I discovered a friend of mine pretends to be female online

This was a pretty embarrassing day for everyone involved and to be honest I can't really look at the guy the same anymore. I don't even live in the same country as him but found this out because we were playing an online game years ago.

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I will admit, when I play an RPG and there is a choice, I will often choose the female character partly for pervy reasons and partly because i dunno, the costumes I guess... mostly pervy reasons.... but I draw the line at actually pretending to be a female also.

I discovered this about my friend during a team matchup with Phantasy Star Online (yes, it was a long time ago) and it was actually very common for people who are guys to choose female characters and there is nothing wrong with that of course.

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It was a relatively basic MMO of sorts but this was very early on in the days of online gaming (I was playing it on a Sega Dreamcast and wi-fi didn't exist yet... so yeah, it was a while ago) and there were "meeting rooms" where you would select your team with a group of strangers... you know... old-school LFG stuff.

You had the ability to partner up with the same people and I, by invite, joined my childhood buddy in his team.

While the game carried on as usual i started to notice some statements coming from the other person, who i do not know in real life and these statements started to seem like something that a girlfriend / boyfriend would say to one another and I just assumed that the other dude was joking and it was funny. However, me being new to this, I asked a question to my friend using his real name and he shot back a private message to me saying "No real world names please."

It was at that point that i figured out what was going on here and I have to say I was a little shocked, disappointed, and a bit disgusted. Thing is, this guy is not gay and if he was I wouldn't have a problem with that. I have heard about people getting their jollies by making fake profiles with girls' pictures and luring men into their trap but I never personally knew anyone who did it.

I did not play that game with him again and it's just as well because as it turns out the game was really repetitive and kinda sucked. It didn't sell very well either to the point where the 2nd PSO game wasn't even released in USA and Sega exited the console market shortly thereafter.

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Him and I have never spoken about this. On recent trip back to the states I brought it up at a Mexican lunch and he claimed to not know what i was talking about. Maybe I should have just left it alone. This was something that happened 20 years ago (or so) and I still think about it today. I suppose he regrets bringing me into his group that day, almost as much as I regret joining it.