The following is an essay that I wrote in June of 2023 on Cohost. It was intended to mainly function as a value-add for a plea I was making at the time for people to purchase and review Opportunity: A Sugar Baby Story on the various platforms on which it retailed, but it wound up being one of my favorite pieces of writing I’d done on that site. The piece focuses on two core pillars of Opportunity’s narrative that tend to receive disproportionate amounts of attention: its queerness (which tends to get downplayed) and its wholesomeness (which tends to get overemphasized). What I’d like to do here is first reproduce the essay in its entirety, and then in a brand-new section talk about what, if anything, has changed since I wrote it, while also expanding on some points I only briefly touched on.

To begin with, a quick refresher on what Opportunity is about:

With two young children, a full-time job, two student loans, and rent due every month, it’s no wonder that millennial single mother Jacqueline is struggling! She’s exhausted, she’s stressed, she’s overworked, and worse: she hasn’t gotten laid in over two years! But things begin to change after she reconnects with an old friend, who makes her a surprising offer…

Opportunity: A Sugar Baby Story is a warm, lighthearted erotic visual novel exploring what it means to rebuild and reinvent yourself against a backdrop of late-stage capitalism. What do you do when you realize you haven’t been really happy for a long time, and what does it mean to be REALLY happy, anyways?

Queerness

Historically, I’ve been a little gunshy when it comes to marketing Opportunity on the basis of its queer content. There never seems to be the right place or time, y’know? Porn-oriented spaces might appreciate knowing that there are lesbian sex scenes ripe for perusal, but the interest there is based more on having precise knowledge what types of hole they’ll be seeing, with less of an eye towards the authenticity of the characters. On the other hand, it always felt a bit like colonization for me to push Opportunity as a brand-name Queer(TM) Story By An Outsider(TM) for the people who might be looking for that kind of thing, since I’m white, straight, cis, male – about as threatening to greater societal power structures as a spirited game of checkers.

Lately, though, my thinking on this has shifted somewhat. For one thing, it feels a bit inequitable that my not-queerness should override the queerness of the queer people who worked on Opportunity – which, I’ll take this chance to point out, is literally every single other person who contributed work to it. Seriously – the rest of the team includes a pansexual woman, two bisexual women, a trans man, and a bisexual genderqueer. (It feels tawdry listing all of them out like some kind of Dragon Quest party composition, but I suppose that’s the cost of doing business when it comes to Marketable Identities.)

The makeup of this team isn’t the result of some kind of diversity initiative – the people I worked with on this project were wholly friends or friends-of-friends. These are the kinds of people I love & who I choose to surround myself with – and, consequentially, the people I’m specifically trying to please with my writing. When writing Jacqueline, I’m trying my hardest to make her resonate with the bisexual mother of two I’ve been friends with since 2011. I want the abrasive trans artist with more taste than patience & a penchant for topping I share a Discord server with to be seen in my writing for Rose. Sasha as a character wouldn’t be possible without the numerous girl-loving internet-poisoned gender gremlins who have populated practically all of my social circles since I was in university. To what degree does being filtered through my fingers make these perspectives I’m attempting to capture less queer?

It sometimes feels unfortunate that due to the whole “sugar baby story” rider, the sex-work aspect of Opportunity‘s narrative tends to get pushed to the fore, which I think makes the whole thing come off as straighter than it is. Heck, over HALF of the sex scenes don’t have a dude in sight! Viewed from a certain angle, Opportunity is about a woman who starts doing sex work, has her first-ever lesbian experience, and immediately decides she wants to spend the rest of her life neck-deep in pussy and girldick. This same woman decides to risk it all with her BFF while in bootleg Revolutionary Girl Utena cosplay and winds up essentially marrying her two months later. Opportunity‘s cast has two (2) straight men in it, and one of them doesn’t show up until the very last chapter & is basically only present for 1.5 scenes. I’m not saying it’s the GAYEST story in existence, but I don’t think I could ever call it a STRAIGHT one, that’s for sure.

A big part of my difficulty around this stems from the fact that I think it’s very hard to sell a story that, yes, okay, is PRETTY gay, but also has a fair amount of hetero content and isn’t so much ABOUT being gay as it is about living a life that just so happens to contain a very high concentration of gay shit in between going to the mall and picking your kids up from school. Thumbnail blurbs and 90-second trailers tend to defy that kind of nuance, y’know? I don’t know that there’s a marketable term for whatever Opportunity is when it comes to sexual identity. However, speaking of marketable terms,

Wholesome & Cozy

Wholesome games are on everyone’s mind right now, so I thought I’d include a few words regarding Opportunity‘s relationship to this well-meaning-but-ultimately-pretty-ideologically-suspect buzzword.

Placed against the vast majority of narratives in porn games, Opportunity‘s story is positively saccharine. Heck, even most non-pornographic narratives are more harrowing. Opportunity is a story where pretty much everyone finishes better off than where they started. There isn’t even an antagonist, really – not unless you count an absent husband & father who ran out two years ago or the ever-looming spectre of late-stage capitalism. Nobody gets kidnapped, or arrested, or murdered. If you’re a person who needs a lot of tension and conflict in your narratives, you’d probably find it to be a bit of a snoozer.

This, combined with its cast of multicultural queers and its warm, friendly color palette of pinks and oranges and deep reds, would seem to make it a natural fit with the ever-growing crowd of Wholesome(TM)-brand titles – but, of course, it isn’t, because you see the dick going in. Which is sort of the beating heart of the issue, isn’t it? I didn’t write Opportunity to try and chase wholesome/cozy trends, but if I had I would be eternally disappointed because of the inherent “family-friendly” baggage forever grafted to any designation of wholesomeness. That really sticks in my craw, since a huge part of Opportunity‘s central thesis is an exploration of the shifting ways in which “family” is defined and preserved. Jacqueline comforting her son as he grapples with his understanding of his father’s departure will never matter to the kind of people who make Wholesome Directs because at other points we see Jacqueline with cum on her. Olive threading the needle of her extant marriage to her husband with her burgeoning partnership with Jacqueline will never rate because at another point we see Olive on a wild extramarital fuck-bender. And so on.

It’s not as though the validation of finding a story I wrote placed on a pastel pedestal is especially alluring – these aren’t sour grapes in that sense. It’s just that (as many others have pointed out) there’s something that makes one feel paradoxically grimy when really considering what signifiers will net a “wholesome” diagnosis by the curatorial zeitgeist, and what things are considered mutually exclusive to said diagnosis.

Expanded Commentary

Some assorted thoughts from the year and a half since this essay was first posted:

• If anything, my beliefs on this subject have become both more belligerent and calcified. Opportunity IS a queer story – it is a story with a cast that is overwhelmingly queer and a plot that places queer lives and queer experiences at its center. Whether or not it is a SUCCESSFUL queer story can be left up to the reader, but in the years since the game’s release I have yet to encounter any feedback calling its representation of queer experiences inauthentic or exploitative. As for its “wholesomeness”, I think it’s inarguable that Opportunity is a wholesome narrative by the non-marketing definition of the term. Opportunity is about kind, friendly people trying to do their best by one another, a story wherein nothing especially bad happens to anyone & where pretty much everyone ends up better than where they began. The fact that it’s also a story where shafts get polished and holes get plundered and titties get cummed-on does not in any way make it less wholesome – just less Wholesome™, AKA the kind of wholesome that makes it into Direct-style video compilations of games about cute animals delivering mail.
• Following the results of the 2024 US election, microblogging platform Bluesky has seen a mass exodus of Twitter users, including a plurality of porn creators. This has led to a certain amount of backlash, both from Bluesky’s more prudish early adopters and from new arrivals who think the neighborhood would be lovely if not for the risk of seeing the occasional furry dick the size of a fire extinguisher. It is hard not to think of this through the lens of wholesomeness-as-brand: the chest-puffing confidence in one’s own progressivism and social goodness that seems to stop JUST short of acknowledging that sex exists and is something that good, moral people can and do enjoy. The playbook of letting sex workers and porn creators popularize a new platform before shunting them off to make said platforms more palatable to advertisers and payment processors is old and well-worn at this point, and I hope the grousing of Bluesky’s weenie baby patrol doesn’t lead to a repeat performance.
• A bit of trivia: the pieces of non-pornographic art seen above (Jackie hugging her kids, hanging out with Rose at the gallery, etc) were the very last pieces of art to be made for Opportunity. In fact, they were made at the very VERY last second – I realized too late that the game’s story needed SOME kind of denouement but didn’t have anything scripted, so instead I hurriedly banged out ten descriptions of Jackie in various cozy situations with the rest of the cast and told Pacha to get through as many as she could. She managed seven out of ten before I had to get the final build ready, bless her.
• In the time since the first version of this essay was posted, I have moved further away from thinking of “queer identities/representation” as being particularly useful tools for evaluating a piece of art’s empirical Goodness. Too often I’ve seen non-normative identities being used to run art through some kind of reductionist scoring rubric: author is biracial lesbian? Plus ten points (diverse perspectives). Story features sexually-aggressive trans woman? Minus fifteen points (bad representation). Someone has a panic attack? Plus five points (mental health awareness). A character is fat? Plus-or-minus fifty points depending on an unthinkably complex equation that takes into account Promotion Of Unhealthy Lifestyles, Fetishization, Racialized Caricature, and Gaze. This approach to media analysis takes it as a given that there exists some aspirational magical holy text that features the perfect alchemical combination of diversity and representation that will forever purge all of its consumers of their earthly sins, and that any failure to achieve this perfect text represents a failure of moral character. Not only do I categorically reject this stunted and self-defeating outlook, I am also at a loss to note anyone whose enjoyment of art has actually been enhanced by it, or anyone who has actually profited from it aside from tiresome hacks.
• In the face of surging global fascism, I similarly find myself with next to no patience for purveyors of so-called “coziness” unable to mentally bridge the gap between the extremely human desires for comfort and safety and the extremely human desire for sexual excitement. It is, as it turns out, a very small gap, requiring only the smallest amount of intellectual honestly to leap. What is cozier than the embrace of a lover? What is more comforting than exploring your sexuality in the realm of fantasy? What is more indulgent than sexual desire and release? If you are the sort of person who conflates your media consumption with your political values (and don’t we all to some extent these days) then you need to accept sooner rather than later the fact that people making art that features visible scrote deserve equal consideration to the latest train-based farming/fishing simulator done in the style of Rankin Bass.

Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this essay (and don’t mind that I spoiled some stuff), please consider purchasing Opportunity: A Sugar Baby Story to support a vision of wholesome queer coziness that doesn’t infantilize its audience. You are also allowed to jack off to it. Until next time!

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