How to Survive a Queer Kink Libricide

As Steam and Itch.io join in the mass purge of LGBTQ content, we must document our past and ensure a shared future.

Photo by Freddy Kearney on Unsplash

In the middle of the night on July 24th, indie game distributor Itch.io quietly delisted all NSFW games from its site. Any game on the platform that has been tagged as containing objectionable or adult content (which, to be clear, is a huge segment of the site’s library) is no longer findable on search, and reportedly, some NSFW games have already been completely deleted from the platform, and even removed from the libraries of users who have purchased them.

This mass erasure of predominately queer erotic art comes thanks to the efforts of Collective Shout, an Australia-based anti-porn, trans-exclusionary group that also recently succeeded in getting nearly all NSFW content removed from the most popular and widely-used PC gaming platform, Steam.

To mount their attack on erotic content on Itch.io, Collective Shout turned its focus on a game called No Mercy, which featured themes on non-consensual sex and incest. In their rhetoric more generally, Collective Shout often highlights the NSFW games with material that the public is most likely to find discomfiting — depictions of sexual assault, abuse, “paraphilias,” and hard kinks.