Our November Guild of the Month contest is still ongoing, but today is the day we unveil October's winner. But before I do that, I want to tell all of the entrants that you shouldn't get discouraged. We get a lot of great entries every month, and if you didn't win in October, enter for November! If you don't win in November, stay vigilant and enter in December. This contest isn't going away.

October's winner, The Stonewall Family, is walking away with a $100 gift certificate from Swagdog, where you can pick up all sorts of custom guild apparel. Rather than trying to tell you about them myself, I'll leave it up to the guild to do it. Who knows them better?

Our History

Our meta-guild, The Stonewall Family, originally started as a single guild – La Familia de Stonewall. It was founded in late 2007 by a handful of friends who had tried other gay/lesbian/bi/transgender and LGBT-friendly raiding guilds... but always felt they were somewhat lost in the shuffle, and never really felt a sense of "family". They wanted to start a guild where the social aspects of play and friendships were the most important factor, and where they would be able to avoid any anti-lgbt harassment. From that small group of friends, we have grown to a "meta-guild" of over 700 members across 5 sub-guilds today. [La Familia De Stonewall, The Family of Stonewall, Stonewall Rioters, Die Familie von Stonewall, La Banque de Stonewall]

Who we are and what we do

One of the guild's biggest strengths is that its membership is extremely diverse and live pretty much everywhere. The guild has large numbers of members in every US time zone, as well as Canada, the UK, Australia, and many other locations around the globe.

We also have a high number of members who are not LGBT – but enjoy being part of the family and gaming with our members. Getting to know members from all over the world and from different backgrounds is one of the most enjoyable parts of being in The Stonewall Family.

The guild has an open application process, and does not require prospective members to have specific gear, or fit a class need. They just need to understand the mission of the guild, and be comfortable with being a part of our community.

Within our membership, there are people who like to focus on many different aspects of WoW; PvP, the most current raid content, pre-BC instances, casual questing, achievement chasing. It all has a home within The Stonewall Family.

Friendships are easy to find within the guild, and there's pretty much always someone online to help with quests, heroics, dailies, or just to hang out and have fun within a harassment-free environment. The guild's leadership stresses the family aspect of our guild above all; they want our members to be able to feel part of the family when they game with us, have others to talk to, lean on, and help. It's easy sometimes in Azeroth to feel you are "on your own" and we try as a guild to be there for each other, both in game and with real-life issues.

The Stonewall Family currently has 4 guild leaders who share management responsibility, and a team of 8 active officers and senior members to help with day to day operations. There is also a dedicated in game channel for recruits and members to be able to reach out to an officer easily, even if they don't know who's available.

Our guild participates in publicity and outreach for causes that are important to the LGBT community on a regular basis (National Coming Out Day, World Aids Day) --- and we proudly co-sponsor the annual realm-wide Proudmoore Pride Parade with our horde-side sister guild Taint. We've recently started up two streaming internet radio stations for our members to listen to while gaming, and expanded from our website to additional social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter in order to create as many ways as possible to communicate and network with our members and let prospective members know about us.

What the Future Holds

The Stonewall Family is continuing to grow and expand our membership and is looking forward to all of the changes the next expansion will bring. We will be sticking to our mission of being a fun and harassment free environment for LGBT or LGBT-friendly players who want to join us. We're also working to put together a guild newsletter via email, and an online merchandise store. The guild actively works on putting together regional and national meet-ups for members to get to meet in person and hang out together. A social mixer at Blizzcon will definitely be a priority for 2010.

Thanks to those who've gotten us here

We're very thankful to those who've been part of the guild's success and pushed us farther. Our current guild leaders – Ginjack, Grinbley, Parris & PerfectEnemy – are a huge part of why we've been able to grow and keep on track. We're also thankful to the guild's original founders -- including our original founding member, Joe aka Trinaselff/Arboretum. One of the main reasons people join us and stay is that it really does feel like family.

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Tags: contest, contests, gotm, guild, guild-of-the-month, guilds, la-familia-de-stonewall, lgbt, stonewall-family, swagdog, the-stonewall-family

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Guilds, Contests