THE ATLANTIC SEPTEMBER 2019 27common objective gives you something
to talk about, and not having to face each
other means you don’t have to lay the full
weight of your emotions on each other.
I suspect that’s why so many of my
closest male friendships have evolved
at least in part around gaming. My three
best buddies in high school all played.
As grunty teenagers to whom conversa-
tion didn’t come easy, we could spend
hours on the Nintendo GameCube in
my family’s back room. After my par-
ents, they were among the first people
I came out to, and boy was that scary:
What if they thought I had a crush on
one of them?
They didn’t. They were in fact mod-
els of maturity. It was my first time really
being vulnerable with them, and they
showed themselves to be the stand-up
guys they have remained ever since.
After what felt to me like an explosive
revelation, the routines of our friend
group took on new significance. Wander-
ing around town, going to action movies,
calling one another gross names—the
mere fact that we kept doing that stupid
stuff showed me I was still their pal.
That’s another important feature of
male friendship, I think: the unspoken-
ness of it. Your bros show up for you
without calling attention to it, and you
never have to thank them. In fact, they’d
probably prefer if you didn’t, otherwise
things might get awkward. My high-
school friends demonstrated their care
for me in a thousand tiny ways, most
of them involving swift and gruesome
death at their digital hands.
That they didn’t go easy on me
may be what I appreciated most. They
schooled me at Halo and shot my head
clean off in Gears of War. They contin-
ued to give me endless shit, too. Verbal
abuse is another way to show affection
indirectly, and we were ruthless because
(though we would never have said it) we
loved each other. Being gay was another
thing for them to make fun of me about,
the way I made fun of them for having
acne or being short.
Our verbal roughhousing was
egalitarian: One of us had obsessive-
compulsive disorder; we made fun of
him for how long he spent going back
over every level to pick up all the ammo.
One of us was a first-generation immi-
grant; we used to say that he couldn’t
understand English when he got a
My friends showed their
care for me in a thousand
ways, most involving
swift and gruesome death
at their digital hands.My boyfriend, Josh, is a gamer too. He
and I have been separated by the Atlantic
Ocean for much of our relationship, and
playing together online is one of the ways
we deal with the distance. We spent a for-
mative few months playing Diablo III, a
collaborative game in which you slay
undead demons. Most of the time we
played with two other guys, who are also
a couple. I’d stumble to my laptop in the
dark at 5 a.m. in England, while Josh and
our friends would settle in at 9 p.m. in Los
Angeles. Over a four-way Skype connec-
tion, we’d alternate between strategizing
and small talk.
Sometimes, as the hours wore on,
we’d find ourselves tackling tougher
subjects: our dissatisfactions at work, or
our fears about coming out to folks who
might not respond well. We joked that
we were taking down CGI demons in the
game and personal demons in our con-
versations, helping one another defeat
whatever we were facing, online or in reallife. These bizarre and distinctly modern
get-togethers were like virtual double
dates—part hangout, part support group,
part romance. We called ourselves “The
Boys Who Fight Hell.”
Josh and I also started playing online
with my father, so that the two most
important men in my life could get to
know each other. I couldn’t help think-
ing back to that day playing Spider-Man 3,
when I had told my dad the secret I feared
might change everything. Here we were
12 years later, and it seemed as if almost
nothing had changed between us. It was
still him and me, talking and laughing
and playing games. Only now it was him
and me and Josh.Spencer A. Klavan is a freelance writer who
recently completed his doctorate in ancient-
Greek language and literature at Oxford’s
Magdalen College.game’s instructions wrong. And I know
how this sounds, but I would have been
devastated if I hadn’t gotten called fag-
got a couple of times. It was how I knew
my friends weren’t going to treat me dif-
ferently, and that meant everything was
going to be okay.
That kind of insensitive banter has
fallen out of fashion; in some circles it
has become anathema. I get it. Kids can
be cruel, and bully ing can have terrible
consequences. I understand the impulse
to defuse it at all costs. But in my own
case, policing schoolyard taunts would
have been counter productive. Goading
one another was part of how my friends
and I were able to connect. You couldn’t
have stopped us without blocking off one
of our main routes to true friendship.I
N THE PAST 50 YEARS, Americans
have moved from stigmatizing homo-
sexuality to tolerating or even celebrat-
ing it. When progressives tell that story,
they often cast straight,
cisgender males as the vil-
lains: Change would have
come sooner if society
weren’t so hidebound with
outdated notions of man-
hood. We should therefore
expunge traditional forms
of masculinity from our
public life so gay people
can be liberated, along
with women and anyone
else who might feel alien-
ated. Video games, according to that nar-
rative, are breeding grounds of the boor-
ishness and exclusivity that can make
maleness so harmful.
None of that rings true for me. Like
everything else, video games and mascu-
linity can go wrong—if unchecked, they
can foster aggression or even violence.
But those are corruptions of things that
are, to me, inherently good. The playful
belligerence, the bravado, and the intense
competition with which my friends and
I gamed together weren’t obstacles to
our acceptance of one another; they
were how we formed and expressed that
acceptance. I know plenty of other guys
who came out as gay, or bi, or trans with
a controller in hand. For many of us, gam-
ing is a way of talking and relating to other
men that feels normal and relaxed—a
way to be one of the guys while still find-
ing space to open up.