Development 09 - Diversity vs. Queerness (Patreon)

Living Games Con had a lot of ups and downs. There were parts of it that were incomparable - getting to hear LARPers from all sorts of backgrounds talk about their personal experiences and their thoughts on developing a more complex, honest version of what LARP is. Even though there weren't any deep dives like I'd been hoping for, there was still some frank and thoughtful discussions on LARP that definitely have informed my practice. 

One thing the conference did serve to show me, something that I wasn't expecting, was a new perspective on queerness. And it was born from the environment the con created.

Living Games absolutely positions itself as incredibly queer friendly. Everyone has nametags on their badges, people introduce themselves with their pronouns, and everyone is very careful to be inclusive. This is not an unfamiliar space for me. My college is progressive and attempts to institute similar policies, and Wayfinder is famously gender-inclusive. There were a lot of people who were very excited to welcome me in as a queer person, and the attitude was very positive. 

But! It also positioned me with my queerness in an odd position. This isn't through the fault of LGC, but instead seems connected to a greater fact about an atmosphere of complete acceptance. Simply put: I am not "just like" a cis person. A trans person isn't a cis person with more colorful hair and who is offended more easily. I don't want to feel like I'm in a space where cis people get to act like experts on trans culture and discourse (ranging from a cishet person moderating a panel about queerness to a cis person talking about how trans people shouldn't use privilege to refer to themselves) while existing in a space where they get to feel fully comfortable with their actions. I don't want people to feel fully comfortable around my gender. I want people to respect my gender, and support my gender, but I also want them to be aware of the inherent contradictions and social dynamics I'm rejecting. 

This, of course, translates into my work. A lot of my work places queerness at the literal front of it. This is entirely because I want to make it clear that it's a queer work. But even works that I don't literally label as being queer are queer. My games are about apocalypses - personal, metatextual, literal. My games are about transcending and transformation. My games are about alchemical principles, about the hermetic hermaphrodite and about the capacity to become something more than yourself, more than what you were forced to carry with you at birth. My queerness is inseparable from my writing. 

I think what's important is that I don't have to write queer games, even though I'm queer. I certainly agree with Sadia Beis when they said "What you need to do to write queer games is to be queer". My games are able to be queer because of who I am. But also, I'm able to write games that aren't queer in nature. I don't think The Rake is queer, as interesting as it is. I think you can have queer characters, and I think that it invites queerness, but I also think that I'm not interested in it being read as queer by myself. 

In the Re-Centering the Other panel at LGC, an incredible group of panelists discussed with that notion is so, so flawed when it comes to race. People of Color don't need to be re-centered - they are already the centers of their own communities. And they're certainly not the other. I'm not sure, however, that that same sense can be extended to queer people. Queerness is defined in terms of difference - we are rejections, we are extensions, we are reinterpretations and transformations. We take things and change them, reclaim them, and carve out our own space. In the West, we are queer because we aren't like them. My writing is queer because it's not like them, and it's about stories that couldn't be told if I was like them. 

I don't know if there's a way to make me actually satisfied with a pronoun-focused space. I'm certainly not making any demands for changes, because I don't think I can visualize changes that actually would satisfy me. Sometimes I wonder whether the space I'm visualizing is even capable of containing cisness, that maybe we need more spaces that are fully queer. There was a funny moment at one of the panels I went to, where all the cis people said their pronouns and none of the trans people did. I loved that. I wonder if that could be a window into something else.