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johannestevans · 8 months

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Is the Homophobia Worth a New Hobby?

Rolling the dice on homophobia in nerd spaces.

Photo by lil artsy via Pexels.

Originally published in Prism & Pen. Also available on Patreon.

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I went to a board-game evening last night with my boyfriend Lewis, who’s nonbinary and uses he/they pronouns. Frequently, people assume they’re cisgender, especially because he’s fat and has a gorgeous, thick beard.

I’m a gay trans man, I only use he/him pronouns, and I’m at a point in my transition now where I almost never get clocked as transgender even by other trans people — a lot of the time other trans people don’t even realise I’m trans too unless I say it explicitly or take my shirt off and they can see my tits.

I occasionally joke that the time I really knew I was passing as a man was when other comics in stand-up comedy spaces started making homophobic jokes about me instead of misogynistic ones, joking that they didn’t want to bend over in front of me, or similar.

But just because they don’t know I’m transgender doesn’t mean they don’t know I’m gay.

I’ve written before about my nuanced experiences of gender-based interaction as a gay man who’s perceived unequivocally as gay and effeminate in every situation I’m in, even at a distance, and how this translates to cis women feeling more comfortable with and safer with me than they might if they perceived me as heterosexual.

Gay men often seek out employment in areas that are perceived as being “for women” or stereotypical women’s jobs — nursing is a stereotypical career for queer men, and much of the time, queer men will fall into step with women in retail, hospitality, and other customer service positions, especially if they’re very obviously queer from a distance.

Why?

Because homophobia is hostile to us in every environment.

People will often wonder why queer men will take up stereotypical “women’s jobs” when being men in those positions make them stand out more because there aren’t other men around. Won’t they be opening themselves up to more homophobia by being such a visible queer man among a staff of mostly other women?

And what those people are missing is how like… queer men among women in service positions will absolutely be treated with homophobia, but because they’re alongside women who are going to be treated misogynistically by many customers at a bare minimum, they will be amongst friends.

Even in more traditionally “masculine” careers and environments, queer men might gravitate towards socialising with the women in the space rather than other men who are cishet or just less visibly queer, because it’s safer as a queer man to be amongst those women than to be amongst the men — who might be violent, who might be hostile or rude, or might just treat him as invisible.

People often treat male nurses and midwives, male nannies and primary school teachers, male receptionists and personal assistants as jokes. They might think of them as stereotypically gay and effete, limp-wristed, “sassy.” I know a lot of those gays. They’re my friends and lovers and ex-coworkers.

I’ve worked alongside them. They’re absolutely real.

But what people mix up is the cause and effect of why those men are in those positions. They don’t become sassy and obviously gay because they took a receptionist job. They went for those jobs — and might excel in those jobs because — being hired elsewhere might be harder, and specifically, surviving elsewhere might be harder.

Because it’s not just about getting hired, it’s about getting to do your day-to-day duties, about going for promotions, about how comfortable customers or patients or parents or students are dealing with you.

And while, sure, they might treat you with homophobia in mind, or say homophobic shit to you — because the positions are stereotypical women’s jobs and you as an effete gay man are treated by much of society as woman-lite or basically a woman (“Except you’re technically a man… I guess.”) the idea that you belong in that position is natural.

These are the caring professions, the service professions.

People like women to be in those positions because they’re “more caring” or because they’re “good communicators” — and because they’re expected to constantly smile and be friendly and bubbly and pretty, and to do what they’re told and to say “the customer is always right” and make you feel good even as you treat them disrespectfully.

People are often more comfortable treating a woman like that than they are a straight man, because to do that to a straight man would be emasculating. It would be an insult to his manhood to treat him like that.

What are you insulting with a gay man, when we don’t have the same manhood to insult in the first place? What are you emasculating, when he emasculates himself with his very existence?

Some queer men I know go up the expected men’s path of advancement in their careers, while others are much more in the expected women’s ones. These men get treated in the same way their female colleagues are and impacted by a similar glass ceiling.

It’s not to say gay men can’t benefit from and leverage misogyny against female coworkers in the workplace, any more than women can’t benefit from and leverage homophobia against their queer male coworkers, depending on the dynamics of a particular workplace and the intersections of marginalisation at play — particularly given that I’m only discussing here the intersections of misogyny and homophobia. I’m not even getting into racism and particularly anti-Blackness, ableism, ageism, fatphobia, or any other form of bigotry that influences the power dynamics and marginalised experiences present in any given workplace.

The thing about workplaces is that we often enter them because we have to. We have to navigate different forms of bigotry or marginalisation, slot ourselves into wherever we can safely fit, or at least fit as safely as possible, because ultimately, we need to earn a wage.

We can’t just pick and choose and wait until we can find employment with people who don’t or wouldn’t leverage institutional power over us, or find a mythical workplace that’s untouched by bigotry or capitalism and the desire by bosses, not to mention society, to exploit their workers.

We do our best to fit ourselves into whatever career track or employment position will allow us best to survive and support ourselves, because we need to earn money to live — to pay rent, to feed and clothe ourselves, to support ourselves.

What about hobbies?

What about things that we’re doing ostensibly for fun? Is it worth it then? Any woman can tell you that navigating nerd spaces can be excruciating.

Frequently, women and people perceived as women are presumed to be ignorant of anything around them in such spaces. They’re guessed to be the wives or girlfriends of men in attendance. Simple concepts might continuously be explained to them when they’re veterans of whatever the hobby is.

They’re treated as romantic or sexual prospects of any man who lays eyes on them, with a refusal to allow them to just play and exist in the space without being sexually objectified.

In the event they do show their knowledge or expertise, insecure men might respond by quizzing them and putting them to test after test, or by furiously disagreeing with any mild critique or opinion they share.

And again, I’m only talking about misogyny here — if that woman is Black, or queer, or trans, or all three?

White cishet dudes will froth at the mouth to demand why she thinks she’s allowed to be there, why she thinks she can be comfortable or can enjoy the same things they do, or speak on them with any entitlement or expertise.

Many white cishet dudes in nerd spaces effectively believe that nerd spaces — sci-fi and fantasy literature and entertainment, board games, video games, computing and tech spaces, coding, comic books, etc — were invented by and for men like them. They respond to any kind of diversity of identity or experience in the space as if it’s an invading threat.

Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko via Pexels.

Particularly because many of them have experiences of being emasculated or bullied for not measuring up to mainstream standards of straight masculinity — because they’re disabled or chronically ill, because they’re autistic, or simply because they “look” and came off as nerdy or geeky since they were young, and were never able to navigate “popular” spaces — they take on a very competitive mindset with the other men within the space. A lot of these spaces can be horrifically toxic, with these men putting each other down, wallowing in their loneliness whilst gloating over men who are more lonely or more pathetic or uglier or nerdier than they are.

They don’t want solidarity with each other in most instances — until a woman walks into the room.

They use and have internalised deeply misogynistic ideologies, often thinking of women as prizes to be won, or beautiful trophies, or in general as people who experience emotions — especially loneliness or isolation — in “shallower” or less real ways than they do themselves as men.

Subsequently, they respond to the presence of women in their spaces as a potential threat and/or as potential reward for one of them.

Nerdy guys of this calibre are often very attached to their identity as a societal outsider, and by their own definition of societal outsider (based in faulty assumption and self-obsession) women can’t experience this sort of social isolation. Women are therefore treated as invaders in the space.

Visibly or obviously queer men are not treated in precisely the same way, but in many social environments, because of the ways in which effeminate queer men are socially sorted into a woman category by homophobes, we’re often treated in ways that effectively mirror expressions of misogyny.

I have a stand-up bit about how many cishet people effectively project their expected male-female dynamic of a heterosexual relationship onto a gay couple, where you can see them doing the maths in their head:

Oh, that one rides a motorbike and has short hair, so she must be the husband, and the other one wears dresses and paints her nails, so she must be the wife. But wait, the wife has a high-powered law career and the one with short hair is a stay-at-home mother! Maybe the lawyer is the husband and the mom is the wife! But wait! The lawyer was the one who carried the baby, and the stay-at-home mom is trans! But wait!

And so on.

Straight people are so obsessed with their gender binary that they’ll tell you something like “Dogs are boys and cats are girls,” to the extent that if you’re like, “What? Why?” they’ll say something like, “You know, because dogs are goofy but cats are sexy,” and they’ll treat that shit as completely normal rather than moderately deranged. They’ll act like you’re the odd one for saying how ridiculous that is, because it’s so ingrained in their world view.

So of course, meeting a couple formed of two men or two women (or two people they assume are two men or two women), they’ll naturally project the same gender binary onto them.

I like board games, right?

That’s not true.

I love board games. I’ve been obsessed with them since I was a child. I own dozens of them, and I’m only starting to get more into the hobby as an adult in the past few years, attending board-game nights here and there. I used to have a lot more social anxiety, and I tend to get quite overwhelmed in unfamiliar environments with large groups of people where I’m also learning new skills, so it’s taken me awhile to feel more confident about going to boardgames events — but I’ve pretty much always attended queer ones.

There are multiple queer board and tabletop game nights in the Bristol and Bath area. There’s one or two in Cardiff; there’s a regular running one in Galway; of course, there’s several across the Leeds and Bradford area.

Last night we went to a local board-game night — just a general meet-up. I liked the look of it because it seemed to have an older age cohort than many of the queer ones I’ve gone to, and a good mix of people.

Lewis and I walk in: they’re drinking a pint of cider, I’m drinking a double of Bailey’s on the rocks. They’re wearing an open striped shirt over a t-shirt and a pair of shorts; I’m wearing some blue trousers with a ruffled blouse and an open waistcoat. They have a thick gingery-brown beard; I have thick sideburns and a moustache.

Of course, I also wear eyeliner. He’s fat, I’m thin, and while we both have similar mannerisms — we hold our hands delicately, we both tend to sway our hips somewhat when we walk with a slight sashay, we both gesticulate and express ourselves with our hands — because of the way that people tend to desexualise fat people and particularly those they perceive as fat men, cishet men often treat Lewis slightly differently than they do fellow cishet men, even just assuming they’re a cis gay man.

We often notice and talk about the fact that when Lewis walks in somewhere on their own, people read him as gay, and that’s coloured and influenced by their fatphobia, where they just assume that fat men don’t fuck, but because of a combination of his fatness and his queerness leading people to assume a level of emasculation, they guess that a lot of people assume they’re a bottom.

Until I’m standing next to them and it’s clear we’re a couple — the assumption is that because I’m thinner and because I’m more pretty than Lewis’ handsome, I’m the bottom, and if we’re split into a cishet’s vision of a man and woman, that makes me the woman.

We put our drinks down as I take out the two games we brought with us and a man comes over — tall, white, cis and straight, in his 50s. He’s friendly!

To Lewis.

I was the one that RSVPed to the event, my name was on the attending list, and they were just marked on the list as a +1. I was the one that looked for the event and brought it to them for us to go.

He asks both of us our names, but when asking us about games, he directs most of his questions to Lewis; his body is angled toward Lewis’ conversation; he looks at Lewis about 70 or 80% more than he looks at me, even though I’m leading much more of the conversation.

It’s not that Lewis doesn’t like board games, of course he does! He attends regular queer board-game nights, they enjoy different kinds of board games, but they remarked that what stood out to them about the conversations of the night is that men kept asking them about the different games, and he didn’t know any of the terminology — deckbuilders or worker-placement games, co-operative versus area control games — and wasn’t as familiar with the stalwarts in each genre.

Whereas, I was and was just ignored. Lewis likes board games the way a normal person likes board games — he likes to play different ones, he enjoys them as a method of socialising with others and meeting and engaging with new people.

Photo by Pixabay via Pexels.

I’m a bit of a freak about board games. I own dozens of them, I browse forum entries and read reviews of board games, I’d play board games solo — they’re an area of special interest for me.

The man who walked over asked if anyone was interested in a particular game, and I put up my hand and said I was super interested in playing In The Year of the Dragon (which I very much enjoyed and was absolutely into). Even playing the game, he described a lot of it initially to Lewis and the other guy playing with us and made far less eye contact with me, talked less directly to me, but also in general acted as if I was less interested and invested in the game than anyone else at the table, despite the fact that I was the first volunteer for it.

It’s the sort of thing that’s so blatant when you experience it, and yet if I’d called it out at the time, I would have been treated as being very unreasonable, if not insane. A lot of the time, when cishet men treat women and effeminate men like this (as abled people with disabled people; as white people with POC and esp Black and dark-skinned people; the list goes on and on) they’re often not entirely conscious that they’re doing it.

There have been numerous studies into gendered interactions in different environments, how much men interrupt women versus the reverse, how a minority of women are perceived as making a more significant amount of the group because of how they’re treated as tokens. If you just speak with people anecdotally, some will absolutely relate similar experiences.

Some people will become angry and upset when you point this out, and say that it’s actually the fault of the people being ignored or spoken over, because they’re not being big or loud enough, or angry enough that it’s happening to them.

Except, if you get angry about it, you go from being the woman or gay man being treated as a non-entity to being the woman or gay man treated as an irrational hysteric, imagining mistreatment where none is happening.

As the game went on, and each of us made mistakes or showed that we were learning the game, the attitude toward me at the table did change a bit, especially because Lewis and I answered a lot of questions together, and we do, as a lot of couples do, add to each other’s answers or remind each other of things mid-discussion.

And then, another man came over to the table, because he was obviously a regular at these events, and had never seen Lewis before. He asked Lewis if they were enjoying this game, what sort of games they liked.

He didn’t even look at me, let alone direct any of his questions toward me, even though Lewis looked to me multiple times when they couldn’t remember particular games they’d liked, or wasn’t certain what kind or genre of games they fit into. I actually answered the question of what games I favoured even though he hadn’t asked, and he sort of nodded awkwardly as he left.

I shouldn’t be entirely offended — the thing about nerd spaces (as with many other cishet-male dominated spaces) is that conversation like this isn’t necessarily approached with a view to making new friends or social connections.

A lot of these guys just want to measure each other up so that they know where they stand in the pecking order, which other men are potential threats to their masculinity or to their standing in the pack — will they be better than him at his favourite games? Will they embarrass him by making him look bad, either by being better at certain strategies, or by knowing more than he does about his favourite subjects and specialist fields? Will they out-man him, in short?

I felt horrible after last night even though I genuinely enjoyed the actual game, because the thing is, like…

When someone turns around and calls you a faggot, or even when they make catty little comments about your sexuality, at least you know they know you’re there.

When you’re treated as functionally invisible, an extension of someone else’s humanity, and given the “girlfriend treatment” — whether because you’re actually a woman, because you’re perceived as a woman, or because you’re treated as woman-adjacent because of some element of your personhood that means you’re also deserving of misogyny— it’s maddening, and it’s sickening.

There’s no easy way to actually fight against it, most of all because it’s so thoughtless, and so easily denied as accidental or inconsequential.

One thing I’m very lucky for is that Lewis does know what that experience is like and clocked it and noticed it and why it was happening from the get-go, whereas I know a lot of women dating men particularly have difficulty not just relating that experience but describing it to an uncaring or oblivious partner. I think there’s something really unpleasant particularly about being in their position, because I’ve felt something similar, where you go to an event with someone similarly or differently marginalised to you, and you’re more keyed into what’s happening, but also like…

There’s a sense that you’re being afforded humanity effectively because your partner or the friends you’ve come with is being afforded less. You’re expected to be complicit or fully engage in their manufactured invisibility so that you can enjoy some conditional privilege.

Lewis didn’t, of course. Repeatedly, he would redirect some questions to me or turn and make a show of asking me. It was just ignored to a large extent, but it’s still shitty to be put in that position with the assumption that you wouldn’t want to do so.

We discussed it, afterwards.

If he’d gone alone, would they have shown the same amount of interest in him, or would they have treated him as they did me, without a faggier gay guy next to him to compare and contrast them with? If I’d gone alone, would they have been forced to extend more interest to me as a person, because there’s no partner to assume I’m the “girlfriend” of?

If we’d gone with a bunch of other queer people in tow, outnumbering them, how would it have been different?

How would it have been different if we’d been at a table with some of the women, or at a table where women were the majority? Middle-aged cishet women have their own homophobia, naturally, but it wouldn’t have been quite like this.

There weren’t any visibly queer men there, but what if we’d sat down with some of the lesbians?

I like board games a lot, and I really like talking and interacting with different groups of people, and especially as someone who writes in the SFF genre and regularly attends sci-fi and fantasy events and conventions, I’m familiar with this unsubtle and subtle homophobia, being snubbed or ignored by other men whether they notice they’re doing it or not, but it’s like…

How much do I actually like board games? How much am I willing to weather to establish my personality in certain spaces and to be afforded some humanity? How many times do I go back until I’m seen as a person — as a full person at that?

It’s just shitty, having to weigh up those calculations when all you want to do is sit down, roll your dice, and have a good time. At least I do have queer-run events to avail myself of, and I do know that I rarely if ever experience this attitude as a queer man at them, but they’re neither as often nor as local as other board-game groups.

Like I said, it’s one thing weighing up these things for somewhere you have to be — navigating a workplace, navigating healthcare, etc, but when it’s something you do ostensibly for fun?

It’s not quite as fun when you have to put in a twelve-step strategy just to be seen as a human being.

#musings #board games #nerd culture #essay

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