Drag Race star Jinkx Monsoon talks about gender expression through gaming
Now more than ever does gaming allow us to escape the world we’re living in and step into a new one. A world that doesn’t judge who we are, but simply lets us express ourselves through its characters and gameplay. Gaming is especially intimate and reassuring for queer people, and that includes Drag Race star Jinkx Monsoon.
In an interview with PRIDE, Monsoon spoke about how gaming shaped their life from the very beginning. Not only were the games fun and interactive, but they allowed her to express her gender and sexual identity in the safety of their own home without judgement. As we’ve talked about on Gayming before, character creators in particular are known to be extremely helpful in allowing people to explore who they truly are.
“When you’re playing alone, you don’t have to tell anyone else that you identify most with the female character. As a trans femme person, I always liked video games for the fact that I may have to try to pass as a guy in my day to day life when I was younger,” she tells PRIDE. “My gender expression was expressed through my video games and through getting to play these characters.”
While gaming today has improved vastly, back then it was hard for diversity to be found. Female characters still have a long way to go even now, but it was even worse back then because they were always relegated to roles that had them overly rely on male characters. And let’s not even get started on the lack of openly queer characters. There were no Ellie’s from The Last of Us, that’s for sure.
According to Monsoon, the gayest thing they’d ever seen in video games “were always the villains, and it was always their femininity kind of made them weird or strange.” Queer-coding in villains certainly isn’t old, or new and for some it helped them come to terms with their gender and sexuality, and even changed their perception of ‘villainy’.
But for Jinkx Monsoon, the turning point in gaming came when they first saw female and LGBTQ+ characters in Overwatch. “It was the first time I realized, ‘oh, I’ve never seen queer characters in games’. It was kind of, ‘oh, wait a second, why haven’t we been included in this?'”
It only got better when Tracer, one of the very first characters that was introduced by Blizzard during the game’s reveal, was revealed to be a lesbian. The reaction was largely positive, even with some loud voices out there that felt this was Blizzard trying to push an agenda on them. But it didn’t stop there for Overwatch, because years later it was announced that Soldier 76 was gay, too.
Soldier 76 being gay really pleased Monsoon, and she felt it sent a message to straight, male gamers.
“Soldier 76 came out and for such a masculine male archetype to also be queer, I just felt it was such a victory for queer gamers.” She explains, “I also loved thinking about all the straight people who probably just assumed these characters’ sexual identities. It probably ruffled some feathers and I loved it. I f*cking loved it.”
To read the full interview for yourself about Jinkx Monsoon and gaming, check out PRIDE.
Header Source: Joe Mabel / Wikimedia Commons
About The Author
