thank you so much to @Ally for the wonderful gift art which I’m using as an avatar!
LATEX, LEATHER, LIPSTICK, LOVE, LUST (THE BODY & THE BLOOD)
Played on: 29th Sept
How I played it: Online via the IFComp ballot
How long I spent: 2 hours to get a little way into Act 2
Some unmarked spoilers for Act 1 (the first third(?) of the game) here.
Bear with me, I’m not used to talking about this and I’m trying to say it right. I mentioned in my First Contact review that I have a couple of hang-ups which my have come out in previous IFComp reviews. I don’t know if I’ve talked about this before but I think I’m somewhere in the asexual/grey-asexual range – I’m not motivated by sex, and sometimes find the idea repulsive. I accept this about myself, and I am what I am (whatever that is), but there’s a danger in imposing that on other queer people. Sex and kink are fundamentals part of the queer experience. To hide them, or to insist that they be hidden, is to sanitise that experience. This can have real socio-political consequences; for example, a lack of access to information about sex for queer people can be a real danger, one that can be swept under the rug by cis-heterosexual people who find it distasteful, as demonstrated by the AIDS crisis.
For this reason, I have been trying to be more open to discussions and depictions of sex and fetish content. This makes LATEX, LEATHER, LIPSTICK, LOVE, LUST (hereafter LLLLL) something of an exam for me. I’ll do my best:
This is a story about L, a young trans man who wants to enter the world of kink and BDSM, but finds himself too socially anxious to take the initiative. After giving up on a kink club and bailing out, they’re taken under the wing of the more experienced Valentine, who introduces L to his first sexual experiences. Throughout the game, L’s experiences with kink are contrasted with the mundane everyday transphobia they face, as well as the conflicting information and arguments held by an entirely-online friend group. Well, I assume this happens throughout. I should note that I did not finish this game due to the time limit expiring. When I realised I wasn’t going to see the end I slowed down and took my time, so I’ve seen rather less of the game than other reviewers – I only made it a tiny way into Act 2.
I’m glad I took my time, though, because the writing here is excellent. I wish LLLLL’s Inkrunner implementation let you copy and paste text, as it means I had to skip over a lot of lines I liked so can’t paste them into the review. If I transcribed every good turn of phrase, I wouldn’t have made it through Act 1. But lines such as “I know I’m supposed to assume ‘they’ [pronouns] because I know that makes me a good person” and “if the opinion shifts, I get to be in the silent company of those who are always correct about everything” were little body blows which I had to flag up, demonstrating as they do uncomfortably-relatable facets of L’s character (more on that later). An extended metaphor about a Lucozade bottle manages not to feel strained, and an early diatribe about what’s expected of a trans person sets the tone for the game’s explorations of discourse versus reality.
It should be noted that what I saw of the game was very linear, with a handful of binary choices throughout offering L the chance to vocalise certain thoughts before the game gets back on track. I can’t speak to how much these choices change the outcome of events. I’m given to understand from other reviews that the choices are being tracked and totalled, but I don’t think I reached the point where they start to matter. Inkrunner is used effectively in other ways: the overall styling is beautiful, committed to bold red and blue colour palettes, and textual styling is largely restrained to an occasional right-aligned paragraph in grey text signifying L’s innermost thoughts.
As a person who largely writes comedy, I think LLLLL’s writing’s greatest strength is that it understands and embraces the truth that kink is funny. Fetishes are inherently absurd and surreal in their pageantry and performance. All the latex, all the effort of wriggling in and out of latex, and L’s bewilderment and inexperience contrasted with Valentine’s matter-of-fact approach, is funny. Act I’s sex scene, in addition to being extremely steamy and probably one of the best-written sex scenes I’ve ever read, is full of ace little one-liners as L’s internal monologue short-circuits, and then the post-coitus scene of L’s dominatrix smoking a cigarette and musing “Maybe I’ll get into piss” is a knockout punch. Without any mockery of sex or fetishes or the kink community, LLLLL has some of the best gags (haha) I’ve seen in the comp.
(Admittedly, my primary point of reference for well-written sex is terribly-written sex in fantasy novels. I’m not done ripping on George R. R. Martin yet. You simply cannot be using phrases like “man’s staff” and “Myrish swamp.” I guess the point for some of those is that the sexual situations are deeply uncomfortable for the characters, but those are still some skin-crawling euphemisms.)
(Actually, the sex in N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth is pretty good, but I’ve only read the first one. Anyway I’m getting sidetracked.)
If there’s any scorn in LLLLL, it’s saved for that most dreadful class of people: posters. I laughed at the “PERVERSIONS” list (i.e. the content warnings) including “online drama/discourse” but that is a major strand here, at least in Act 1 – an exploration of how young online queer communities can get tied up in taxonomy and litigating Tumblr posts, and how useless it is without an understanding of queer history and experience. This is practically shouted at the reader through a megaphone in a scene where L, experiencing sexual fulfilment for the first time in his life, opens Discord to see his friends arguing about whether “bi lesbian” is TERF rhetoric. (I’m disconnected enough from online discourse these days to not know whether this is an actual debate, but if you told me that was a real Tumblr post I’d believe you.)
This kind of discourse has deeply affected L, who is a quietly excellent player-character, full of contradictions yet to be resolved. L and friends appear to be of a certain online mindset that the job of leftism is to sort people into having Good politics and Bad politics, and to make sure you’re on the Good side, and to prove it by making an example out of the Bad side. (You see this all the time if you don’t curate your social media feeds aggressively enough: teenagers and 30-year-olds who should know better slap-fighting each other with snide one-liners and quote-tweets. See A Paradox Between Worlds for another excellent game which examines the same trend as manifested through online posting.) Those earlier lines I quoted demonstrate L’s self-vigilance here, the set of rules which dictate Good queer politics.
However, the ever-so-slightly-sarcastic tone of those lines betrays L’s burgeoning discomfort with this mindset, and a growing understanding that the world doesn’t sort as neatly as we would like. There’s an early scene where they have to convince themself to laugh along with Val’s anti-Dutch bigotry by remembering “They did colonialism at some point, right?” The later conversation with Artemis, where L realises he’s met a bi lesbian in the wild and struggles to reconcile the real person with the bitter, derogatory ~friendly reminder~ Tumblr post about bi lesbians they read that morning, is, I’m sorry to say, relatable. Posts delivered with an angry enough tone and a suggestion that not agreeing with them is a moral failing really do get into your head. The different directions L is pulled in by the demands of regular cisnormative life, the online panopticon, the practical realities of kink, and his own self-doubt and growing skepticism add up to a superb character and some compelling, wry and believable narration.
If you can’t tell, I really liked LLLLL, and it’s given me a lot of food for thought. I wasn’t expecting this game to be for me, and I’m still not sure it is, but I still adore it. I can’t vouch for the whole thing, but I want to make time to finish it after the comp.