Yes, the unplanned off-the-rails lesbian kiss at E3 generated some really great press coverage! And it was also soon after Columbine, when video games were getting a lot of unfair flack and blame for causing violence and school shootings, so people were really hurting for a non-violent gender inclusive video game, both for gamers to play and for the press to write about.

Here's a great video essay by Alex Avila, who deeply analyzes The Sims, and discusses "The Kiss". The YouTube comments are exceptionally amazing and heartwarming! (Well curated to eliminate the toxic slime from hateful GamerGate incels like FAAST, too.)

Did The Sims make you gay? - a video essay.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xi-HWyh0Ybk

>It's no doubt The Sims is an influential video game. In this video essay, we're going to talk about its GAY influence, particularly the role it plays in queer people's identity development. Enjoy the presentation as we go over how the Sims influenced a generation in letting them live out their Tumblr dreams...

Just a few of the many comments:

Yes it did, I used to make wlw families in my Sims 2 games and make their homes lower than the ground level bc I thought it'd hide them from my parents

I DID SOMETHING LIKE THIS. I made the bedroom downstairs so when they slept, cuddled or whoohoo, my parents would not see.

Ah yes, fond memories of saving my gay in-game relationships on a separate memory card. And if that wasn’t enough good measure, being a psychopath and making my characters fight to reduce their social status back down to friends or enemies so that no one would see or suspect that they were ever married.

You were hardly made gay by the sims.
You were always gay.
The sims just help you discover it.

@tikimillie hey not trying to respond in a mean or hateful way, I’m pretty sure everyone commenting and the person who made the video know the sims didn’t make them gay, but it’s a joke based on anti lgbt people claiming stuff makes us gay, so this joke subverts that by claiming the thing that made us gay is a game we love.

My wife was a huge fan of The Sims and your video on its impact on sexual orientation made her laugh out loud. She would watch it over and over, always finding something new to enjoy. Though she is no longer with me, the memories of her laughter while watching your video will always be a source of comfort. Thank you for creating something that brought her so much joy. Rest in peace, my love.

I 100% made gay sims but the pattern actually started way earlier. When I was five had a pair of polly pockets who were "married" and lived in the same little pocket house. My parents thought this was very cute and were equally sweet (and completely unsurprised) when I came out 10 years later.

I was gay before but the Sims make me accept in who i am, because of how gay people in the game is treated as just normal people, it was so heart warming to see my two gay sims kiss each other in public without people harassing them

I remmeber playing my first sim game (3) alone at the age of 10 and my two characters, one rich old man and one surfer bro who started out as roommates, eventually fell in love and started cuddling on their own and at the time I was so unfamiliar with gay content in any of the media I consumed I remember being absolutely astonished that the game would let them do that at all. not in the angry reactionary way but in the "holy shit... they can just DO that????? and it's FINE???????!!!!" kind of way

When I came out to my sister, the very first thing she said to me was “……. Is that why all your Sims were gay?”

I'm one of those players that never had a problem with the sexuality system in The Sims. I never felt the need for labels, homophobia, queer history and such in my game. Equal for me was enough. More than enough, it was everything I wanted. No distinction means no hate. Everyone is normal and the same. I love queer history irl, but I long for a world where I don't need to label myself, to come out, to identify with a community and not with another. For me, not having to be different is freedom. As in, I can be as different and unique as I want, but it won't make a difference in how much people love me or hate me; I want walk down the street holding hand with my partner without people looking at us because we're not the pair they expect. Their indifference would mean the world to me. And The Sims gives me that. I don't want no labels, no hate, trauma in my game. Not the real life kind that is. Downloading extreme violence and ending families is a whole different story :)

Making my sim flirt with/date/kiss a female sim every day before quitting without saving so my parents wouldn’t find it and so it didn’t count is one of my gayest experiences

That reminds me a story of my childhood:
Me and my cousin playing the sims together.
Making two sims (me: a female, he: a male) and controlling them in turns.
My cousin controls his sim and gets him a girlfriend from some of the neighbor households.
Then he says: "Yay, I started dating her! And who are you going to date?".
And I answered, without a second thought: "I am going to steal your girlfriend".
He: "What? Is it even possible?"
Me: "Let's try and see."
And it worked, my sim successfully stole his sim's girlfriend.
That's how we discovered the sims can be gay. And how I discovered I prefer girls. So I quess The Sims made me gay? :D

When I was like 7 I used to play a psp sims game and saw the option for 2 same sex sims to get married, so I tried that and was surprised to see it wasn't like a weird insulting thing. When I showed it to my grandma she just confiscated the psp and hid it for actual years which was so confusing

I remember the first time I ever made gay happen in the Sims. As a kid I didn't know sex worked so I made my Sims adopt their children as I was unsure of how to make them have children naturally. I learnt much later by accident when 2 of my Sims were sharing the same bed and the option came up. So the next generation of my Sims family came along. Their offspring was a girl who had a friend throughout childhood who was also a girl. As they grew into teenagehood, I realised the option to do romantic interactions was there. I was really surprised. When I clicked on them I didn't think the two girls would actually kiss. I felt really hot all over, it was so exciting. I made them kiss over and over and over. I didn't know why this kiss felt different from all my other Sims kissing. Quickly, I started to feel guilty and embarrassed (I don't know why because my family have no issues with gay things, seeing as many members are gay themselves). I forced my sim to leave her girlfriend and marry a man so they could have children, because I was desperate to have biological children. My Sims were basically always gay as I got older and older. The Sims actually helped me to realise that I was apart of the lgbtq community myself even if I didn't know it yet.

as a bisexual sims fan, i view the lack of choosing an identity, and the "utopia" of existing without having to declare a label as something that was helpful to me. to see sims autonomously love each other despite that was one of the things that helped me realise that people having to come out is just strange. And as someone who loves queer history and understanding the oppression and suppression presently and in the past i think having a game where flirting with the opposite sex is the same as flirting with the same sex. it felt refreshing to other games i also like, such as stardew valley.

When we were 9 or 10 my best friend and I made an all-female prison and since we had heard that lesbians were bad people we made two prisoners kiss, it was supposed to be wrong but for some reason it felt more familiar to me than my sim self's life with a husband and kids. So I decided to give myself a girlfriend and see how I felt, I realized this is how I wanted my real life to be as well when I grew up. Unfortunately, my mom caught me and made me delete my gf and back in the closet I went.

I'm obsessed with how well this essay was put together. The background information laid a wonderful platform to build off of and put things into perspective, and then call back to as we went and were introduced to new information. Not only that, but it created a sense of tension that led up to and really paid off around the 30 minute mark when the mirror stage was brought up. That whole section brought all the other ideas talked about into a singular, clear focus and made a really compelling argument.

From the title before watching, I thought the video was going to talk about being able to discover your identity through a private experience with a game that allowed queer expression that you might not have seen/experienced before, but damn, it went in hard with the idea of queerness coming from innately within or from external societal ideology and has seriously made me rethink a bunch of things, past just the game and even past the subject of queerness.

Seriously, amazing job. I hope you got great marks for your school essays, because I'd bet my left foot you deserved them.

[These are just a few examples. There are many more great comments on the video!]