Gay or straight, most young people go through a period of figuring out their sexuality at some stage. It can be a lot to take in. I’m sure most of us have awkward stories from our teen years as we grappled uncomfortably with our hormones, our weird new bodies, and some strange, powerful new urges we felt around certain people. For those of us who find ourselves attracted to more than one gender, this already complicated process can be even more mysterious. It often feels like we're being asked to ‘choose a side’, and bi-erasure can often make it feel like everyone has. Are you gay or are you straight? Into ladies or men?
For me, I always thought of myself as straight. I’d always dated women. Women had always been my crushes. And to this day, all the people I’ve had to get over have been women. But as many of us learn over the course of our 20s, teenage me didn’t have it all figured out like he thought he did. In 2015, I found myself having a second sexual awakening; a sequel that I hadn’t imagined, yet it made perfect sense. It was the year when, at the age of 27, I realised I was bisexual. Fittingly, this revelation occurred thanks to a game called Coming Out on Top.
By little known developer Obscura, Coming Out on Top is a dating sim in which you play as Mark Matthews, a gay college student. Dating sims are typically dialogue-driven and visual, where the goal is to find romance or, sometimes, get laid. These goals are achieved by prioritising time spent with one potential partner over another, and by choosing suitable responses to the scenarios and conversations that play out. It may not sound like much, but good writing and character design makes all the difference. Thankfully, Coming Out on Top has both.
The game opens with Mark coming out as gay to his closest college friends and making a pledge to make the most of his final year of college. What follows is the gay male equivalent of an American Pie movie, with equal parts cringe, comedy, and sex. Oh boy, does it have sex.
While there are many dating sims that are happy to keep things PG, Coming Out on Top is not one to shy away from the male form. You will see plenty of erections being handled in one way or another. For context, when I played this game I was reviewing it for the gaming section of my university’s student magazine. It’s also worth pointing out that for those more interested in the game for the fun, rather than the funny business, Coming Out on Top can be played in a mode that removes the more explicit material. But for me, I felt it was my responsibility as a critic to experience the artwork uncensored. That’s what I told myself, anyway, as I pretended I wasn’t a little bit excited to see some skin.
Naturally, it was these steamier moments that got me thinking I wasn’t wholly residing in camp hetero. It was still a while before I had it sorted out in my head enough to admit that I was attracted to people other than women. It was by no means an ordeal, but I couldn’t help but feel like I was intruding on the sexual identities of other LGBT+ people, a little bit like crashing a party several hours in and claiming you’d been “invited the whole time, actually”.
Eventually, I had it mostly figured it out. But it begs the question, why did it take me so long to realise? Once again, the accepted notions that you’re either gay or straight, man or woman, are misleading (not to mention harmful). Language is a powerful tool for allowing us to be a certain way: I assumed I was straight so I made myself sexually available to women, which went on to support the idea that I was straight. Furthermore, media outlets and society at large treat male and female bodies very differently, encouraging us to think differently about them in a way that can make it confusing when you find both attractive, but in different ways. In visual media, we have a pretty good idea of what the male gaze looks like, but the female gaze is yet to be so concretely described. And yet all genders are attractive to someone, despite the narrow view of sexiness that society upholds.
For men, this confusion is further intensified when they must contend with the limiting conventions of masculinity that encourage clear divides between things that are heterosexual and things that are gay. Oh, you like football? You’re probably straight. Like fashion? Probably gay.
Sexuality is confusing for us all. It’s why, for so many of us, we speak of different experiences as being a sexual awakening. For some it was a movie, or a book, or even the entire 1960s. For me, it was a game about trying to score before exams.
And even though many people now accept that these aren’t rules that always hold true, sexual preference is still treated as though it’s a light switch, rather than one of those fancy lights that you can dim by turning a dial. But really, aren’t those sexier anyway?
