Steven Harper Piziks

By most definitions, I'm not a video game fanatic. I don't have shelves of games and ten different platforms. I play only on my PC, and I tend to play one or two games, and that's it. Right now, those two are Baldur's Gate and City of Heroes.

But even a dilettante like me has noticed the changes.

The first video game I remember playing that had an actual story to it was Adventure on the Atari platform. Remember that one? You were a little cube wandering through different screens, able to carry a single object--a yellow arrow that was supposed to be a sword, or a blocky key. You were bothered by a mischievous bat that would steal your object and menaced by 8-bit dragons that would swallow you and end the game, all during your attempt to return a blocky glowing chalice to a blocky gold castle. The game was a best-seller, and my brother and sister and I played it over and over.

Now the game seems silly and simplistic, like a Model T or a rotary phone.

Games continued to evolve, though. Graphics improved by leaps and bounds. Computers got faster and memory got bigger. And we finally got full-blown animated characters, 3D worlds, and rich storylines.

But when story-based fantasy games like Final Fantasy and Zelda and Dragon Age came out, they kept up strict guardrails on character creation. Very few choices about what your character could look like, and very binary gender choices. The males were all manly men, the women were all womanly women. The games also included romantic subplots in the stories. Your avatar could romance certain characters in the game--or not. Your choice. These romantic choices were all strictly heterosexual. Absolutely no hint of male/male or female/female romance. Building-sized dragons, sorcerers with world-changing spell, and minotaurs charging into battle? No problem. A man kissing a man? That's too ridiculous to consider.

Also, the major mainstream games had no adult content. With the exception of the deliberately over-the-top Grand Theft Auto games, every story was, at most, PG-13. Characters could kiss. Sexual activity took place off-screen and wasn't discussed. No nudity.

"Well, yeah," said the big video game companies. "Kids and teenagers are the majority of our market, and we don't want to piss off their parents. And those right wingers boycott you and Wal-Mart won't carry games with adult content anyway. Besides, adults will still play teen-oriented games, so why should we include content for adults at all?"

It was really Walmart, though. WalMart dictated content for everything. Publishers of books, magazines, and video games NEEDED WalMart to carry their stuff, because everyone shopped there. You cut your own throat by risking WalMart's wrath. Book covers and blurbs were designed with WalMart sensibilities in mind. Video games wrote for children and teens. If you broke the rules, WalMart wouldn't carry your stuff, and you were relegated to niche markets in small gaming stores.

But games like The Sims started sneaking in LGBT content. Just hints of it. Players scratched their heads. "Is that character ... gay? Huh." The internet remained uncertain, but the game sold well.

Then, some ten years ago, one of the Dragon Age games allowed a male avatar the chance to romance two male characters. One of these characters was a flaming queen, and the other was a huge, hot-tempered minotaur, done up for comedy relief. But they were there.

Parts of the internet lots its collective shit, of course. The trolls howled. Parents snatched up their children and ran to church. Wal-Mart refused to carry the game. 

And it didn't hurt sales one bit.

See, society had changed. Same-sex marriage was legal. We were starting to see gay and lesbian kisses (well, lesbian, anyway) on TV. LGBT storylines were becoming cool.

And something else had happened. BioWare (maker of Dragon Age) released the game both as a disc and as a download, meaning you didn't have to go to the store for it. And anyway, if you still wanted the disc, Amazon would ship it to you overnight. Who needed WalMart? Fuck you, Sam! 

I also think the game creators realized that they had been trapping themselves in hetero-centrist thinking. It simply hadn't occured to them to allow a male avatar to romance a male character or a female a female. But finally someone said, "And why not? The non-player-character's dialogue would be exactly the same, whether the avatar is male or female. It's actually EASIER if we write the game to be gender blind. Besides, we have same-sex marriage in the real world. Why shouldn't we have it in our fictional world?" And so it happened.

Sexual content and nudity also crept in. Holy crap! Adults like adult content in their video games! Who knew? And who has more money to spend on video games, adults or teenagers? 

Yeah.

Along came Baldur's Gate. Character design that lets you play any type of body. You can be cis-gender, transgender, non-binary, or anything in between. You can even customize the character's genitals. (!) Turned out the option of playing a female-presenting character who also has a penis became an astoundingly popular choice. Your avatar can romance any character, regardless of gender. And very explicit sexual content. 

The game broke sales records all over the world and won countless awards.

Oh yeah--WalMart carries it. Guess their principals don't stand up to the chance at profit. 

Now BioWare has released the newest Dragon Age game. It also allows highly-customizable characters and sports gender-blind romances.

It's freaking awesome. I would have committed cheerful murder for even a speck of gay content in a video game when I was growing up and when I was a young adult. The chance to play Someone Like Me? Wow. 

It does highlight how bad things used to be for LGBTQ people, of when we were invisible even to entertainment. But the days of retailers dictating content are gone. WalMart doesn't have the near-monopoly it used to. We've become visible.

Now? Let me put it this way. When I mentioned the LGBT content of Baldur's Gate to the students in the Gay/Straight Alliance at Nameless High School, none of them had heard of it. 

Let that sink in. This level of LGBT content has become so normal that it can be overlooked! A long, long way from the firestorms a hint of gay content once created.

These days I only read books with gay protagonists. I'm catching up after decades of being forced to read about straight people. And now I can play gay men all I like in video games, too. I've played Baldur's Gate several times through with different avatars, and I've never once romanced a female character, not even to see what happens. After decades of being forced to have straight romance or nothing, I can have all the gay content I want. It's fan-fucking-tastic.

As I write this, my computer is downloading Dragon Age: The Veilguard. I'm going to build a male who's good-looking by my standards and pay attention to romantic overtures only from male characters. Because I can.

And I'll slay some dragons, too.

The big deal about THE ETERNALS is that it's the first Marvel movie with a gay super-hero in it, one who is married, with a husband and son.

I really wanted to like it.  I tried to like it.  I couldn't.

(Light spoilers follow.)

The Eternals are a group of immortal super-beings, each with their own power--matter transmutation, super-speed, mind control, illusion, flight and strength, and so on. They were sent to Earth by another being, a Celestial, to stop monsters called Deviants from wiping out the human race.

The movie itself is unfortunately and deeply flawed.  Like I said, I really wanted to like it, and I tried, but nothing really worked.  At the beginning, we're dropped into an action sequence in the stone age. A Deviant kills a man in front of his son, and the boy doesn't even react.  In fact, when the Deviants wipe out a big chunk of the village, no one really seems to mind much. The boy, who should have been frightened and traumatized, expressionlessly accepts the gift of a knife from one of the Eternals instead.

This set the tone for the rest of the movie.

The Eternals are outside humanity, supposed to be apart from it. And most of them are hard-bitten and even uncaring. Ikarus, the male lead, spends most of the movie stony-faced and rigid. He's in love with Sersi, but he never seems to take joy out of that. He doesn't seem to get joy out of anything, really.  Sersi seems to feel the same way--their relationship is a burden, not a support, and she puts up with it because she feels she should, rather than out of any real romantic attraction.  Sprite, the mischief-maker, also rarely cracks a smile, and uses her illusions for workaday heroics. We never see her get any =fun= out of her powers.  Kingo, a blaster hero, seems to be the only one who likes what he's doing, but even he turns overly serious halfway through the show.  The actors decided that immortality has hardened the characters and made them either less than or more than human.  An interesting choice, but it means the characters feel remote, and I couldn't connect with them.

There was an attempt to humanize Sersi by giving her a human boyfriend, but it actually makes the problem worse. The boyfriend--whose name I'm forgetting--takes the news of Sersi's true identity with sarcastic resignation, the world-weary sigh of someone who's already seen super-heroes stop world-wrecking events. His low-key acceptance is, perhaps, different, but it's ultimately off-putting. He was a chance to inject some humanity in the show, and that chance was thrown away.

Director Chloe Zhao also seems to have little idea of how to pace a story. Just when the movie gets some momentum going and the tension builds nicely, she stops the story dead for long, long minutes so the characters can emote at each other. I found myself checking my watch, never a good sign. The time-hopping structure of the story (starting in the distant past, jumping back to the present, popping into the past again) makes this worse. It's hard to keep track of what's going on, and we have to put the present storyline on hold every time we're plopped back into the past again.  It's another momentum-killing device.

And then we come to Phastos, the much-heralded First Gay Movie Super-Hero.  He falls flat.

This isn't the fault of Henry Tyree, the actor who plays him.  Tyree does a great job.  It's the script and the director who fail the character. First, make no mistake, Phastos is a minor character. He's absent from most of the movie, in fact. After the first few scenes, the Eternals basically split up and scatter around the world. Later, Ikarus and Sersi travel around the world, trying to reunite them so they can fight a new threat.  This could have been done quickly, much in the way Paul Neuman picks up grifters in THE STING. Instead, Zhao slowly, frustratingly takes. Her. Time. We have a long, long, LONG scene partway through the gathering process in which the characters gathered so far share a meal.

Guess who isn't there yet?

At LONG last, the characters get off their asses and look for Phastos. They find him in a suburb with, to the surprise of his fellow Eternals, a husband named Ben and their young son.  We have a set of family-oriented scenes here that, I think, are meant to normalize a same-sex relationship, but the relationship itself is dry. Everything is too matter-of-fact. Like Sersi's boyfriend, Ben doesn't seem much affected by the revelation of Phastos's true identity, and when he learns Phastos needs to leave them to go fight evil, Ben sends him off with a smile and a quick, dry kiss of the sort you give your husband when he's going away for a two-day conference.  There was no attempt whatsoever to show romance or, heaven forbid, passion.  (And I have to point out that Sersi and Ikarus, our straight couple, get an extensive and passionate lovemaking scene.) 

Later, after the Great Big Battle, the Eternals come back together, but do we get a scene in which Phastos is reunited with his husband and son? Do we see Ben and Phastos fling themselves into an embrace with thank-god-you're-okay-I-love-you-so-much? Do we seen Phastos's son leap into his arms shrieking "Daddy!"?

No, we don't.  Instead, we blip to a farmhouse.  Phastos is in a living room eating pizza. Ben is nowhere to be seen, and their son is in the kitchen, talking to another Eternal. Later, Ben pops in to deliver one line, and Phastos decides to rush into the kitchen, but not to talk to his son, whom he deliberately pushes aside, but to talk to his team-mate.

It drains all emotion from the scene.

This is doubly problematic in a movie that stutters and stammers because the plot gets interrupted for emotional emoting for emo emotions. Zhao is willing to sacrifice pacing so her straight people can emote at each other, but she won't do the same for her gay folk.

A few audience members did shout and clap during the kiss.  I just shrugged.  It could have been--should have been--much better.

It's abundantly clear Disney/Marvel is testing the waters. They decided we could have a gay man, but he couldn't be =too= gay. We could have a same-sex marriage, but it has to be completely, blandly domestic. We could have two men who are married, but they have to keep romance and passion off-screen.  It has to be bland and boring in order to exist at all.

I'm glad we have a gay super-hero in the Marvel movies. I'm hoping it leads to more of them.  I suppose it's inevitable that the first one is botched.  But I'm tired of feeling that way.

I wanted THE ETERNALS to be an awesome movie, with an interesting, fast-paced story with a prominent and heart-felt gay relationship. I got something entirely, and disappointingly, different.

I can't tell you what this would have meant for me if this had happened when I was a kid. Seeing it on the page made it possible, made it =real=. More than that, seeing Superman with a boyfriend, made such a thing . . . not just acceptable, but DESIRABLE. Something it was okay to want.  The world's greatest hero wants the same thing you do.

So I'm reading.

A couple weeks ago, Darwin and I decided enough was enough.  We needed to get away.  But this is a pandemic.  What to do?

Camping!

Of course, Darwin and I don't do tent camping at this point in our lives.  Instead, we go to Campit Campground, an LGBT campground near Saugatuck in west Michigan and rent a cabin.  The campground is huge, and they accommodate tent camping, RV camping, and rustic cabin camping.  And it's all LGBT people.

It was a delightful week.  The weather was perfect--never too hot or too cold.  No bugs.  Darwin ordered firewood from the campground office, and they asked, "How many?"  "Six!" he replied brightly, thinking they meant "how many logs?"  A while later, the campground's errand-runner came out with a trailer piled high with wood.  It was six sections of wood, each one the size of a 1'x1' box.  So we had this huge woodpile, and it forced us to have a campfire every night.  (We still had wood left over!)

Our cabin was basically a wooden box with a knee-high shelf for a bed, though it had a mattress.  It also had a small fridge and a very nice deck. And it was surrounded by gay guys.  They may strike some of you as funny, but I have to tell you--it's so very wonderful knowing every single person around you is like you and supports you and won't be a source of homophobia.  It's why we go to this place.

Usually when Darwin and I go camping (and I realize I'm using the term loosely, here), I don't cook much.  We usually go into town and eat in restaurants.  But with the pandemic, we wanted to keep that to a minimum, and we brought food with us, along with my camp stove.  Darwin had never seen this stove before.  It's old--I got it back when I was in college.  It's the size of two shoe boxes and has a chamber for liquid propane.  You use a tiny hand pump to pressurize it.  I like it better than the stoves that use propane canisters--it's less wasteful.  Darwin was both fascinated and appalled.  "How can you cook on that thing?" he said.

I demonstrated on the first morning by cooking bacon.  Cooking bacon outdoors while camping is cruel for everyone around you.  The wonderful, crispy bacon smell permeates the fresh morning air, and they know they aren't getting any!  The stove impressed Darwin very much.  I cooked nearly all our meals on it all week, and did the usual camping trick of setting water on it to heat while we ate so it would be ready for dish washing afterward.  I didn't know that Darwin had never done any campground cooking before, and he was more than a little amazed at how smoothly it went.

We did run into one problem.  We stopped at the store on our way to the campground, which meant we arrived with a whole mess of bagged groceries, but the cabin had no cupboards or shelves or anything.  We put the food and kitchen equipment under the bed, but it was highly disorganized and difficult to find anything, which makes my teeth ache.  The next time we were in town, we stopped at another store and I searched for . . . laundry baskets!  Two of them.  One for food, and one for kitchen stuff.  Everything went into the baskets, and the baskets slid neatly under the bed.  Ta da!

We lazed around Saugatuck and South Haven, two of our favorite Michigan towns.  Saugatuck is crowded with vacationers, even during a pandemic, and we amazed ourselves by scoring a perfect parking place right at the edge of downtown.  We kept our masks on, even outdoors, and so did almost everyone else.  Progress!

We also came across The Lake Problem.

The Great Lakes are riding way high this season.  No, seriously.  They're higher than any time in recorded history.  And nowhere was this more evident than in Saugatuck and South Haven.  Both of them are lake towns, with docks and piers right on the streets.  Usually the water levels are low enough that you have to climb down a short ladder on the dock to get to a boat.  Now?  Many of the docks are underwater.  Water has encroached into the streets, forcing some to close.  The Saugatuck Fire Department (which is on the river because it also rescues boats) was flooded.  Many houses are inches from water in the living room.  Inches.  Water pumps were everywhere, gamely gooshing water out of the street and back into the lake, only to have it return a few minutes later.  Nature always wins in the end.

We love South Haven so much that we joke about Darwin becoming city manager there one day as a retirement job.  While we were out there, he learned by accident that South Haven is currently looking for a new city manager. (!!)  He isn't going to apply, but it was a head-shaking moment.

We shopped and ate ice cream (and made sure Darwin used his insulin pump) and worked out bits of local history by studying the architecture of buildings and houses (What?  What do YOU do on vacation?). 

And we hunted graveyards.

See, Darwin has a number of ancestors who are buried out in that area, and he wanted to find their graves.  For a couple a days, we wandered through Niles and Berrien Springs.  Here, I was invaluable.  Totally true!  (Since this blog is All About Me.)  One graveyard surrounded a white, clapboard church way out in the country, a church that Darwin's great-grandparents helped found.  Their graves were somewhere in the graveyard, and I finally found them.  They were only a few yards from the church, and as far as Darwin and I could tell, they must have been among the first people buried there.  It was very interesting.

A side note: the church's outhouse was still standing.  It was divided into two sections, each with two seats.  I said to Darwin, "Your great-grandparents pooped in here."  And he nodded sagely.

Back to my invaluable-ness: Later, outside Niles, we were hunting through another cemetery for the grave of another ancestor, though this one didn't have the last name McClary.  We looked and looked, but found nothing.  Finally, I found something that made my jaw drop.  Darwin was in another part of the graveyard, distracted by an odd inscription.  I trotted over to him.

"Come over here and look," I said.

"Hold on," he said.  "I want to see what--"

"No, no," I interrupted.  "You want to see this.  Right now."

Sighing at the perfidy of husbands, he trudged over to where I was pointing and at last realization came over him.  =His= jaw dropped.  In the middle back of the graveyard, occupying a prominent position, was a large stone marker engraved with one word: MCCLARY.

This was a major find.  Darwin didn't know that he had a McClary presence in this graveyard.  Darwin immediately set about checking the stones.  He found a number of relatives buried in that plot, and these were graves he wasn't sure he'd ever see.  One was for a great-great uncle who lived on his own farm all his life, never married, and who eventually committed suicide by poison.  Darwin suspects that he was gay, and the guilt and pressure from a homophobic society and upbringing finally forced him over the edge.  I agree with him.

It must also be said that Darwin had a miracle find of his own.  We scoured the little graveyard, which was surrounded by a thick woodland on three sides and on the fourth by a busy road, looking for the non-McClary ancestor Darwin really wanted to find, and came up empty.  Finally, we called it a day and got into the car.  As I was driving toward the exit, Darwin yelped, "Wait! Wait! Stop!"

I did, and he got out.  A gravestone we had both seen before but passed over because it was too hard to read, had become legible after the sun moved and changed the way the shadows fell.  Darwin happened to catch sight of it as we were heading out, and it was the very grave he'd come there to find.  Win!

As we're wont to do, Darwin and I also spent some time exploring small town downtowns, commenting on the old buildings and whether the place was a decent one or not.  Many of the small downtowns we looked at had basically been wrecked by the local highway system.  Back when the state started linking up little towns with the then-new highways, the state just incorporated the town's main street into the highway.  The towns initially welcomed this--it brought more traffic and people to town.  But this was back when "traffic" still involved horses and those new-fangled automobiles that went a shocking thirty miles an hour.  As time went on, cars became faster, and semi trucks appeared on the scene, and they all use a highway system designed back in the 1920s. 

Now, the nice little downtowns are being wrecked by roaring traffic.  You might we strolling down the sidewalk, wondering if there's a cafe for lunch, when two semis and a dump truck bellow past you in a cloud of acrid diesel fumes, followed by a long line of cars that whoosh and rush and drown out both conversation and enjoyment.  And none of them are stopping in the downtown to shop or eat or do anything.  To them, the town is just a place that slows you down for a minute before you pound back up to 55.  It's a terrible shame, but it does give Darwin and me something to complain about.  You take your wins where you can.

The weather continued to be a delight--warm during the day, cool at night.  Perfect for campfires.  It was a fine week!

I really needed mid-winter break this year. Usually for mid-winter, I'm saying, "We just had a big break! We don't need a week off right now. Let's keep going."

But this year, the winter has been especially gloomy. And wet. And Darwin lives in another town most of the time. And I'm coping with more than the usual bouts of feeling low. So a break? Bring it!

Saturday was spent gaming with old friends, which was very nice. Sunday, we had dinner with my mother, who was overnighting in area before flying out of state, and that also very nice.

The rest of the week, I was in Albion at the new house with Darwin. It was a week of doing little things around the new house--hanging pictures, unpacking the rest of the office (which Darwin mysteriously never got around to doing), putting up the last curtain rod. I cooked in the new kitchen, learning where its snags and corners were. I solidified the plot of a new SF novel and wrote the first two chapters.

And I got to spend time with Darwin. He was still working, of course, but he was home early in the evening. (His commute is literally five minutes.) That was very good. I'm still not sure about dividing our time between two different towns. We fought for the right to get married and live together. Now that we aren't living together, it feels like a loss.

Early on in this, I tried to comfort myself with the idea that lots of married couples live large chunks of time apart. Military families. Families where someone travels for their job a lot. And they adapt. I could too, right?

But now I've realized something else. When you marry someone in the military or who has a travel job, you go into it KNOWING your spouse will be gone quite a lot. I didn't marry Darwin with the expectation I'd rarely see him.  I married him IN ORDER to see him.  When we got married, there was no separation on the horizon. It never even occurred to either of us.

So I find the idea of military and other couples living apart not at all comforting or supportive.

And I needed the break.

Now that this is all settled, I can write about it publicly.

You can look it up in the papers, and the papers usually have chunks of it wrong.  Here's what happened:

Darwin's police chief in Ypsilanti left, which meant Darwin had to hire someone new.  He farmed out the initial selection process to a company that deals with such things. They winnowed through the applicants and turned a handful back to him for interviews.  One of those was a lieutenant in the Ypsilanti Fire Department.  The Ypsilanti city charter specifically prohibits the council from having input in hiring practices. That's the sole responsibility of the city manager.  But more than once council member illegally let Darwin know they wanted the internal candidate as the new hire.  The internal candidate, however, was absolutely not qualified for the job. He didn't have the required education background, and he additionally had failed to complete course work he had promised to do years earlier.  Darwin also found irregularities in his application.  Meanwhile, a candidate from Livonia applied who had the education, background, and experience the job required.  Darwin offered him the job.  He accepted and signed the contract.

The internal candidate was black.  The Livonia candidate was white.  The councilors who were pressing Darwin to hire the internal candidate were black.

The city council, in a hastily-called closed meeting, told Darwin that he could either resign or be fired.  Officially, he resigned, but we all know it means they fired him.

Darwin and I were both extremely upset.  The city I had lived in for twenty years and which Darwin had come to love had fired him for racist reasons.  I've now become so angry at the council that I can't consider living in Ypsilanti again.  It also ended our friendship with the city's mayor, who refused to stand up for Darwin.  I can't stand the sight of her, and she should hang her head in shame.

However, Darwin negotiated a separation settlement from Ypsilanti. The council resisted at first, but in the end they knew that if Darwin sued them for discrimination and for violation of contract, they'd lose, and badly.  So they handed it over.

Darwin started a job hunt right away.  Several weeks went by, but he got no nibbles from the applications he sent out.  He was getting worried that fallout from Ypsilanti was following him, despite the fact that he had fielded several phone calls from people in city management who told him flat-out that everyone in the municipal community knew Ypsilanti had treated him badly.  I told him the lack of calls arose from it being summer time--too many people on vacation to get much done.  Still, he worried.

In the meantime, he hung around the house.  This was strangely difficult.  I love Darwin deeply, but having him home every minute was strangely wearing.  It did mean we could eat supper at a decent hour (Darwin often gets home after 7:00 PM, making it difficult to eat together), but he was a relentless presence around the house, and it wasn't something I was used to.  I began to understand stay-at-home wives who spent their entire marriage alone during the day in an arrangement that made everyone happy until the husband retired and found himself not knowing what to do with himself all day at home.  Such husbands are notorious for following their wives around like lost puppies, driving everyone nuts until a new equilibrium is established.  Darwin didn't follow me around all summer, but he was indeed around all the time, and neither of us quite knew how to respond to that.

Darwin applied at some places in our general area.  He also applied at places farther away, and even some that were out-of-state.  One city in Connecticut expressed a great deal of interest in him as a candidate, and they were enthusiastic to the point that we were eyeing houses and working out logistics, and then suddenly all contact with them ended.  Weeks and weeks went by.  Nothing.  They hadn't hired anyone else, either.  (Several months later, they finally hired an internal candidate, but they still never contacted Darwin again.)

Our plan, if Darwin got a job far away, was that he would move to the new town and I would stay in Wherever until Max graduated, since he's in his senior year.  Then I would take an early retirement, sell the house, and move out with him.

The summer passed slowly.  I went on the exchange trip to Germany and returned.  Still no interviews or offers.  Right around the time Darwin was getting seriously unhappy, he got a call to interview in Albion.

More coming . . .