming a more inclusive site but they didn’t reply. As we’ve seen in the past Twitch gets to skate on a lot of things. I’m still waiting for an official statement on my reporting about sexual predators using features of their site to prey on children so I doubt they’ll be firing off a reply about this any time soon.

When the users started switching up which combination of words and emotes they used they started manually banning people. Somewhat hilariously while I myself was watching one of the matches from the most recent IEM Katowice event a user noticed me in the chat and decided to lambast me for “selective outrage” for being the catalyst of the spam. They contended I should criticise all of the esports operations owned by Saudi Arabia. I suppose in retrospect maybe my views on this weren’t clear and my coverage was just not extensive enough. I replied by saying “I am outraged by Saudi Arabia’s human rights record” a response that seems reasonable enough. I was timed out while the concern troll continued to rant at everyone about how the Twitch chat was ruining his experience by posting rainbow emojis.

Since then I’ve been messaged by dozens of other people who I suspect want me to amplify the fact that ESL is timing people out for various expressions of “gay pride” because people do like drama. The users that complained were referred to the channel rules which includes a blanket “no political statements or discussions rule” which is fine. My first reaction to that would be to point out that we did arrive at the consensus there’s nothing political about people’s sexualities somewhere in 2016 and to say to the contrary makes you a bigot… My second is the ESL broadcast itself is decked in explicit political statements including recruitment for the same US military outlet that has killed civilians in Yemen.

But I wasn’t going to say anything about it because it’s just shouting into the void at this point and you never want to become one-note as a writer. What tipped me over into writing this was an observation made by another one of the Discord socialites. They noticed that ESL’s DHL giveaway, which requires viewers to spam the chat, was typically being deployed during the Falcons games. Being a Discord regular their findings weren’t just presented anecdotally but rather with an Excel Spreadsheet and several graphs they’d made. They approved me sharing them in this article.

I’m sure ESL will say this is a coincidence or that it was to do with the time of day but I do find it hilarious that there’s even the slightest chance that their executive body had to have a meeting to discuss the best way to deal with public LGBT support during Falcons games and this was the strategy. Even if that almost certainly didn’t happen the optics of it alone has made the whole exercise worth it. I’ve been constantly reassured that there’s nothing malignant about the Saudi Arabian state’s takeover and that the partnership was actually positive because it meant our values would be more likely readily adopted in their country. Now here we are mass deleting pride emojis so as not to rock the multi-story yacht, just further proof of the insane double-standard bag-getters will employ. No-one stands for anything in esports.

So that’s where we’re at in case you were wondering. I’m sure none of this will go over well with the “I just want to watch the game” crowd and that’s fine too. These days I’m so jaded with how everything has turned out I can only really get excited by the moments that expose the inherent absurdity of what we’re all doing here but I don’t expect everyone to feel that way. It was good to be back in the trenches again though. This project for a brief moment made me rejoin the Counterstrike community and be a fan again. Fly high Falcons, fly high.