First off, we're not just making this up: the official Grey's Anatomy video game is being developed right now by some lunatic asylum that goes by the name Ubisoft (at this news, damn right I be soft! ZING!) for Wii, NDS and PC.

To be honest, why anyone would even want to watch the show at this point is beyond me, much less play a videogame where they actually have to inhabit Seattle Grace's herd of self-obsessed doctors, but whatevs. Since it's a done deal, we figured we'd at least weigh in with our suggestions as to some challenges that the game really should include if they want the gay Wii remote-swinging masses on board.

For example, how about a PaRappa the Paparazzo round? Get the right combinations to bounce, duck, and dive around shrubs and fences as you snap pictures of T.R. Knight and his boyfriend!

More suggestions, after the jump!

A true guilty pleasure of mine comes when conservative media watchdog groups deliver their annual lists of condemnations. These lists clearly come from a place of hate and yet they're often hilarious in how they reveal more about the particular issues of the group that developed them.

What's more, the lists often explain the offenses in such loving detail that they could be a substitute for actual decadence or, as comic writer Tom Peyer calls them, "God's Guide to the Hot Parts".

A new list grabbed my attention today, one dedicated to naming the 30 top offensive games. Much like the Parents' Television Council's annual list of TV shows they hate, this list, compiled by a conservative investment company, is very interested in finding gay content. In fact, I'd say they've managed to put together one of the most useful resources on recent, gay-inclusive video games not written by gay video game players.

Find out about their gay video game recommendations warnings after the break:

Working on As the World Turns hasn't stopped Van Hansis from doing double duty in theatre before. He previously was part of an off-Broadway production of Charles Busch's Die Mommie Die! and now he'll be working on a stage adaptation of the camp-tastic video game Dance Dance Revolution.

If you're not familiar with DDR, it's a game where players are expected to step on footpads in time to music. The game features plenty of dance music including gay fave performers like Kylie Minogue along with hilarious dance covers of classic songs like "Have You Ever Been Mellow" and "Smoke on the Water" (and then there's one song that features the "Boy on Boy Mix").

The stage adaptation will keep up the game's campy sensibility. It's set in an Orwellian society where a dance prophet named Moonbeam Funk helps dancing youth gangs rebel against a fascist goverment. The company working on the show describes it as "like Footloose set in the future -- but kind of scarier, and with 40 really attractive, barely-clothed young actors and buckets of free beer."

I haven't wanted to see a show so badly since I heard the words "Xandadu On Broadway".

This week:

• What's gay at this weekend's Alternative Press Expo?
• The Transgender Day of Remembrance is seeking webcomic submissions.
• Fallout 3 finally hits the store shelves. Can a game with such a strong following live up to fans' expectations?
• Fable 2 just may be even gayer than its predesessor.
• Could we give up Pushing Daisies if we got a Bryan Fuller-led Star Trek?

Check it all out after the break!

Neil Patrick Harris and Tippi Hedren at the unveiling of Harry Houdini's refurbished star last Friday

Following this assortment of carefully-selected news items, interested readers can find a refreshing pic of a hot man in underwear after the jump. Yes, we're serious.

• Dr. Horrible, meet Wally Wellesley: Neil Patrick Harris (a gay man nominated for an Emmy for playing a straight man) will voice the villain in the upcoming Eat Lead video game, opposite Will Arnett (a straight man nominated for an Emmy for playing a gay man) as action hero Matt Hazard.

• A 60-year-old San Francisco streetcar that appeared in Milk will be dedicated to slain politician Harvey Milk tomorrow, the day that the film's premiere is held in the city.

Dashing TV bros Dave Annable and Matthew Rhys (Brothers & Sisters) at a recent GQ event

• Out actor/director Tom Hulce (Amadeus, Animal House) was recently interviewed about his theatre work (including producing smash hit Spring Awakening) and shot down the IMDB rumors that he was married and had a child, noting that "there are a lot of falsehoods" on the Internet.

• The lineup for Lincoln Center's 2009 American Songbook series has been announced, with out stars Paulo Szot, David Hyde Pierce and Alan Cumming among the performers. (Pierce's concert, a tribute to Cole Porter, sounds particularly exciting.)

And today's Briefs are brought to you by...

SLAYERS, SLAYERS EVERYWHERE:
One of the more intriguing bits of video game news to come out last week was the announcement that an MMO set in the Buffyverse is in the works. The downside? This means a Firefly MMO coming from the same people is being shelved.

Wait, there was a Firefly MMO in the works? Yeah, that's the LA Weekly's reason for expressing cynicism about our chances of actually getting to play slayer.

The Buffy cast, as we last saw them.

While I see more MMO potential in Buffy than Firefly ("Another mission where we have to take the long route to avoid the authorities and barely make any profit?") I'm really having a hard time imagining it ... or rather, I'm having a hard time imagining how one would translate the Buffyverse into a variety of balanced character classes. This one will be interesting to watch ... that is, if we actually get news of how the game is developing, something we didn't get with that Firefly MMO.

APPARENTLY IT TAKES DECADES FOR A CAMP CLASSIC TO MAKE IT OVERSEAS:
Here's some exciting and surprising news for gaymers who appreciate the obscure and campy. This week, Cho Aniki (long pegged as the gayest videogame of all time) became officially available to American customers for the first time thanks to the Wii's Virtual Console. In light of the recent discussion on how the iPhone could revolutionize gay gaming, I wonder if there's a similar potential in outlets like WiiWare (where another gay-inclusive game, Eternity's Child, debuted) and the Virtual Console, which lessens the financial risks that might make a publisher wary. It'll be interesting to see if it sells well enough for more Cho Aniki games to hit the Virtual Console.

Cho Aniki

Deep down, tho, I'm hoping that this makes that final Eternal Champions game a possibility. (The original EC is a WiiWare title.) Sure, it wasn't a great fighting game, but Shadow Yamato is one of my favorite fighting game characters: gotta love a corporate spy who managed to remain covert despite dressing as The Huntress instead of working a cute business-casual number.

Eternal Champions' Shadow Yamato

ROCKIN' MOVE ON HIS PART:
The original rock & roll rhythm game, Guitar Hero is getting a new edition, Guitar Hero: World Tour soon and the new version boasts plenty of real life stars as playable characters, including:

One of Guitar Hero: World Tour's playable characters

Hey, cool, it's Neil Patrick Harris in video game form! No, wait, I've just been handed a note telling me that's not Neil Patrick Harris, that's actually Sting you can play as in the game. I guess I'll go back to hoping that I'll be able to play as Keith Strickland in some rhythm game:

The B-52s' Keith Strickland: Still dreamy

Excuse to post a picture of Strickland aside, wouldn't The B-52s be awesome in a Guitar Hero game? I know you can download a few B-52's tracks into Rock Band, but wouldn't it be neat to have them as playable characters?

After the break: What other gay sites are saying about Ultimate X-Men...

WARM UP YOUR VOCAL CHORDS FOR A "ONE OF US" CHANT:
Get your Barrowmania hats back on, cuz a certain Scottish actor has come a-courting. In an interview with the National Post of Canada John Barrowman talks about his love of science fiction, declaring himself a "G-Double-E-K":

"I grew up watching Doctor Who," he says. "I'm of the Star Wars generation; I love science fiction. Star Trek: The Next Generation, Battlestar Galactica ... love 'em."

"I love every morning, getting up to go to work because that little boy inside of me jumps with excitement every time I'm going to fight an alien or shoot a rocket gun or be on a spaceship or be with the Doctor or get onto the TARDIS," he gushes. "So every time I'm working on it, I'm really, really happy."

Barrowman: "G-Double-E-K"

Okay, so there's a little optimist Lyle on one shoulder and a cynic Lyle on the other. The optimist is going "Aw, sah-woon." while the cynic is muttering something about people who say they like Star Trek and follow the sentiment with a series of imitations of Checkov asking about "nuclear wessels".

METAPHORS FOR QUEER RIGHTS MOVE TO SAN FRANCISCO, FILM AT ELEVEN:
It's been a pretty high-profile change to the status quo, so you've probably heard that the X-Men made a move to San Francisco with the 500th issue of Uncanny X-Men. But editor Axel Alonso gave us an interesting teaser when he talked with the San Francisco Chronicle recently:

Q: Is there a chance we might see one of the X-Men come out?

A: Yes. Yes. The city being what it is, certain characters whose sexuality might have been ambiguous are going to feel free to be who they are. I will qualify and say that I never go into the situation with a mandate or an agenda. It has to come along naturally. We're not going to rush into it. But I see it happening.

San Francisco, open your Golden Gates...

Considering the current team working on the X-Men, I see more than a little reason for optimism. Alonso is the editor responsible for Peter Milligan's excellent run on X-Force/X-Factor and the current X-Men writing team includes people responsible for some notable gay moments in comics. Uncanny X-Men is co-written by Ed Brubaker, who created Holly, the temporary successor to Selina Kyle, in his Catwoman run. The adjectiveless title (currently called X-Men: Legacy) comes from the pen of Mike Carey who's was very gay-inclusive on Vertigo titles like Lucifer and Hellblazer, even though in most cases that was a matter of including gay people amid those titles' high bodycount. Finally, Astonishing X-Men has the mind of Apollo and Midnighter creator Warren Ellis working for it.

From the way Alonso phrases things, it sounds like any gay mutant who might come out would be one who has been quietly coming to terms with their sexuality for a while ... so who's been pinging your gaydar? Anyone think it might turn out that Beast wasn't joking when he came out a few years back?

The new Infinity Inc.

By the way, speaking of Peter Milligan, is anyone reading his gender-twisting work on Infinity Inc. at DC? There's nothing specifically gay about the series, so far, but the series includes one guy who sometimes deals with his insecurity by turning into a woman (leading to plenty of gay teasing from one friend) and another guy whose struggle with narcissism is complicated by his ability to clone himself. Of course, the series is already has its final issue scheduled to come out in a few months. Sigh.

AFTER THE BREAK: New life for the gayest video game never to get a US port, Calvin and Hobbes gets mashed up and more!

GETTING CLOSE TO CAPRICA:
I usually end up totally geeking out at this time of the year, as the Television Critics Association is a time when some interesting TV news and discussions starts coming out. Here’s one rumor that has me particularly excited – the Sci-Fi Channel has reportedly ordered two scripts for the Battlestar Galactica prequel, Caprica.

That’s encouraging news since I long had the impression that Caprica’s pilot would air as a mini-series before the network would decide to make it a series or not, as it did with Galactica. This probably means that The Sci-Fi Channel thinks Caprica is good enough to please us Galactica fans. Hopefully there’ll be some official news when the Sci-Fi Channel has its TCA session next week.

EMBRACING TRACING PAPER:
Scandal apparently broke out last week amongst the YAOI community in Japan when Embracing Love creator Youka Nitta admitted to having traced images from various fashion ads. You can check out a collection of side-by-side comparisons at this Japanese web page. As Brigid Alverson notes, I find it interesting how Nitta frequently took images of opposite-sex couples and changed them into male couples:

The page that got Nitta in trouble and the ad that inspired it.

Nitta’s faced a few consequences as her work seems to been dropped from an upcoming issue of Be-Boy Gold magazine and she’s also canceled her planned appearance at YAOI-Con. I wonder if this will further affect the availability of Nitta’s work in the United States. Embracing Love is hard to find due to financial trouble at Be Beautiful, the publisher who licensed the title, a situation that became even more complicated when the Japanese publisher Biblos went into bankruptcy and put Be Beautiful’s licenses in limbo. DMP just published one of her titles earlier this year and has another title coming out in December.

If it's up to American audiences, I doubt this will hurt Nitta’s presence here. While her tracing is a big scandal in Japan, I’ve seen a few American artists whose tendency to copy and alter images became a running gag (like Greg Land and Rob Liefeld) and it didn’t seem to hurt them. Then again, maybe manga audiences will react differently.

I know Nitta has a few fans here (and I probably would be one of them if I ever could find myself a copy of the second volume of Embracing Love); does this change your impression of her work in any way?

After the break: Gays in games and comics ... and what's Stephen Fry doing in this column?

June 27, 1969 marked a definitive moment for the gay community: When a police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar, it sparked an uprising from the bar's patrons, who had had enough of the harassment the raid symbolized (and, according to many accounts, were already upset over the recent death of gay icon Judy Garland earlier in the week).

The revolt grew, as people from nearby bars stepped in to support the Stonewall patrons, eventually turning into a protest that lasted for five days. While the idea of gay pride and that gay people had the right to exist without constant harassment had been building for some time thanks to groups like the Mattachine Society, the uprising energized the gay rights movement. A year later, the event was marked with the first Pride Parade and several major cities celebrate Pride on the last Sunday in June because of Stonewall.

One website is celebrating Pride with a webgame inspired by the Stonewall Rebellion. Stonewall Brawl takes designs from gay cartoonist Eric Orner (creator of The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green) and turns them into a Streets of Rage-style side-scrolling fighting game, where you play a character that fights police officers, collects martini power-ups and unleashes a superpower based on disco fabulousness.

When news of Stonewall Brawl first came out reaction was pretty mixed. Critics wondered if the game would reflect the diversity of the Stonewall Revolution's participants (the Stonewall Inn's patrons were mostly Black and Hispanic, and the uprising probably wouldn't have happened if not for the drag queens and transgenders who were a key part), asked if the game could be taken out of context to make the gay community look bad (after all, it is a game about violence against the police) and worried that turning the Rebellion into a game would trivialize a key event for gay rights.