Meet Amola Nomo and Cosca the Wookiee...they were Jay and I for nearly five years in the once popular, online game Star Wars Galaxies.
As many of you may know, Jay and I are HUGE Star Wars fans. We will participate in nearly anything that gets the Star Wars logo put on it. But, for those of you unfamiliar with Star Wars Galaxies (SWG) or Massively Multiplayer Online Games ("MMO's")....Star Wars Galaxies is a game played online in a world that is shared by hundreds of other players from all over the world. Sharing a game world allows players to do more than simply play against each other...you can also form communities and participate in just about type of adventure you have ever fantasized about being in. A side effect of this type of play is that you can also learn a great deal about your fellow human beings, and you can discover some interesting things when you don't know their real life details....as Jay and I soon discovered.
The old joke goes: "What does MMORPG actually mean?"...Many Men Online Rollplaying Girls.
Theres a whole lot of truth in that humor.
When both of us heard that there was going to be a Star Wars game that would allow us to play together we were both very excited. We immediately began dreaming of what kind of characters we would play. This being a fantasy world, the sky was the limit in terms of what gender or even alien species you could be. I chose to play a huge, furry Wookiee because I admired there loyalty and strength. Jay chose to play a fish-like species called a "Mon Calamari"...made famous in Star Wars for Admiral Ackbars "Its a twap!" scene, assaulting the second Death Star in "Return Of The Jedi"......(Come on. Don't roll your eyes like that. Let your inner geek out!)
Jay elected to play a female character and we made a backstory for our characters that they were a married couple. This was fantasy after all, and being a gay couple, we believed that this would be as close as we would ever get to that level of recognition...at that time there was no marriage equality anywhere. Plus, same-sex marriages where not a part of the game then...but heterosexual ones where. Thus the only way to have that experience was as an opposite-sex couple, which fortunately...you could just create.
Now take a second and put aside your heebie jeebies about how a big furry clawed alien and a fish-like one get their groove on.....none of that is important here....and get your mind out of the gutter anyway ;)
...Also, we acknowledge that we are far from the only players to play a different gender. Lots of people do it. However, when you form relationships, it blurs the lines between fantasy and reality.
During the course of our five years we got to have some awsome adventures and made some truly great friends. We still keep in contact with them today. But another thing we took away from this experience was that people really do treat a straight couple differently than a gay couple....not to mention that a girl in that environment...where there are so few... can get just about anything she wants.
Jay of course jumped into the roll play side with abandon and had great fun being a dissent-stirring, rabblerouser for the rebellion...and did not edit out the flirty side that we have to keep locked up during normal life. Things you may never say to a straight person in normal, everyday life...got said. If Jay wanted to say that a particular male character was attractive...he could do so without causing fits of rage from the target of the compliment. So much took place that some people would make fun that I was going to get jealous and rip someones arms off, as Wookiees are wont to do. But how can you be jealous of someone hundreds of miles away on the end of a computer....It never got inapropriate...mostly...but neither was what anything held back with the normal fear of causing offense because we are men. needless to say...that if Jay asked a favor from any of the male players...it got done.
For me, Cosca lots of pats on the back and "Cosca's a good Wook". Gone was the unspoken label of "gay" that ussually put an invisible barrier between me and a good portion of the world. It was nice not to be "the gay guy" and just be another one of the bunch.
I could give open affection to my partner and no one angry mobs showed up on my doorstep waving pitch forks and torches.
Playing in this environment, all the details of you ordinary life are gone. Even though everyone obviously knows that the persona you crafted for yourself is not your real one, for all intents and purposes...you are your character. Unless, you chose to reveal yourself for those you trust. And thats where our dilema occured...
After having played for a number of years we had formed a group of friends and created a guild...which is basically like an ingame club. Were we had began the game with just to two of us, now we had a rather large group of friends who believed that we were a straight couple....and there was the invisible label barrier... back again...only this time the label was different.
Playing with certain people for a long time meant building relationships and in some intances, sharing bits of yor real lives together. Thats what SWG was really good at...community building. We founded guilds and in-game cities together and spent long hours in cooperative adventures, making friends along the way.
As we played along side our freinds it became harder and harder to share our actuall selves with them because that would mean "coming out". Jay and me debated this for a long time. He argued that the game was basically fantasy and that, "if I didn't need to come out as not really being a Wookiee, why feel the need to out our sexuality?" For a while I went along with this rational, but I hated it. We were forming friendships that we wanted to keep and we were once again back in the closet...but the questions that our guildmates began asking, made it very difficult to keep our real selves a secret. With that, came the sense that I was betraying our growing frienships.
Eventually, The developers of the game ran it into the ground with endless, unasked-for changes to the game that drove off almost everyone playing. All our friends were gone. We tried to recapture what SWG provided, in other games like World of Warcraft, but they could never provide that same sense of cooperative community. It was then, that we decided it was time to come out. as with most such experiences, no one flipped out...but niether did the truth telling remove that invisible barrier, we just switched labels again back to "gay guys". Also, now the wierdness was back, as people felt they didn't quite know what was safe to say around us and what wasn't. Out little group handled it well though...even if they secretly may not have approved, they treated us with kindness.
I still play that game...much less now that I have kids, but I still play because its Star Wars and I will play just about anything as long as it's Star Wars. I also play because I wish the good times of the games heyday didn't have to end the way that it did. The game feels like a big empty room now...full of memories. Theres only three of us left out of our original group of 30+.
I hope to reconnect with everyone again and make new memories in the next big deal in Star Wars online games...."The Old Republic". I tend to thouroughly glut myself in Star Wars goodness and perhaps bring some Youtubers along for the ride...but this time...I do it as me. :D
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