Discuss these supplements

Hi Chris,

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How is the play affected by having homosexual members of the game group? When living in Chicagoland (90-91), my roommate and the guy who typically ran our games was gay. We dealt with sexual situations and I can't recall special tensions or interesting situations that arose. Do you or anyone have experience with how one or (especially) more homosexual members of the group changes stuff? Again, it's been a few months since I read your books, but I recall a conspicuous absense on the topic.

Discussing this is tricky because the term refers to so many wildly different preference-profiles, behaviors, subcultures, and so on, such that I can't see much value to saying "OK, Sex & Sorcery for gay people is like this." At that grossly coarse level, though, my call is that the issue isn't a very significant one at the level of "gay or not." I think such an investigation would have to be very age-specific, subculture-specific, and "what sort of gay" specific to mean anything useful.

My own experiences regarding homosexual members of a gaming group yield a big "blah whatever" to the analysis, especially since the people involved have tended neither to be strident/showy nor closeted lah-lah sorts. The following are all just minor bits and pieces:

Gay to straight: The self-identified gay folks I've role-played with typically do not treat the self-identified straight folks in the group as potential sexual partners to any serious extent, although attraction may play some role in wanting your characters to be friends or to help one another in surprising ways, for instance. But my take on that is that it's very much like a straight guy's (e.g.) in-game choices regarding the character played by another straight guy he admires.

Gay to gay: I haven't seen a whole lot of interactions I could spot as such, probably due to group composition. This is also tricky because, if I'm not mistaken, the individual people I'm thinking of weren't approaching our particular role-playing as much of a "market," so to speak. That's highly likely a matter of specific circumstances and can't be much worth at a general level.

Straight to gay: Again, probably my limited experiences or observations for role-playing groups aren't going to be useful. I'm thinking that the same "I like you, so my character will like/help yours" works in this direction as well, without any particular nuances. Side note, not especially kind: I can only imagine the college-crowd phenomenon of the Lone Vocal Young Lesbian gaming with the Several Attentive Flushed Young Men, and I swiftly have to stop contemplating that image. That's potentially a good example of "gay" meaning something a lot less than is usually construed.

Straight to straight: Hands-down, and I don't think this is an issue of simply demographics/composition, straight people are utter beasts about constantly expressing the possibility and signification of sexual activity among one another during role-playing. It's all the more prevalent considering that, out of college, it's rarely to be acted upon and usually only exists in the context of the shared imaginary space. My own experiences have led me to think that once a bit of this is out in the open as a creative engine, it's a much healthier situation, as I try to express throughout Sex & Sorcery.

My final thought is that I would be personally disappointed in our group if a lone gay person ("person who self-identifies as gay in association with behaviors XYZ" being too hard to say) were to go into Ken or Barbie mode in order to feel like they can get along with the rest of us. That strikes me as an insidious possibility that would ultimately create the Denial problems that I outline in the supplement.

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The other point is really just reminiscence. There was a time, about 11 years ago when I went back to college, in which just about every member of my game group had screwed just about every other, either casually or as part of a romance. I really wish I could "go back" and observe our play with these issues in mind. In general that group was very relaxed about such things. But there were some peaks in tension in the games that happened from out-of-game relationship clashing. It would have been a great group to bring into the interviews before writing.

Oh, this was such a big deal in my college gaming days. Two of us were running games all the time, and although both of us were extremely fervent about "the story" (and attendent authorial power-issues), it was the current bed-hopping, both overt and covert, that really provided the substance of most characters' decisions at any given time.

Best,
Ron