I'm a queer person and I recommend these games, books, and other materials that have themes of being lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, intersex, or asexual. One of the strengths of itch.io is that there are a lot of creations here about being queer. The best way to learn about what it is to be queer in real life is from queer people themselves. Zines and other personal creative projects are great for that. Even if they're different than my own views or experiences, I liked them and they meet these criteria:
This catch-all LGBTQIA collection is the beginning of a series of queer collections that I curate. These are the rest of the collections in the series so far:
Content: Rated PG-13.
Medium: A tiny computer game created in Bitsy. It runs in your web browser.
Duration: You will be able to see everything in one play through, within 15 minutes.
About: Walk through a museum of charts and graphs that show the facts we know about transgender people, debunking some common misconceptions. The web page for this game cites sources for this information.
Queer themes: trans men, trans women, trans youth, intersex people, transition, transphobia, detransition, and restroom access.
Content: Rated G.
Medium: An interactive text, created in Twine, which guides you through steps of making a drawing on a piece of paper.
About: This game "uses the art-making process to mirror the process of forming a gender identity, and invites players to think about their gender in ways that are unclear, abstract, potentially uncomfortable, and disconnected from a binary understanding of gender."
Content: Rated G.
Medium: Icon set.
About: These are twenty-two pride flags, in a 32x32 pixel art format, to use in RPG Maker or your other creative projects. It has a plain flag that you can customize. Then it has flags for these, in alphabetical order:
abrosexual, agender, ally, aromantic, asexual, bigender, bisexual, demiromantic, demisexual, gay, genderfluid, genderqueer, graysexual, intersex, lesbian, nonbinary, pansexual, polyamory, rainbow, transgender, and an updated pride flag design.
Content: G.
Medium: Zine.
About: Satirical prose and photography about hormone replacement therapy (HRT) pills, describing them as though they're reviewing the cuisine at a very fancy restaurant.
Vibe: Humor.
Content: Rated PG-13.
Medium: A computer game created in Bitsy. It runs in your browser.
Accessibility: There is no audio, so it's friendly to Deaf/HoH players. The light pastel color scheme would be difficult for people with low vision or sensitive to eye strain.
Duration: About fifteen minutes to play the whole game.
Story: You are a ghost. Your human boyfriend has a human boyfriend. You like being in a polyamorous relationship, but you feel jealous, so you're talking with your therapist about it.
Vibe: Sad, lonely, anxious, grief, hope.
Content: Rated R, 18+. Explicit sex advice, with illustrations. Safe, sensible, and consensual.
Medium: Book. Zine. 18 pages long, with covers.
About: "This zine is about how trans bodies are beautiful. This zine is about the myriad ways you can love (and fuck) with your trans body. Yourself, others, the whole deal!"
Queer themes: This has sex advice for trans women, trans men, nonbinary people, and their partners.
Content: Rated G.
Medium: Physical game. A bookmark microgame.
About: Print out this bookmark. It is your passport for recording your travel through the diverse world of books. At the top, describe yourself. Below that, there are sections on the bookmark for particular types of authors: banned, indigenous, queer, etc. When your bookmark enters or leaves a book by a particular type of author, stamp that section and write the date.
Queer themes: If you do not choose to print a version of the bookmark that uses the least ink, then you can choose from 20 different pride flag backgrounds to represent yourself. In alphabetical order, the options are:
agender, aromantic, asexual, bisexual, demiromantic, demisexual, gay, genderfluid, genderqueer, greyromantic, greysexual, intersex, lesbian, neurodiverse, nonbinary, pansexual, polyamorous, polysexual, progress, transgender.
Content: Rated PG-13. Some essays have content warnings at their beginnings because they talk about trauma and having survived sexual assault.
Medium: Zine.
About: An anthology of essays about learning martial arts as a tool for moving past trauma, and how martial arts instructors can teach it in a way that is suitable for students who have survived sexual assault or who are sex workers, who need this instruction the most.
Queer themes: Written by a community of queer and trans people of color.
Vibe: Serious. Painful. Direct. Useful.
Content: Rated PG-13.
Medium: A 14-page nonfiction research article about history, with bibliography. Letter-size pages formatted for reading on screen. Screen-reader friendly. Not printer friendly.
About: When British colonialism came to India, the traditional gender category of hijras did not fit their norms, which threatened their supremacy. The colonialists invented a moral panic about hijras to justify criminalizing them. This persists in anti-transgender attitudes in Britain and former British colonies today.
Queer themes: Traditional gender variance outside of Western culture. Transphobia.
Vibe: Academic, yet easy to understand for the average reader.
Content: Rated PG because it's all about flirting.
Medium: Tabletop role-playing game. For two partners to play, but it says you can adapt it for more if you're polyamorous.
Story: You and your partner are dragons. Use puns, treasure, and over-the-top sappy flirting to tell each other how much you love each other.
Queer themes: This is based on a comic about a gay dragon couple, so that's what it is by default. ("Bro" doesn't mean a literal brother.) The game says you can adapt it for other genders, if you prefer.
Vibe: goofy, playful, sincere, affectionate, and just celebrating that with no shame.
Content: Rated PG.
Medium: A computer game that can run in your web browser. A short story in a visual novel style.
Duration: Each play through can be about five minutes. You have some meaningful choices. You have to play through it several times to reveal the whole story.
Story: Your friend asks you for advice about someone he likes.
Queer themes: Bisexual men. Self discovery. Homophobia. Being closeted.
Content: Rated PG or PG-13.
Medium: A dissertation and academic poster.
About representation of sapphic relationships that are sapphic in video games. Sapphic means lesbian, bisexual, and/or pansexual women. Some other queer women's identities are beyond the scope of the project. Most portrayals of sapphics in games are by straight men, with results that LGBT people find unsatisfactory. Developers create better results if they at least consulted with real live sapphics. Some of the best are on itch.io.
Vibe: Academic, yet easy to understand for the average reader.
Content: Rated G.
Medium: A computer game created in Bitsy. You can play in English or in French.
Duration: About ten minutes long.
About: This game is sort of like an interactive bibliography. You go to a library for your research project about HIV and AIDS. The librarian helps you find some relevant materials in each section, which are titles that you can check out in real life. The next room of the library happens to be showing an exhibition about the history of AIDS.
Queer themes: The game itself doesn't talk about being queer, or anything in detail about the virus or its effects, though the books and organizations that it mentions do.
Vibe: A sense of calm, nonjudgmental camaraderie organized around sharing knowledge about this.
Content: Rated PG.
Medium: A full color book, hand-lettered, with cartoon illustrations. 11 pages, with cover. Not screen reader friendly.
About: Short, easy definitions for some LGBT identity words. The definitions themselves are accurate, it's just that the tone is tongue-in-cheek in response to quarrels that people have had about how to define them.
Queer themes: The queer identities this covers are asexual, aromantic, bisexual, pansexual, lesbian, gay, trans, questioning, and queer.
Vibe: Queer joy. Choosing not to let the haters waste your time.
Content: Rated PG-13. Contains references to alcohol, homophobia, and racial tension.
Medium: Computer game.
Duration: Each play-through is about 15 minutes. There is a lot of replay value because you have many meaningful choices in each move, which can guide you to nine different endings.
Story: You're spending a night out at the bar. Drink with an old friend and a stranger, and text your girlfriend. This game is all about carefully choosing your words and your tone. For each of your own lines of dialog, you choose parts of sentences, and put them together into what you want to say.
Queer themes: Your girlfriend is a lesbian. Your ex is a man.
Vibe: Tense, flirty, or funny.
Medium: A zine created in Decker (a program inspired by the Hypercard software from the 1990s).
Accessibility: No audio, so Deaf/HoH friendly. Black and white high-contrast 1bit graphics, so colorblind friendly and low vision friendly.
About: A personal zine about being trans and how some people will clutch their pearls about that no matter how you present yourself, so you may as well be your whole real self.
Vibe: Raw, vulnerable, defiant.
Content: Rated PG because of how one of the definitions of terms mentions some sex organs.
Medium: A full-color zine, designed to be printed out on a single sheet of paper, cut, and folded. One version is in English, the other version is in Japanese.
About: A tiny zine that gives definitions for what the initialism LGBTQIA stands for, and then a few other relevant words.
Vibe: Cute, cheery, simple.
Content: Rated G.
Medium: Custom emoji pack for using on Mastodon and Discord. Pride flags in the form of butterfly emojis. (Visit the designer's profile for sets of pride flag emojis in the form of ghosts, hearts, and more.)
Queer themes: Pansexual, lesbian, nonbinary, intersex, bisexual, asexual, transgender, agender, aromantic, demiromantic, demisexual, genderfluid, genderqueer, and intersex inclusive progress pride flag.
(Plus some flags that aren't LGBTQIA identities: mental health, disability, and plural pride.)
Content: Rated G. Friendly for all ages.
Medium: A computer game of the type called kinetic fiction or a visual novel, because it's mainly dialog with character portraits. This one is a prototype, so it feels like only the first chapter of a story, but it demonstrates what it's supposed to do, and it's fully playable without any problems.
Duration: One play through is about ten minutes. There aren't major decisions or other endings, but you can replay it to experiment with other gender expressions for your character to see how you feel about them as a player.
Story: You help your friends plan a wedding.
Queer themes: A game where you can choose your gender expression, including nonbinary options. The purpose of this game is to be a sandbox where you can safely try out different names, pronouns, and other words for yourself, to see how you feel about being called by them in real life.
Vibe: Encouraging, friendly, companionable, hopeful, cozy, cheerful.
Content: Rated PG-13, because although most of it would rated G, there is a chance that you might stumble into some fatherly advice about the importance of using condoms. Other content warnings: description of depression and anxiety.
Medium: A computer game that runs in your web browser.
Duration: Each play through is about ten minutes. Play through it several times, choosing different dialog options to see what they reveal.
Story: You haven't spoken to your dad much since you've been going to college. Now you're on a long car ride together. He cares about you, no matter what... right?
Representation: Gay men. Coming out.
Vibe: Awkward, defensive, tense, caring, sweet, anxious, wistful, dread, frustrated, nostalgic.
Content: Rated PG. Specific content warnings are in the front of the book.
Medium: Book. Fantasy novel.
Story: A company invented cleaner sources of power for the city. Why is someone stealing them? Because she discovered that the power comes from the stolen souls of witches like herself. She can't safely come forward with this information yet, and a police officer is hot on her trail.
Queer themes: Pretty much character has one or another queer identity. Its focus is on characters who are genderfluid or on the asexual spectrum, and how they have feelings for one another.
Content: Rated PG-13. Mentions of sex organs, medical discrimination, misrepresentation, and non-consensual sex reassignment surgeries, all of which are necessary topics when explaining about what intersex means. It doesn't depict or go into graphic detail about any of these.
Medium: Nonfiction zine, designed for being read on a computer screen.
Duration: About a ten minute read.
About: An introduction to what intersex means, written by someone who is intersex, portrayed as a cartoon dog.
Representation: Intersex.
Vibe: Informative, a touch of humor, some heavy topics.
