The Sims 2 taught me it was okay to be gay
The signs that I would end up gay have always been obvious – and nowhere was it more clear than when I was playing The Sims 2.
Everyone who has played The Sims has one version that they grew up with and The Sims 2 was mine. I was so excited to bring home my second-hand version from CeX, put it into the CD drive of the computer, and play with the digital dollhouses.
There was a lot I didn’t really understand about the game when I first started playing: from the cowplants and the Bella Goth mystery, to what the adults really did when they ‘Woohooed’.
And why I so often made the girls fall in love with other girls.
The Sims 2, the only version I played until around 2011, originally came out in 2004. This was barely a year after Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988, which had banned local authorities and schools from ‘promoting homosexuality’, was repealed.
In 2004, same-sex couples were finally allowed to adopt and have a recognised civil partnership. The Sims 2 allowed the exact same thing.
But while equal marriage still wasn’t quite there, both in-game and in real life, it was available in The Sims 2, and so the game provided something that the UK couldn’t: positive, mainstream LGBTQ+ representation.
I was 5 when Section 28 was repealed. I can’t recall a single LGBTQ+ character in the media growing up and it would be years before kids shows like Steven Universe and Adventure Time hit TV screens. I had a completely heterosexual sex education experience, where queerness was something only made fun of. Because of this, I would turn on my family’s whirring computer and enter a world where the boys who loved boys and the girls who loved girls were not only treated with respect, but one where, without knowing at the time, I saw a representation of myself.
I started off making straight couples, but regularly killed the male Sims off or made the women cheat on their male partners with women. Looking back, my internalised homophobia must have meant that the queer relationships had to come from pain and negative circumstances, but the first seeds of realising who I was were planted.
Similarly, the fear of homophobic abuse – even if I didn’t really understand what homophobia was yet – was the same reason I never told anyone I played the game like this and why I hid my gameplay from my parents. Our computer was in the dining room, so when one of my parents would come through to the kitchen to make a cup of tea, I had to quickly change the view of the camera. I would desperately hope that it wouldn’t play a cutscene of two female sims, kissing, proposing or woohooing (you couldn’t exit the scene once it started playing) or that the chat forums I searched for queer cheats codes on weren’t still somewhere on screen.
It would’ve been bad enough for my parents to see me making two sims woohoo, but two gay Sims? In my young mind, it was the worst thing I could think of.
Even so, despite making dozens of gay characters in The Sims 2, I never really grasped that these characters were queer. Maybe I didn’t want to believe it, or I believed I simply preferred playing the game like this.
But what I did notice was that these couples were almost nowhere in my real life, and if I had seen two people of the same gender holding hands they’d be sneered at. In The Sims, they just lived as ‘normal’ people.
And much like the straight ‘normal’ Sims, they did things that I didn’t realise gay people could do. In relationship and sex education, I only learned about heterosexual relationships and sex. I had no idea couples could be made up of people other than one man and one woman.
As I continued to play The Sims 2 and realised what ‘Woohoo’ was a euphemism for, it clicked that even though I hadn’t been taught about sex like this, it must happen. If queer people in real life could adopt and have a civil partnership, and so could the queer Sims… Well, surely, they could have sex too? I might not have been taught about it or have seen LGBTQ+ people on screen, but this was a mainstream game where, while absurd at times, the lives on Sims were similarly mundane and relatable.
Sure, Bonehilda, cowplants and vampires weren’t real, but having a career, cooking mac-and-cheese and paying bills were. Maybe queer sex and LGBTQ+ relationships were too?
When I started writing this piece, I mentioned it to my mum. I said about how I would hide the gay Sims off camera when she would walk in. If she started making dinner, I would play instead without one of my few nuclear, heterosexual families. If she asked me about what I was doing, I would certainly never say “making the women woohoo”.
She was confused. Why would I have been ashamed? Because when The Sims 2 was released and I started playing, Section 28’s shadow was still heavy, gay was a slur in the school playground, and I could think of nothing worse than being queer.
Even so, The Sims 2 showed me from an early age that being queer was okay and LGBTQ+ love exists. What I learned from that game was better than anything else I learned about queer people as a child, and I will always be thankful for the exploration it offered.
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