The game is the story of a college senior, a white gay guy with the default name “Mark Matthews.” Mark is in his final semester of college and, after being closeted for many years, decides to come out, starting with his roommates. While it’s nice to see someone making and aggressively marketing a gay dating sim unafraid to tackle sexuality, particularly sexualizing gay men’s bodies, Coming Out remains mired in an ancient and damaging vision of what those bodies are. Queer media are way more prolific now than they were then, though we’ve a ways to go with including more than just the “L” and the “G” in “LGBTQ.” Yet while I played Coming Out on Top, a gay dating sim from Obscurasoft released in December 2014, I was transported right back to 1996, and not in a good way. Lord, did I watch a lot of it: an endless parade of smooth, European (white) twinks having deeply emotional silences while they stared at each other for a while and then fucked.īut it’s not 1996 anymore. Seeing gays and lesbians in the mainstream media was still a rarity, and other parts of the queer spectrum were basically invisible.įour Star had a nickname on campus: “Porn Star Video.” The reason for this, other than having a literal porn section (which… who cares?) was that they also had a more innocuously-named “International” section where an enterprising young queer could find softcare Euro porn. This was before Will and Grace, before In & Out (the movie, not the burger).

At that point in my life, the only “gay media” that I had consumed regularly were Absolutely Fabulous on Comedy Central and watching DiC’s Sailor Moon dub every morning before school. While I had been out of the closet for two years at that point, college meant hassle-free time and space to watch and enjoy whatever I liked.Īnd I had a hunger, believe me. Back in the day, when I was too broke to have a DVD player of my own and Netflix was years away, the renting of VHS tapes on the regular was a key thing for me.

As a college freshman at the University of Wisconsin in 1996, I was fortunate enough to have access to a video rental place called Four Star Video Heaven.

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