Disclosure and the "Secret Underground Movement": Analysing Queerness in Disco Elysium

This paper examines whether disclosure is necessary for players to engage with queer elements in Disco Elysium: The Final Cut (ZA/UM, 2019), an isometric detective RPG set in the post-war city of Revachol. Its central thesis is that queerness in the game is often ambiguous, probabilistic, and interpretively constructed rather than explicitly revealed, and that the necessity of disclosure depends on the player's own embodied relationship to queerness. The authors use two conditionally closeted characters, Kim Kitsuragi and the male escort "Smoker on the Balcony," as focal cases for this argument.

The analysis finds that the game's queer content is encountered through chance, dialogue choices, and specific character engagements, and that it frequently resists definitive interpretation. The "Homo-Sexual Underground" Thought, which requires sustained interaction with the Smoker, offers a Solution that questions the demand for stable, easily identifiable queer identities rather than resolving the character's sexuality. Kitsuragi's disclosure of being gay occurs only at the end of an optional quest, yet the authors report that they had already read him as queer from the start of their playthroughs, suggesting that disclosure was not required for engagement.

Methodologically, the study adopts a feminist-materialist approach grounded in relational inquiry and textual analysis, drawing on the co-authors' own playthroughs and discussions as navigational tools for identifying queer elements. The authors adapt Sedgwick's paranoid and reparative reading framework, arguing that queer readings can recontextualise game elements and that knowledge produced through such readings is performative. The scope is a qualitative, two-researcher analysis of a single game, and its findings are presented as an initial demonstration rather than a generalisable account of queer play.