The History of Queerness in Videogames - Part 1 - The 90s

This week we look at the 90s.

Believe it or not, games have been queer for a very long time. Nowadays too many people focus on queerness as a thing in games that is a problem. That makes it "woke". People in the industry hear that word all the time, and have to deal with assholes from the "anti-woke" crowd, including dealing with death threats. They have this belief that queerness in games is something new, something that has been forced into more games as opposed to something that has always existed and is just being more in the foreground. The idea that queerness is something new in games is a fundamental misunderstanding of gaming history which ignores tons games from the past and the representation that existed in them. As a reference for how I will be approaching these games, I will be grouping them into 4 different spheres because this is how I think of queer representation in games:

1. 1. Ignorable: this means that the representation is either completely missable or takes initiative from the player to have the representation.

2. 2. Shitty: this is portraying queer people in a bad light, being stereotypical with that bad light, or making an obviously queer character but having some explanation for why they aren't queer.

3. 3. Antagonists/killable: this is when the queer people are either the main or side antagonist/bad guys in the story or they are able to be murdered by the player.

4. 4. Actually good representation: this is when the queer representation is done in a positive way, when the queer folk are portrayed in a way that is accurate in its representative fashion.

Now, an important note is that it's not just queerness that equals “woke” to these people, any kind of representation that they don't like makes them angry. Or any representation that doesn't fit their idea of what a type people "should" look like. But that's not something I can necessarily address as I'm white and don't believe I could do justice to the problems with the "anti-woke" idiots and their approach to race in games. So instead, I'm gonna stay in my lane and talk about queerness and only queerness, although a lot of this does apply to other kinds of representation.

This is part 1 of a 4 part series and will be posted every week on Fridays for the next 3 weeks. This week we discuss the 90s. The point of this series is to go over different games that have had queer representation during past decades in the industry, to show that games have always had queerness in them. That, despite the queerness being more obvious in the industry now, it is bullshit to say it's new.

The 1990s

The 90s was really when gaming started to accelerate. Games started to be more unique and have more identity as they entered the 3rd dimension. Queerness was there as well, although much less of it and usually not very obvious due to the fact that we were still viewed as outsiders. As people who weren't normal, as people who had to be whispered about ,as opposed to discussed at normal volume. My Uncle came out around this time and that side of the family were whisperers. It was rough for the queer community cause we were also still dealing with the AIDS epidemic and its consequences (the deaths of over 300,000 queer folk by the end of the decade).

This isn't to say queerness wasn't in media however, as I've said, we've always been there. The 90s just had a lot more coded queerness as opposed to outright queerness. Often this queerness was confirmed years later by writers, actors, or creators. For instance, let's look at Earthbound. It came out in 1994 and was a hell of a game. While I never played it I know how much it impacted a lot of people. In the game one of your party members is Jeff, and he has a roommate named Tony. Tony is gay. This was not a major character, and people only really knew for sure once the creator came out and said as such in an interview after MOTHER 3 came out years later. Saying of Tony:

Well, for example, there’s a gay person in [Earthbound]. A really passionate friend who lives in an England-like place. I designed him to be a gay child. In a normal, real-life society, there are gay children, and I have many gay friends as well. So I thought it would be nice to add one in the game, too.

Yet, if you really paid attention you could tell Tony was gay. Just reading over his letter to Jeff that gets shown after the end of the game shows that Tony is 100% gay for Jeff. This was pretty standard for queerness in gaming and media as a whole at the time. We existed, but in a very ignorable fashion or were there, but people were able to say "no, they're not queer, it never directly states they are so they aren't." Queer coded characters were common, similar to Tony. So Earthbound then falls into the Ignorable sphere.

Just look how gay Tony’s letter is.

But there was a game in the 90s that was made to be queer. That was made for people to be able to play as themselves in a game at the time. GayBlade came out in ‘92 and I bet you've never heard of it. It's a dungeon crawling game that allows you, the player, to make a team of characters at the beginning like any old TTRPG except they're meant to be queer. The armor for your characters are things like leather jackets, aprons, tiaras, & condoms while the weapons were things like purses, mace, press-on nails & blo-driers[sic]. There were more of both, but those were a short list of some of them. Meanwhile, the enemies were TV evangelists, young republicans, rednecks, homophobic cops and even STIs. It was an incredibly gay game and as such the bigot community freaked the fuck out about it, as they would if the game was released today. Even the normal press covered it. The creator, a gay man named Ryan Best, said about the press coverage:

…[it] included National Public Radio, USA Today, dozens of national and international GLBT[sic] newspapers, Der Spiegel magazine, and I was interviewed by Howard Stern on his radio show.

GayBlade existed for queer people and was made by queer people. This was very surprising to find out about for me when I was researching for this series. Seeing that there were gay game creators in the 90s, and that there were gay games in the 90s, really solidified the idea, in my mind, that we have always been in the industry and always will be. Gayblade was unique, it was the second ever really queer game instead of just having queer representation, and it was one of the few games of the time that fell into the 4th sphere, Actually Good Representation.

I just HAD to include the cover.

There was also Chrono Trigger in ‘95 which had the character Flea, the 9th boss in the game. They were a very feminine looking character but was constantly referred to as a He. There's also a moment where they say:

Male…Female…what does it matter? Power is beautiful, and I’ve got the power!

Obviously this is pretty damn queer. There are definitely people who would argue against that, but in all honesty I do not understand how they're able to disregard the quote I highlighted. It's a very non-binary way of looking at the world, although that term wasn't widely used back then. Flea is obviously some kind of trans/non-binary and views gender as being unimportant and pointless and that the only point of life is power. Flea was queer, arguably agender or some other type of trans. But Flea was also a person you fight, an enemy. So this, obviously, falls into the sphere of Antagonist/Killable.

There were also two games that provided a small amount of queerness for the player directly. The first 2 Fallout games came out in '97 and '98 respectively and they both allowed for gayness for the player character. Mostly, only if you were a female PC, however. This was an instance of having queerness, but it mainly only being the acceptable kind, the "I'm a man and that's hot" kind.

Lesbians have long had more acceptance in at least American culture because of the male gaze. In a whole lot of media it's "hot" to see two girls kissing, I mean in all the frat bro movies out there there is a scene with girls making out. It's viewed as a phase, or as just something to have fun with. It's not viewed as the queerness it is. I knew someone who was very religious and had a very religious boyfriend but he was fine with her making out with her best friend because he didn't view that as queer. But it was. They were both people who thought being queer was a sin as well and believed that the only way to be an acceptable queer in the church was to be celibate or force yourself into straight relationships.

And then here in the first 2 Fallout games where two women having sex and flirting is the "acceptable" type of queer. This provided an experience for young or adult lesbians to see themselves in gaming and, unfortunately, for the guy players to get that "two girls is hot" thing. There is only one instance of a male PC being able to have sex with and marry a male character and it is also in Fallout 2 where the PC, of either gender, can have sex with the son or daughter of the slaughterhouse owner. After sex, the owner forces the PC to marry the one they had sex with. This is one of the first documented instances of having gay marriage in a game, at least in the west. Which is a really interesting fact. While the Fallout games' representation was not perfect, it was still representation. Representation that, in many ways, was both ignorable and also adding to a small list of games that allowed for male on male gayness. As such the first 2 Fallout games fall into the Ignorable sphere, with the caveat that Fallout 2 had better representation overall.

Said slaughterhouse.

Of course, I also couldn't do justice to queerness in videogames during the '90s if I didn't talk about Final Fantasy. Three of the Final Fantasy games released in the '90s had queer characters. We had the pirate captain Faris Scherwiz in Final Fantasy V in ‘92. Faris refers to herself as both male and female during the game since she was raised male by pirates. Faris is obviously gender fluid, and if she wasn't she wouldn't have referred to herself as male and female. It's a rather interesting portrayal that is also a playable character who you're meant to like. Some of the other members of the party don't realize Faris isn't only male so when they accidentally open the door to her room and discover she has a more feminine body, they fall in love with her to which she then quickly kicks them out of her room. Believe it or not, this actually plays into the idea that Faris is pulling the wool over the eyes of the other players, hiding her feminine-ness and as such keeping a secret from them (cause not telling people you're trans is keeping a secret). Faris is obviously queer but the fact that the other party members only "fell in love" with her after they see her body is a very 90s way of looking at both women, and queerness.

The scene is much better in the Remake.

Meanwhile, in Final Fantasy VII came out in ‘97 and there's the cross dressing scene with Cloud which is pretty queer despite the fact that he's required to do it. This scene really spoke to a lot of trans kids, giving them the idea that transness was even a thing, so while Cloud is not trans, this moment is very trans coded, or at least very queer. Unfortunately there's also the character Mukki who is a not very good portrayal of a queer guy because he might have sexually assaulted Cloud when Cloud wakes up with Mukki on top of him trying to wake him up. The Final Fantasy Wiki describes the scene like this:

Cloud experiences a bizarre hallucination of himself and faints, to the horror of the girl he entered with. As he wakes up, he feels pain, but his HP and MP are mysteriously restored. When he comes to he is lying on a bed and Mukki is on top of him, hitting him repeatedly on the face and yelling at him to wake up. Cloud sits up and Mukki lies down beside him, telling him how relieved he is that Cloud is alright. Mukki tells him to ‘give this next one his best shot’ and then starts to leave, saying his ‘time’s up.’ The girl apologizes to him, saying that there are ‘a lot of adult things going on,’ and for his trouble, she gives him a piece of Lingerie. This scene implies, and generates much fan discussion, that Mukki may have taken advantage of Cloud while he was unconscious.

This scene is debatable of whether or not it was sexual assault (but there is that implication), yet it having the possibility of being assault plays into a lot of bigoted ideas of queerness, that we are inherently rapey. This was obviously still representation but it wasn't good.

Then in Final Fantasy VIII in ‘99 there is Adel, a minor antagonist, who is often read as queer due to how her form is rather masc but she uses she/her pronouns. Now obviously this one is more coded, as much of the 90s was, but it is still, arguably, representation. Adel might just be a cis woman who is more masc, but even being a cis woman who is more masc in the 90s in a Final Fantasy game is really unusual so would likely be some kind of lesbian coding if Adel isn't trans. Unless it was all based on an accidental translation disconnect which accidentally swapped the gender, which isn't impossible as translations get messed up sometimes both in the 90s and today. Final Fantasy V falls into the Actually Good Representation sphere, Final Fantasy VII falls, mostly, into the Shittiness sphere, and Final Fantasy VIII falls into the Antagonist/Killable sphere.

There was also GTA 1 and GTA 2 that came out in the ‘97 and ‘99 respectively which, surprisingly, also had representation. Specifically, GTA 1 had the quest giving character El Burro, a gay guy who also happens to be a terrible representation for gay men and for Mexican men. He both adheres to a very stereotypical and kinda racist Mexican accent and also jokingly says he's gonna show you, the player:

"...why they call me the Donkey".

If it isn't obvious, this is a really shitty way to portray gay men as just dying to show you their dicks, despite straight men showing their dicks to the world far more than gay men. Then in GTA 2 there is the character Tetsuo, a Japanese gay man who is only referenced as the owner of the Hochi-ban Bar, a bar that exists but seemingly in the ether as no one really knows where on the map it is. So then GTA 1 falls in the Shitty sphere and GTA 2 falls into the Ignorable sphere. Again, these are still representations.

This guy. Ugh.

Then there was Persona 2 (a series we will be talking about the next 2 weeks as well) that came out in ‘99 where the main character is able to date either 2 women or 2 men. This is actually rather unusual for the time for the main character, a man, to be able to date other men. As mentioned above, even Fallout 2 only allowed that in one instance, which was good but not as in depth as Persona 2. To see Persona, a series that would go on to be incredibly homophobic and transphobic, actually allow gay relationships was a rather large surprise for me as I researched it. One of the boys the main character can date also is a more stereotypical gay man, effeminate and such, but that existing doesn't change the type of representation, in my mind. Unfortunately, since you have to choose to engage with the gayness to the point you could go the entire game without seeing it, this falls in the Ignorable sphere.

Part 1 - Conclusion

The games I have gone over, despite having mixed types of representation, are all still representation. Earthbound still has a gay character in a game that many consider to be one of the best games ever made. Fallout 1 still had some basic queerness representation and Fallout 2 had the most amount of representation in such a popular game from the west at the time. Fallout 2, in many ways, set the standard for future RPGs with having such frequent queerness. GayBlade was an indie game for the time and was immensely queer, a sign of how the indie sphere has always been more representative. Chrono Trigger was, again, regarded as one of the best games ever made and despite the only queer person in the game being a boss, that doesn't change that we were there. Final Fantasy V had a queer PC, something almost all games at the time didn't have, even if it wasn't the best, having a trans person in the game at the time in such a big franchise was immense representation. Final Fantasy VII had the scene that almost all trans gamers, and particularly trans-femme gamers, have heard of and paid attention to with the Cloud crossdressing scene that sparked some embers in their head that maybe they're not cis. That maybe they just want to be a beautiful woman like Cloud. Final Fantasy VIII went back to the stereotypical villain role for the possible queer character, almost mimicking Chrono Trigger, except that one was more obvious and has more evidence. GTA 1 having any representation, despite being trash, is surprising. It being trash but there also then makes it less surprising that the sequel, GTA 2 had "representation" in the form of a person that exists almost only in the myth of the game. Then, Persona 2 had actual gay male relationship content, something incredibly unusual for the time.

Jun is Jun Kurosu, a gay guy.

All of these games had queerness involved and a few were direct in their representation. Despite there being more ignorable queerness in this decade, queer folk still existed. This also isn't including multiple queer games that I found during my research that I didn't go into for length reasons. Surprisingly, the 90s had more queerness in games than you'd expect, even in ignorable fashion, and particularly from Japanese devs. Its something that kept coming up in my research, game after game had queer folk a part of it. Games have always been queer, it just used to be more ignorable.

The 90s ended with the introduction of Will and Grace on peoples TVs which actually began to normalize queerness. Whatever you think about the show and the stereotypes it can sometimes reinforce, it cannot be overstated how important the show was for the community. Not just because queer folk saw themselves in it, but also because non queer folk began to see that us queer folk have the same struggles they do. Struggles with relationships, with jobs, with friends. It showed them that we are normal and they don't have to be afraid of us. The 90s was a decade of incremental change, but some change is better than none.

Queerness in games was similar levels of incremental change, having many, many moments of ignorable representation, moments of absolutely awful portrayals, moments of being antagonists, but still being representation, and small moments of positive portrayals/representation. All of these moments were still there and shows how we have always been there. The industry was changing, was growing, was morphing into what would become a much more accepting and representative industry 2 decades later. First, though, the industry had some progress to make, first they had to start portraying us in a less coded fashion, in a less terrible fashion, and in ways that we could see ourselves in. First it had to go through the 00s, a decade filled with progress and reaction to that progress.

Next Time On...

Next week we are gonna dive into the 2000s. As I said, it was a decade of expanding queerness in games, of decreased queer coding and just having queer people. It was also still mixed and allowed for people to be bigoted murderers. Allowed for people to completely miss or ignore the queerness and it continued to have us as the bad guys in some rather big games. It also laid the ground work for the following decade of queerness in games and for GamerGate. Have a great week and see you next Friday.

Meow,

Cat

The Main Sources for this series are both my memory/own experiences and LGBTQ Videogame Archive:

Also: the LGBTQ Videogame Archive Tony page for the quote about him, Final Fantasy Wiki for the Mukki scene description, a RockPaperShotgun article about Fallout 2’s gay marriage, Fallout Wiki for the Slaughterhouse picture, this specific LGBTQ Videogame Archive for GayBlade that had everything, and a YouTube video for El Burro.

Link to part 2 and 3: