Make Faggot Games
Catherine of Darling Demon Eclipse recently published a blog post titled Faggot Games: An Urgent Warning, a manifesto that calls for the genesis of radically faggoty RPGs. I, among other faggots, heard the honeysuckle call. It is, after all, the kind of work I always want to do.
The heart of the call-to-action is in the section aptly labelled “Make Faggot Games” where Catherine also defines her terms:
What is a faggot game, you may ask? Well, it’s not really my place to define that for you, but some traits I’ve noticed among the best include:
- Loud queer sexuality, without a desire to make play more comfortable for cishet people and prudes.
- Departure from popular axioms around player and character consent, and broad rejection of the modern safety framework for something more interpersonal and robust.
- A central role for fetish, kink and sexual fantasies. Faggot games aren’t always necessarily /about/ these things, but they loop back to them as much as possible.
- A focus on challenging and unexpected visuals. Blend the cozy and the macabre, the outside and the mainstream, in ways they didn’t know they even wanted. Keep them guessing.
I had caught a brief preview of this section ahead of publishing and felt immediately that this post was going to catch at least a little flak, specifically for its seeming contention with axioms of consent and safety frameworks. Its the kind of statement that is prickly at first blush, especially for the anxious and traumatized like myself, for whom consent and safety can feel most important.
That prickliness, I feared, could easily become anger to be fed into the social media machine that rewards hot takes and public displays of rage. It’s the kind of thing I could see a queer person — most likely a trans woman — getting flayed alive over. It appears as though my fear has been mostly unwarranted, though I can’t say for sure if this will continue to be true. (Maybe I have just seen one too many people publicly wishing they could “gut” a woman and believe it to be Just because she has Done Harm.)
I’m inclined to agree with my friend Nova that scrutiny over this particular point is “missing the call of this manifesto”. Catherine orients faggotry at a more mutual and relational model of safety but is still fundamentally interested in harm prevention. When questions were raised about this point, Catherine expanded on the failures of the axioms and frameworks in their current state:
Yes! First, on safety:
Stars & Wishes, Lines & Veils, X-Card, etc. are powerful tools, but they don’t necessarily prevent hurt in the same way that more complex safety conversations can. They are surface level and potentially over-cursory.
They don’t encourage players to discuss intent, desire and common issues they have when playing that they want to avoid. I think we need a pedagogy and practice for safety that focuses more on the patterns that actually create unsafe play.
Second, on consent:
To my estimation, many games currently understand consent in one of two ways:
- The D&D approach, where dice rolls levy complete control over the fates of players and characters.
- The modern indie approach, where a character and their player must consent unanimously
I think these can both be interesting and useful in different contexts, but I’m excited to see more consent models that function outside of this paradigm. What if I you want something that your character doesn’t or everyone comes in understanding that their characters will be used?
In doing so, Catherine positions faggot games by a variation in the model through which safety is enacted, rather than any variance in the value of safety itself. I don’t think it is far-fetched to say that valuing safety and consent is shibboleth for any game maker who isn’t a reactionary, so a departure here is likely to raise concern. Nevertheless, that is precisely where I find myself wanting to push things even farther.
Faggots, after all, are rarely safe.
Definitional Debauchery
I have been very deliberate in my use of faggot/fag as opposed to queer throughout this post. Before I go deeper, I’ll provide my reasoning for doing so and make my own case for the importance of the faggot’s perspective.
First, faggotry is inherently about the subversion of masculinity. In common parlance, fag might be used to refer to an effeminate gay man (either as a derogatory term or the playful reclamation of it). It is a particularly charged slur because it accuses its subject of gender transgression. For this reason the term has picked up popularity among gender transgressors generally — the flamboyant femme-but-still-cis gay boys, the trans girls who used to be perceived as such, the trans guys who fuck other guys, and the disaffiliated queerdos who refuse taxonomy — each with a different relationship to the masculinity the word originally sought to protect.
Among faggots however, the term also drips with sex. The power differential that is established when one man calls another a faggot has proven to be ripe ground for fetishes to germinate. A quick search for “faggot” on your favourite gay porn platform will quickly clarify the image.
Faggots are the perverts that parents warn their children about. They are mired in lust, consumed by the basest desire to fuck and be fucked. They are failed men. They serve no other purpose than to seek and provide sexual release. Faggots are those lost souls seeking salvation on their knees. Their eyes point towards heaven, their mouth is agape, and their tongue is out; they are ready to receive His holy communion.
Lust can be a sacrament that washes us clean of envy, pride and anomie, and returns us to daily life with a satisfied heart, renewed hope and greater compassion. The mouth is not the only orifice that generates poetry; we must learn to listen to the hymns of our other openings, other lips.
Patrick Califia, The Necessity of Excess
In its worship and reverence for sex, faggotry holds its power. It makes real those desires deemed undesirable; desires broken over the knee by a social system that values safety above all else (or at least wants its citizens to believe it does) and exerts power and control over faggots to ensure that “safety” is maintained, paradoxically at the expense of the safety of those willingly participating. To realize a faggot’s desires is to perform an act both unsafe and subversive. Faggotry therefore distinguishes itself as a sexual modus operandi for liberation.
By calling for faggot games (as opposed to queer games more generally), Catherine deliberately centralizes this sexual practice in the work. This is politically useful as a detournement of the rhetoric used to justify the subjugation of queer work generally. Faggot games are not the subject because games in general need to be so faggy, but instead because faggotry happens to be both powerful and reviled. The existence of faggot games will benefit us all.
Terminal Velocity
“In some ways, our utopia is behind us”, my friend Kara Stanton tells me a few summers ago as we sit on a the moss carpeting the grooves of wide, rocky platform. We’ve both finished work for the day and meet here, cross-legged, bathing in the mid-afternoon summer sun. We squint at each other through the brightness.
We are on an open hill at the height of one of Victoria’s seaside parks. The wooded area around us, with paths winding below and branches high above, serves as one of the city’s cruising spots where faggots come to fuck after work. I have Sniffies open on my phone to monitor the loosely geolocated clusters of profiles, some just a few blocks away. Each one an eager fag showing off their hard cock or gaping hole. Maybe one of them will climb this rocky hill and secret me away to the underbrush. There, on a bed of green I would take him in my mouth.
Kara and I share a queer grief, mourning the slow, quiet death of the places where dykes and fags would meet to share their bodies with one another. They tell me about a date they went on recently. The two of them toured the pottery studio that now occupies an otherwise unremarkable brick building. The current occupants seemed to be unaware that the building used to house a beloved lesbian bar. The place had shuttered long before any of us had arrived here. Then a year before we gathered here on this rock the last gay nightclub in the city quietly took down its pride flag.
I’m particularly fond of those “unpalatable” gathering places. The rough, jagged edges of a space used and unkempt. I like to visit gay bathhouses, in particular, when I travel. I’ll spend an evening wandering its dark halls and speaking with locals through a language of glances, closeness, and touch. Sometimes you learn the most about a city when you offer your hole to a stranger.
There used to be bathhouses here in Victoria too; the kind that I’m told, for some God forsaken reason, had carpet and reeked of cum, sweat, and piss. If it were still standing today I would not have spent much time there, but I feel the weight of its absence nonetheless. The faggots in Victoria, these days, seek their fix of pleasure in the urban underbelly; the mycelial network of public washrooms, rec centre saunas, and forest paths just out of sight.
It’s a story that rhymes across space and time. The North American Metropolis: the budding flower of the colonial seed. It promises an affordable home with the safety of urban density to anonymize any disenfranchised faggots and other undesirables who might need it. Perverts of all kinds find community there and the walls of gathering places emerge around them. The Metropolis, over time, realizes its role in the ecosystem of the colonial economy and blooms, transforming the urban landscape to remove the least desirable parts of itself. Those parts just happen to be the unhoused, the sex workers, the faggots.
The pressure the faggot experiences through this transformation is omnidirectional. The cost of living rises to a boil. The heterosexual public capitalizes and absorbs the most appealing of the faggot’s gathering places. The least appealing are perceived as a threat and targeted for gentrification. The heterosexual public expresses disdain for the faggot under the guise of concern for safety and privacy.
Moral hostility swells. Punishment follows. A process of abjection. A slow, quiet death.
I make a vow to repurpose public space for my sexual projects.
Cruising is a Microcosm
“Cruising is already so much like a game”, my friend Alex Chalk says to me. We are chatting over Discord back in November 2024 about a project I’ve been trying to get funded on Victoria’s cruising spaces. “I’d hope the work here further ambiguates that boundary.”
The project was born a few years prior as the furious response to the disappearance of Victoria’s queer gathering places. I was feeling claustrophobic — I still am — and I needed some way to embody my full faggotry outside of the confines of my 450 sqft apartment that I already share with one of my partners. I needed space.
Cruising exists before and after the gathering place. It is the faggot’s practical answer to public hostility that threatens their safety. It’s also a convenient solution in a city where even outside of the urban core, a full-time worker on minimum wage can not afford a bachelor suite. (Hosting? In this economy?) Cruising is a valve that could vent some of this pressure.
Cruising also felt imminently linked with my creative interests in play. (Some of this is academic, so bear with me for a moment). In 2018 I participated in the Queerness in Games Conference where I attended a presentation by Tommy Ting discussing his in-progress master’s thesis on Cruising Game Space. In his research, Ting links the cruising space with Huizinga’s notion of the magic circle, an oft-cited term in game studies that refers to the porous boundary between the real world and the game space, its border defined by the rules of the game. In Huizinga’s own words: “All are temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart.” (Homo Ludens, p. 10)
Ting ultimately applies the theory of the magic circle to cruising spaces so that he can analyze the physical structure of the cruising space itself — in this case, Vancouver’s Stanley Park — and the ways in which it’s queerly navigated. This in turn then informs a kind of queer level design for digital games. On the way, however, he identifies extant commonalities among rules and protocols for cruising as a whole to establish cruising as a game:
Although each cruising ground has its own idiosyncrasies, they all remain similar in that the mechanics to engage with other people are mostly non-verbal and gestural, and because the sites where the cruising takes place always already exist as spaces for completely different uses, players must be able to pick up on small visual cues in the environment in order to stay safe. If cruising in public spaces could be understood as a magic circle that has a negotiated entry, a set of boundaries, mechanics or rules of play that suspend the normal rules of reality, a goal or goals and an end that signifies the exit of the game then we might able to begin to understand cruising as a form of game.
p. 6-7
Cruising is a rare and unique game among all games in this regard because it is a microcosm of the faggot’s framework. It contains within it a set of rules and procedures for play authored exclusively by-and-for the perverted among us. The rules that can be observed, as both participants and as witnesses of this play, redefine some of the most sacred social rules of this colonial age: our right to intimate privacy, our expectation to opt-in to exposure to sex, what “normal” sex is, what safe sex means, how you protect yourself and others, how consent is given and revoked; all values and calibrations are in some way altered or inverted. It’s all a bit scandalous.
And yet, it’s the faggot’s game, hidden away and liberated, for a brief moment, from the weight of the cisheterotopia that surrounds it. It’s far from utopia but it’s a brief kiss with another slutty world.
Safe Play
Given the link established above between cruising and games in general, it is probably not that surprising for me to suggest that there is also notable overlap between roleplaying games and kink (especially when you happen to be roleplaying with kinksters). Aside from the obvious connections through the magic circle, there are more specific comparisons to be drawn. Participants structure scenes, explore personal fantasies, define and alter their power relationships — there is no shortage of parallels. Participants Safety and consent are no different in this regard; it feels as though most popular safety tools are negotiation and safe words with extra steps.
This parallel also seems to extend through the attitude that participants have towards these pastimes. The prominent communities that form around kink and roleplay take their respective play much more seriously than the casual participant. Play that triggers strong emotional responses in its participants is something both desired and feared, especially when approached carelessly. Emotional safety is considered critical.
The purpose of safety is to prevent harm as much as possible. Safety, for many kinksters and roleplayers, is rhetorically couched in appeals to a shared value of caring for others — especially those most vulnerable among us. When participants are engaging in riskier forms of play (for example: roleplaying traumatic events or engaging in edge play), the potential for harm becomes even greater, as does the need for safety. By this argument, to oppose the “best practices” of safe play is to disregard the needs of those who benefit from them and, at worst, fail to prevent harm where we could have.
Preventing harm, however, is not the only way we can practice care; I believe that the alternative is something much more responsive. Faggot behaviour is far from risk-averse, which reminds us all that sooner or later the thing that they fear will happen will probably happen. They’ll get that STI, they’ll get busted by security, or the guy they’re with will not take no for an answer. This is where kink culture and faggot culture diverge in their priorities, and why faggot games necessarily will reconsider the role of safety and consent in play.
How does our perspective change if we begin with the assumption that harm will be done? If the question is not if, but when, then how do we prepare for inevitable failure? What comes after? How will we persist?
A Ruined Orgasm
There are many threads I am begrudgingly leaving loose for the time being: exploring practical examples of care among faggots, the kind of safety that faggots do practice, the difference between safety from harm vs from punishment, the erotic potential of risk, and plenty more. This a practical choice, if an unsatisfying one. A grant writer recently told me, “This is PhD material,” and as I looped back on this post for the third or fourth time to expand on ideas here and there, I understood what they meant. It will never feel done. I will probably be exploring faggot work for many, many years.
This blog is now supported by my lovely readers over on Patreon. Follow me there for FREE to get notified every time I post, and consider taking me out on a coffee date to receive love letters and some other special gifts from yours truly. 💕

A small child forgets her mother.