Deadmau5 Has Said He Isn’t Homophobic, After Again Saying Something Homophobic
"Fuck off with that shit, I know who I am, and I don't have to fucking sit here and cry and defend my-fucking-self."
Deadmau5 has deleted his Twitch account after he was suspended for using what the service called a “homophobic slur” during a live-stream.
The producer is a long-active and prolific user of Twitch, and appeared at the video game live-streaming site’s first festival in 2015, TwitchCon.
It’s believed that the service suspended Deadmau5 (real name Joel Zimmerman) for calling another PlayerUnknown’s Battleground player a “fucking cock-sucking stream sniper f*g”, meaning the user was watching Deadmau5’s live stream to find him.
In response, Deadmau5 deleted his account — when fans made a Reddit post asking why, he added a now-deleted but screenshot comment. In it, he defended his words as being “in the heat of the moment”, but acknowledged without the context they were “generally toxic as fuck”.
Twitch has banned @deadmau5 for 'hate speech' for using a homophobic slur against a stream sniper in PUBG.
In a response on Reddit, deadmau5 says he will likely no longer partner with or stream on Twitch due to the platform's double standards on censorship and suspensions. pic.twitter.com/fRI9ogF64j
— Rod Breslau (@Slasher) February 13, 2019
“It wasn’t ‘directed at an entire group of people who have a sexual orientation that differs from my own,” he wrote. “Fuck off with that shit, I know who I am, and I don’t have to fucking sit here and cry and defend my-fucking-self with the obligatory ‘I’m not that person, I am sorry’ reflex.”
In the post, the producer says he deleted his account as a protest against Twitch’s “double standard when it comes to censoring” him. Twitch adopted a zero-tolerance approach to hateful conduct last year. Given that the man who allegedly hit his wife while live on Twitch is back streaming, it’s clear they are still working out how to implement the policy.
Having said that, Deadmau5 has a history of making anti-LGBTIQ comments online. Last year, he apologised for making transphobic comments on Twitter, saying he “got into a heated argument with some dude online [and] said something dumb”. The apology echoes his new one, but as multiple Twitter users point out, using a slur in the heat of the moment means it’s sitting there comfortably on the tip of your tongue, waiting to be used.