Hello! Eurogamer once again marks Pride week with features celebrating the intersection of queer culture and gaming in all its forms. Things kicked off today when James Croft reflected on the particular charm of LGBTQIA+ gaming groups.
Reh kills Cabal while fighting Destiny 2’s Emperor Calus in the heart of Leviathan. He throws grenades at packs of space dogs, headshots Psions, and double jumps over flames as his fire team once again attempts a sneaky raid on the shadow realm. Calus’s health is low and the tension is building – if they succeed, they will finally defeat this fiendish boss, otherwise it’s back to the beginning. But their rockets fly true, their supers crash into his mechanical body and – finally! – Calus is defeated. But Reh’s enthusiasm is short-lived. “Wow,” says a member of the fire team over the comm. “I can’t believe my first clear was with a bugger.
That was the last straw for Reh. Sick of the homophobic comments and eager to find a place to be accepted, Reh took to Facebook – the ISO queer Destiny clan! – where he discovered Guardians of the Rainbows, a group founded by two gay men in 2016. Since then he has been involved, graduating to admin and de-facto leader of the clan. For Reh and many of its other members, Guardians of the Rainbows – which has grown into a thriving international community over the years – is a haven, a safe space away from the toxicity of gaming. But more than that, it is a place of strange joy and even the source of its members’ deepest friendships.
I can relate. In December 2022, after 15 years in the US, I returned home to the UK and moved to Brighton on the south coast. I was new in town, so I did what I had done before when I wanted to meet new people: I found a local gaming store and played Magic: the Gathering. By pure chance, I sat down with Louie, who just after the Covid lockdown put together a couple of MtG friends he met in person and on Grindr (literally sharing deck photos) to form a regular cadre of LGBTQIA+ players. This informal gathering grew into a group that now calls itself Tragic: the Gathering – and its members quickly became some of my closest friends.
Manage cookie settings
Louie admits he was initially worried about how the group would interact outside of the game. “If we’re not playing together,” he recalls thinking, “are we really getting along?” But we started seeing each other more and more outside of our Magic-time, going to the cinema, hanging out in the pub, even going to an impromptu Dungeons & Dragons show together at the Brighton Fringe. We became a community and it made me think about the relationships that LGBTQIA+ gaming groups tend to foster: why do I feel so close to these people even though I’ve known them for such a short time? Why do these groups feel like home—like family—to so many of their members?
ManicPixyGirl joined the Guardians of the Rainbows for the same reason as Reh. She is trans and has often faced harassment and toxicity while playing online first-person shooters. “If I’m playing with random people, I’ll generally keep quiet to avoid misogyny or transphobia,” he tells me. In Guardians, on the other hand, he knows that if someone says something inappropriate, the others will report it. Everyone is working to make the space safe for queer people of all types, and that makes all the difference. “I feel safer talking on the communicator,” he says.
James, who regularly plays Overwatch with a group of gay friends, agrees. “It’s safer to play with LGBTQ people,” he says. “There’s a lot of hate on the internet – you still run into people saying derogatory things.” But as a group, it’s easier for James’ team to face the homophobia they face at times. And while everyone I’ve spoken to has experienced queerphobic harassment while playing, James says he’s noticed allies speaking up more and more. “We like to help them, heal them more or protect them.” In this way, queer gaming groups like James’ Overwatch gang and the Guardians of the Rainbows can help make gaming feel safer and more welcoming not just for LGBTQIA+ gamers, but for everyone.
But it’s not just about security. “I find that there’s so much joy in queer spaces in general,” ManicPixieGirl tells me. “We’re all capable of being fully ourselves. I’ve experienced it going to gay bars and I’ve experienced it in this clan. Everyone is so authentically themselves and it brings joy.” And for queer nerds, finding a group that both affirms their queer identity and their player identity can be particularly strong.
Lee, a member of Tragic: the Gathering and up-and-coming MtG YouTuber (one of the relatively few openly gay creators in the universe), put it this way: “Gay and nerd, it’s a bit of a double whammy in life – how many more cuts do you need?” But when he’s playing games with his Tragic friends, he can share both of these parts of himself. “I feel pure joy [playing with Tragic]”, he says, “because they accept my joy in this hobby, because they understand it.
Perhaps the joyful exuberance that comes from this double rush of validation is why these LGBTQIA+ gaming groups can be so good for non-queer people, too. Guardians of the Rainbows, while still explicitly a clan for LGBTQIA+ players, has always welcomed cis members directly. .”
While most members of the Guardians clan are part of the LGBTQIA+ community, it is not uncommon for three or four members of the six-man raid team to be straight. I asked Reh if he was worried this might affect the nature of the clan, but the group makes sure all potential members understand who the clan is for and the queer ethos it promotes. And if you’re wondering why a straight person might want to join an LGBTQIA+ clan, I think the answer goes back to that queer joy.
I know from personal experience that the queer fireteam is a entertainment fireteam and there is a kind of freedom that rubs off. Reh gives an example: the Kings Fall raid in Destiny has a notorious jumping section that requires players to jump from platform to platform while avoiding a series of push pistons. Careless players can be pushed into the abyss by the banging bars. “They’re very phallic,” says Reh, “and the decent guys will make jokes about the ‘penis wall’. ‘You got slapped!'”
This may seem like typical straight male ribaldism, but I think there’s something deeper going on here: the exuberant and unapologetic authenticity of LGBTQIA+ people can, in a sense, liberate straight cis people, allowing them to explore aspects of themselves that they might otherwise struggle to find. they fit into rigid societal scripts of gender and sexuality. Thus, LGBTQIA+ gaming groups (like all queer groups) can be a space where everyone – not just queer people – can be a little more free and honest.
But perhaps even more heartening are the kinds of truly deep relationships that these groups so often facilitate—the members of which even become chosen families. James’ Overwatch team originally started as a board game group, but they wanted to stay in touch during the pandemic – so they chose Overwatch as a relatively easy game they could all play together online. And they played daily. “It saved my sanity during the lockdown,” he admits – and his team now includes some of his closest friends. “Playing together accelerated our closeness.
It’s a similar story for Guardians of the Rainbows. Reh tells me that a number of clan members have complicated relationships with their birth families, who don’t always accept them as queer – yet they’ve found a place for themselves by playing together. And the community built in Destiny 2 is slowly expanding beyond it: after several Zoom meetings during the pandemic, a group of Guardians will soon share a chat in Michigan and meet offline for the first time. Reh is excited but nervous: his social anxiety is kicking in. But the clan helped him with that too.
The last word, however, must go to my Tragic: friend from the Gathering, Lee. “My real family didn’t understand me at all when I was growing up,” he tells me. “I was the weird bohemian gay kid in a family where no one understood the weird bohemian gay kid.” “It’s been a lifeline for him to find groups where people understand what you’re talking about. You spend your formative years feeling so profoundly alien, and then suddenly the shared references make you feel like there’s a small group of aliens running around. And don’t feel so alone, I found more comfort in these people that I’ve known for two years than in my family that I’ve known for 45 years.”
That’s a special kind of closeness—the magic created when queer gamers who share a minority identity as well as a passion find each other and say, “I choose you!”