26 SEPTEMBER 2019 THE ATLANTICDISPATCHES- TECH
GAMES BOYS PLAY
How Gears of War helped me come out
BY SPENCER A. KLAVANCAME OUT to my dad while
we were playing Spider-Man 3 on
Play Station 2. People ask me if it was
hard—he’s a political conservative and a
Christian, and they wonder if I was afraid
he would condemn me. I wasn’t. My
father is an artist from a family of New
York intellectuals. On social issues, he
takes a laissez-faire stance: Live and let
live, just don’t hurt anyone. I was pretty
sure he’d react all right.
But it was still hard, because com-
ing out to your dad is hard. Sons want to
be like their fathers—they just do—and
fathers want to see their sons become
men. Marrying a nice girl and getting her
good and pregnant is part of that, just
like playing catch in the backyard is. He
teaches and shows, you watch and learn,
and a vision of your future life emerges,
a picture of successful manhood that is
in some ways the most cherished thing
you and your dad share. At the very least,that vision would have to be radically
re configured once I told him I’d only ever
had romantic feelings for other boys. I
was 16. We were playing Spider-Man 3,
and somehow, that made it easier.
Video games were something we
always did together—half an hour or soevery weeknight. The normalcy of that
ritual was comforting to me. The game
also gave us something to focus on, so
we wouldn’t have to look each other in
the eye. I still felt icky using the word gay
about myself (“I’m ... not straight” is what
I said). It would have been intolerable to
tell him face-to-face; I almost certainly
would have choked up, as I had while tell-
ing my mom earlier that day. Coming out
felt emasculating enough. Crying would
have been utter humiliation.
He took it great, as I’d predicted, but
I think we were both glad to have some-
thing in front of us that we could look at
while we talked. The task of swinging
on webs through Spider-Man’s pixelated
streets absorbed enough of our attention
that, looking at him with my peripheral
vision, I could tell him this raw truth.
Men are good at relating to each other
in this way. We get along well when there’s
a project in front of us—when we’re side
by side looking at some third thing. All
of the classic “male bonding” activities
are like this—when you’re hunting, or
working on a car, or shooting free throws,
you can look together at the deer, or the
transmission, or the basket, and talk. TheI
Illustration by ROSE WONG