Sex With a Sadist

CW: sex, mentions of consensual but violent sexual encounters

Inconsistent gait. Blood dripping down my leg, I'm clutching a pearly wound. I limp. Blood-drops on the floor. I crawl around a dirty dorm room...or is it a hospital? I try to run and hide but a sadist rips me open. The trail of blood and cum led him to me.

The Evil Within has one of the most bizarre intros in videogame history. An action setpiece immediately followed by a repugnant jank-stealth section that culminates in yet another bloody, gory action setpiece, seeing you hurriedly escape with a wounded leg from a gigantic monster of a man wielding a chainsaw. Your starstruck admirer is appropriately called The Sadist.

It was the Great Ed Smith who once stated, when writing about the voyeuristic nature of Manhunt: "Killing and fucking are the same". Sex and violence have always felt ontologically similar. Getting fucked in the ass is no more dissimilar than getting rammed in the back with a running chainsaw. I am not coming at this from some puritanical idea of prudishness, nor the ascribing of 'sex as violence' or 'violence in sex' as absolutely immoral ideologies, but from the idea that violence simply 'is'. I do not believe that getting tied up, spanked, and punched in the face during or to precede a good, hard fuck is indicative of some moral or personal failure. Violence is fun, and sex is fun, and consensual violence in the bedroom is fun, unless it isn't, because all violence is defined by its context.

I play The Evil Within and I embody detective Sebastian Castellanos: scared, and a little excited, because a man with a bigger dick is about to fuck me up the ass. The Sadist's strength is so apparent that when he penetrates me from behind I rise up into the air as a blood-filled mess, mouth agape either in ecstasy or in the last throes of my life.

Sebastian Castellanos is canonically straight. A hard-boiled cop with a traumatic past: a missing wife and a daughter lost in fire. It is no more appropriate to state the Sadist is gay, since he wants to non-consensually penetrate the unarmed detective, and attaching such predatory and violent behaviors as a state of queerness is nothing short of homophobic.

The whole setpiece, however, is gay sex, or is, at the very least, steeped in homo-eroticism. Here's a man who has faced twink-death, weakened from his injuries, dripping liquid on the ground, hiding under beds and stepping back into the closet until a muscular power-top comes from behind to get himself off.

The forced-stealth is obtuse and slow—the narrow halls of the sex-room built as if by chance, without any semblance of the feng-shui of 'good' level design, where the lockers and beds you can hide in exist organically and can assist with the completion of the section rather than simply being there for the sake of being there. I hide in the closet and the sadist just fucks me through the door. I hide under the bed and he eviscerates me as I cower below the matress.

This routine happened often: I was stuck for an hour having sex with the Sadist. But after it is done, there is no more homosexuality, only the haunting ghosts of queerness.

I finally escape down an elevator, the game continues, and the façade the game built slowly crumbles. It is not a game of tension where you have to overcome immortal zombies with guile, guerilla tactics and sneakiness—it is an action game with superficial horror imagery. The psycho-homosexual drama recedes into the background, re-appearing in brief glimpses when Sebastian is joined by his cop partner, Joseph Oda, to inundate the screen with their romantic and/or sexual chemistry.

In a medium obsessed with the idea of agency, I always appreciate the moments a game strips me of it and forces me to vulnerable, both literally and metaphorically. Our world is replete with stigma—being queer, trans and/or into violent sexual proclivities comes with its own sets of societal wounds and defensive nakedness. Queerness has always felt like putting down shields; sex with men makes me feel like a wounded dog.

The Evil Within's main failure is the basis of its game design. It does not know what game it wants to be or what vibe it wants to give off. There's a mechanical soul to the game, there's ideas that could work if better executed. It disempowers you, but for a moment.

The Evil Within is campy, and, while not all camp is gay, it is us queer people that invented it, nurtured it, but the game not campy enough to be enjoyable. It is gory and violent without any pathos. It's horror without horror, only action. It feels like having sex with a man that only cares about hurting you because inducing pain will make him cum, not because the lashes and cuts will also help you reach climax.

The game lost some passion along the way. From sneaking under wires to lead enemies straight into an explosion, resource-scarcity and vulnerability, to gunning and running and ammo exploding out of enemies The subtle queer drama distorts into a straight power fantasy. So much so that, when the Sadist re-appears, it no longer feels like gay sex. When a monster with a safe for a head or the big bad Ruvik show up, they don't feel like lovers, but adversaries.

The game is a blur in my mind cavern. I cannot recall many specific scenes, any dialogue, plot-beats, or enemies. I even had to google the main character's name because the game is so remarkably mediocre I refused to have it occupy space in my limited memory. But I will always remember the intro, the same way I will always remember when I was a man fucking other men before I came out as trans, despite the equally mediocre and violent sexual encounters I've had with them.

I thought I was a man...but playing bottom for real men—big men, muscular men, husky men, men twice my size—taught me I was a girl. In my mind, I am still in that dirty room, having gay sex with a sadist.

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