This isn’t a story about how a BioWare game saved my life (it didn’t) or made me gay (Anne Rice and twink-era Tom Cruise had that covered). It’s a story where Knights of the Old Republic felt like a homecoming — and because I’m me, you can expect at least one act of oral sex. 

The summer Knights of the Old Republic came out, my mom had moved us from Portland to Madras, Oregon. If you’re unfamiliar, Madras is like a retirement community for the most racist pig-fucks you’ve ever met. It’s hot and barren and people casually drop antique slurs like the punctuation they didn’t know how to use. We moved because my mom’s boyfriend-of-the-week had family out there, and he missed them and we’d love them and they’re so fucking dope and they have SO many guns isn’t that cool? You kids love guns right? So my mom you uprooted her faggy Portland kids and dragged them out to the Sunken Place.

I’ll be honest, it was refreshing at first. I hadn’t been called a faggot in earnest for years, let alone by a sisterfucking yokel leaning out of an F-150 doing 60 in a school zone. I’m disappointed it didn’t have a confederate flag in the window, that would’ve really rounded out this anecdote.

It sucked there. I didn’t sleep. I was hallucinating with startling – but in hindsight, understandable – regularity. I was convinced there was a creature out in the desert. I saw him out of the corner of my eye every time I was out there alone at night. Which was pretty often. There’s not much to do in Madras besides look at rocks, do drugs, and flirt with the age-inappropriate dad next door. (He said I had pretty hair for a boy, and I’m a sucker for flattery.) Between the isolation, sleep deprivation, casual substance abuse, and the way everyone there leered at me, I was unraveling. 

Replaying Morrowind with a teeth-grinding intensity helped me hold myself into something like together. I also watched a lot of trailers for the imminent releases that summer. The one that I stuck into Winamp and ran on a loop like a very normal person, was the trailer for Knights of the Old Republic. Star Wars never looked so good, so alive, so fresh, so new and so different. So immersible, so much like an actual place. You can’t ever really put into perspective the way an old game looks when it was new, but the gameplay in those trailers left a wet spot on my second hand office chair. I’m actually not joking. The desire I had for this game was carnal. It actually put the kind of pit in my stomach you feel when you take your clothes off in front of another person the first time. I wanted it so bad. I wanted it worse than bad.

I’m the kind of Star Wars kid who had read and reread all the old books – including the ones about the kinky Hellraiser aliens who dropped a moon on Chewbacca. If Star Wars lore scholarship was a career I’d be doing post-doc work on the ecology of Dantooine instead of competing with the lie-machine for scraps of freelance piecework. 

At the time, I didn’t know who I was when I wasn’t hooked on something. It was usually games, books, and movies, but also pretty often pills, powders, and the kind of escape and release and deeply regretful mistakes you can only make in wood-paneled bedrooms that smelled like ashtrays. Didn’t matter what, as long as they were places or states I could be in instead of here and now, I’d dive deep enough to touch the bottom. 

After a few weeks in Madras, Morrowind wasn’t cutting it. I was desperate for the kind of novelty I didn’t need to awkwardly ask a guy with football shoulders and resting hate crime face to direct me toward. One snag: we were broke. So whenever a new game did drop that summer, I had to wait for the IRC Warez scene to crack it and upload it to a seedy server somewhere so I could copy that floppy so to speak. I’m not proud of it, but the only way I could put money in my pocket at the time was a thing that didn’t pay well and cost a lot more than the cash I’d get out of it.

Fast forwarding so we can get to the BioWare of it all. A couple months and some domestic violence later, all our belongings were packed into the back of a semi-truck (don’t ask) and we were headed back to Portland.

Yee-haw, our Frontierland adventure was over. My time in Madras wasn’t all a bust though, I learned a lot. 

I found out my mom can do a helluva Carrie Underwood impression when she has a steel baseball bat and an abuser’s prize pickup truck to introduce it to. I learned about how “slavery wasn’t all that bad,” and “AIDS is punishment from God,” and I found out that me at that age was the dumbest motherfucker on the planet.

I was at one point reckless and sleep deprived enough to try and throw down with a drunken hick at my mother’s place of work. Imagine a 5’6-ish skinny kid in an oversized No Fear t-shirt who had an encyclopedic knowledge of Star Wars lore and looked the part, appearing so absolutely foaming-at-the-mouth feral that a dyed-in-the-wool country song redneck looking like an extra out of Road House (the Swayze version) actually says “whoa hey, calm down, kid.”

Mom said she was proud of me after, so there’s that. Let’s be real though: I wasn’t a cool kid doing punk Riot Grrl shit, this wasn’t an I ain’t afraid of no man moment. I was completely off my tits. I don’t remember what I was high on but it was probably a literal handful of things. A while back I found a picture of me from that summer and honestly I get it redneck dude, I looked bad. Not tough or rebellious or I’m-too-cool-to-care-about-sleep-hygiene. I looked like someone scooped the me out of me and what was left wasn’t quite a person. Shucked is a good word for the way I looked, like a corncob stripped of its leaves and silk, like an oyster sliced open and slurped out.

When we got back to Portland, I was high on the smell of trees. My friends and their parents helped us unload the truck and unpack and didn’t ask any questions that the look on my face and my mom’s black eye didn’t answer. They brought soda and snacks. They bought us groceries. A boy I had a crush on hugged me and said he was glad I was back. 

We landed in the same apartment complex we left, my guilt-ridden mother gave me fifty bucks and sent me to the mall. I had one goal for that cash and it was waiting for me in an EB Games full of that hot plastic game store smell.

This isn’t the part where I tell you I chose a game over drugs. I was buzzing on something that wasn’t just Star Wars fever when I got on the light rail. 

Back home, my half-sister was at her dad’s, mom was at work – she was working back to back doubles – and it was getting dark. Ever since we got back, being alone at night made me dizzy and feel like I was breathing in water instead of air. I didn’t want to be alone. I didn’t want to see if the desert thing followed me back.

So I called the friend who hugged me and I asked if he wanted to sleep over and play Knights of the Old Republic with me. When he said fuck yeah I couldn’t stop smiling like an idiot. He came over and we took turns playing our characters in two hour blocks.

I drank up every goddamn second of it, him and the game. It was the kind of game that rewarded dorks who knew the Deep Lore. Every little codex entry felt like there was a gift in there just for me. I practically jumped off the couch every time someone mentioned Exar Kun or Nomi Sunrider. I would have to pause the game to explain who these people were, why they were important, and what it meant for this codex entry to be found in this room. He listened patiently and smiled and I couldn’t tell if he was really interested or just being nice and I didn’t really care, because he was looking at me as long as I was talking so I talked for a long time. 

He was sitting close enough I could smell his deodorant and the summer boy-sweat it didn’t quite cover. I tried really hard not to just lean over and start huffing and licking him. He had blonde hair and dark blue eyes and I loved the way he talked shit about Carth Onasi — because for real, fuck that guy.

Being near him always made me a little swimmy-headed and red-in-the-face self conscious about what was going on in my jeans, and I had never been this close to him for so long before. He was the kind of boy that was confident and easy in every situation except when we were alone together. He always wore basketball shorts and a white t-shirt. 

I never noticed how soft his skin looked till then, right up close like that. The silk-soft near-invisible hairs that laid flat against his forearms. At some point our knees touched and neither of us moved away. We didn’t really say anything either, just searched for Bastila in the slums of Taris in silence. My skin was hot inside and cold outside, I could feel my heartbeat in my teeth.

Another two hour block, controller swap, neither of us moving an inch. Then our shoulders touched. Controller swap. By then we were both kind of panting from the exertion of restraint. We rescued Bastila and got off of Taris. I gave him the look and he gave me the look and our lips touched, then they locked, then we were all hands and bodies and tangled t-shirts and alone in the apartment and not-alone together and god, fuck, his skin was softer than it looked and I wanted to crawl inside it and devour him from the inside out. In the background, the Sith Empire sent Taris to space hell. 

The rhythm didn’t change, but the in-between did. Controller swap, I get on my knees, controller swap, his hands and mouth and hold on I gotta close the blinds, controller swap. You get the idea.

We lived in that game and each other for months. The school year started and I’d get hot in the face when we’d pass each other in the halls. We didn’t even need to say anything, he just got on my bus every afternoon and squeezed in beside me and by the time we got to my stop I had to get out of the seat very carefully and with my backpack in my lap.

We played through the whole campaign probably a dozen times. Dark side runs were our favorite. The outfits were cooler, and the power fantasy fell away leaving something surprisingly tragic. Turned out we both liked that kind of thing. Revan was a woman stripped of agency and remade into someone she wasn’t. When the twist came, she had to choose. Be the lie, or be who she was, even if reclaiming her identity meant dragging the people she loved into the dark with her. That’s probably a therapy subject.

We never talked about what we were to each other, but we did talk about Darth Bane and the Rule of Two, and argued about whether or not Canderous Ordo was hotter in his fuckass Old Republic-era Mandalorian armor or out of it. When my mom left for work at night, we had a new rhythm. Bedroom. Door closed. Clothes on the floor. 

Most nights we’d end up tangled in my sheets, not in a romance movie way, there was nothing composed about the state of my bed and the two out-of-steam queers twisted up in them. Fitted sheet half off, comforter wadded up at the foot of the bed, a single pile of two teens worth of clothes. The salty beachy taste of him coating my throat and drying sticky on my ass cheek. There, on the bed so soaked with the smell of him I could’ve wrung it out and bottled it, we’d start to drift off together. We’d murmur things like “I wish Carth could die on Taris,” and “I really like you,” and “you’re such a faggot,” and he’d laugh and I’d fall asleep to the heat of his breath on the back of my neck. 

My hunger for him, for affection, for being needed and wanted, and the sweaty, sticky, damp proof of it was bottomless. Safety wasn’t something I knew how to find in other people and I don’t think I did even then. He was enough safety-like and state-altering that I could lose myself in him the way I lost myself in games, and books, and pills, and powders, and still want and need more, and more and more. Except nights with him and Carth Onasi and his stupid fucking hair didn’t hollow me out. Every time he went home in the morning there was more of me than before. I noticed it the way a body notices when it’s not starving anymore. I wanted to know his deep lore, I wanted to get high on his boy smell and the taste of his sweat, and the weight of his attention, and I wanted to swim to the bottom of those dark blue eyes and drown myself there. 

I wish BioWare hadn’t gotten triangle shirtwaisted the way so many other studios have this year.

I wish I could remember if we ever said the L-word.