Alternate Universes

I’m 14 years old. I live just outside of London with my dad and my sister, and I’m the only openly queer person at my secondary school. Under bed covers at 2 A.M., I’m using a poorly made website to talk to strangers on the internet.

These people live on all corners of the planet, and we share an innate enthusiasm for twisting and shifting the already fictional lives of fictional people. They all know me by a different name—and no one thinks I’m the girl that my family thinks I am.

The practice is called text-based roleplaying, and I’ve been doing it since I was 11, starting out on an equally poorly made app that my mum and dad did not approve of before purchase. It was essentially a virtual high school, with no pictures but multiple forums full of strangers to fight with. The chat feature was as rudimentary as you could get.

I met my first girlfriend on that app. We were in very different geographical places, but that didn’t matter. We would virtually play house, but as members of the band My Chemical Romance. I was always Gerard and she was always Frank. I didn’t stop to think about why I always preferred pretending to be men and boys.

We were their partners, but we also controlled them. Under our thumbs, they could be anything we wanted—but they were mostly just excellent boyfriends. I don’t remember much of the content of these stories, but I know we spent a lot of time pretending to virtually kiss through these characters.

That relationship lasted for 3 months, but the habit I formed there has continued throughout my entire adult life—it would even end up shaping it. From my adolescence to my gender transition to my broader interest in fandom culture, text-based roleplaying has been at the heart of it.