How a new generation of drag artists is breaking limits and queering video games

I was a gamer before I knew I was gay. I started gaming in 1989, at six years old, when my parents brought home an Amiga 500. A boxy, beige monstrosity with a chunky keyboard and a polygonal mouse, the Amiga, an early home computer, wasn’t much of a looker. But, to me, it was a portal to other worlds. I spent hours as a child watching my father battle his way through the ThunderCats side-scrolling platformer – I can still hear the crunchy “swoosh” of Lion-O’s sword and the rising chirp of his jump – and looking over my mother’s shoulder as she stalked the corridors of Dungeon Master, hiding when I heard the shuffle of the mummies. And I spent hours trying to complete Barbarian, an early fighting game which saw two loin-clothed muscle-men roll and kick and hack each other to death.

I’d love to say Barbarian made me gay, that those tight thighs and pixel biceps sparked something queer in me – but my gay awakening came 20 years later. As a teen and young adult, I experienced gaming as a resolutely straight hobby: romance, if there was any, was always heteronormative; gender stereotypes were rigidly enforced; and there was no sex in games hardly ever. Gaming was not queer. Now, however, gaming has exploded from a niche hobby to a global obsession, and a new generation of fans is queering games in ways my younger self could never imagine, using drag as a medium to explore, examine, and expand gaming culture.

Fulfilling Bayonetta’s queer potential

To get an insight into this new world, I spoke with Velvet Caveat (creator of SlayStation, a London “drag video game cabaret” dedicated to the mash-up of gaming and drag) who helped me understand the three main ways game characters can be presented in the medium of drag. First, you can select a character which already has queer traits. Bayonetta is a prime example: she’s unusually tall for a woman, is sex positive and kinky, and tends to be presented as a strong protagonist who frequently rescues male sidekick and himbo Luka, overturning the trite “damsel in distress” trope. This makes Bayonetta a prime candidate for a drag performance, because her character already challenges rigid norms of sexuality and gender. Bayonetta hardly needs queering, because she’s queer af already –