Coming Out While Going Fast: Queer Conviviality in Speedrunning Live Streams

Johanna Brewer's study examines how openly queer and transgressive speedrunners who live stream their gameplay cultivate what she terms "queer conviviality," a culture of mutual support that extends into material community action. The paper argues that visibility in games remains insufficient on its own: an analysis of over 4,000 US titles released between 2010 and 2015 found that only about 1 percent featured queer or trans characters or non-heterosexual interactions, a stark contrast to television, where queer characters reached 12 percent by the 2021 season. Against this backdrop, the author positions speedrunning's collaborative, queer-temporal practices as a model for inclusive, communal change relevant to game studies and human-computer interaction.

Drawing largely on interviews and observation of Twitch communities, the study finds that many queer and trans speedrunners came out for the first time on stream, often after harassment elsewhere in gaming culture. Events such as Games Done Quick are described as comparatively welcoming, and streamers who come out frequently take on protective and representative roles despite risks including hate raids and doxxing. These communities channel their energy into charitable fundraising, including for The Trevor Project, and into advocacy that has pushed Twitch toward more inclusive discovery tools. The author notes that these claims rest mainly on qualitative evidence rather than broad quantitative data.

The paper also traces how Twitch's changing discovery features shaped marginalized streamers' ability to find one another. Custom communities, introduced in 2017 and removed in 2018, were followed by identity tags in 2021, after which harassment reportedly rose. The study documents grassroots responses, including the Peer2Peer.live tool, the Hate Raid Response toolkit, and the #ADayOffTwitch strike, which reportedly reduced viewership by 12 percent, as well as Twitch's later safety measures such as Shield Mode in late 2022. Framing these efforts through Ivan Illich's notion of convivial tools, the author presents LGBTQIA+ speedrunners as builders of community-driven infrastructure and urges HCI researchers to center such grassroots work.