Gen Con and Beyond: Queer Gamers and Creators Reshape North America's Largest Gaming Convention
LGBTQ+ visibility reaches new heights at Gen Con 2025 as community celebrates a decade of progress
Justin Nauman watched the line snake around Community Row, each person clutching convention badges already adorned with rainbow ribbons. As president of Tabletop Gaymers, he and his co-founders, Zach Lones and Jeff Sorensen has seen this group grow from a handful of friends distributing Pride flags to a thriving community celebrating its 10th anniversary at Gen Con 2025.
"I probably cry at least once a convention," Lones admitted, watching attendees transition from wearing "ally" ribbons one year to proudly sporting "gaymer" badges the next.
The emotional weight behind those tears reflects a profound shift in tabletop gaming. Recent research from GLAAD shows that 17% of active gamers identify as LGBTQ+, a 70% increase from 10% in 2020. Among younger gamers, the numbers climb even higher, with 23% to 28% of gamers under 35 identifying as LGBTQ+.
At Gen Con 2025, which drew record-breaking attendance to Indianapolis from July 31 to Aug. 3, that representation was impossible to ignore. Over four days, queer joy was evident at nearly every table.
Tabletop Gaymers' origin story reads like a quest narrative with real-world stakes. Founded in 2015 after then-Gov. Mike Pence signed a "religious freedom" law widely seen as targeting LGBTQ+ people, the organization emerged as Gen Con was threatening to leave Indiana in protest.
Gen Con CEO Adrian Swartout wrote a letter to Pence hours after the legislation landed on his desk: "Gen Con proudly welcomes a diverse attendee base, made up of different ethnicities, cultures, beliefs, sexual orientations, gender identities, abilities and socio-economic backgrounds."
Back then, Tabletop Gaymers were a handful of friends handing out rainbow ribbons for gamers to attach to their convention badge. Now their designated room is a hub for connection and a symbol of how far queer gaming has come.
The transformation isn't just symbolic. "We started out really small back then, just giving out badge items," said Nauman, one of the founders. "We've grown from doing just that to having events. We work with community centers across the country, and we work with retailers to create safe spaces."
That mission resonates across the Midwest — and matters more than convention politics might suggest. As Ben Lippi, co-owner of Opal Grove Games in Detroit, explained in our May 2024 story about the inclusive gaming space they created with partner Aisha Blake, "A lot of stores I've been in previously, I haven't always felt comfortable in or like I can be myself. Even though I read as pretty masc to a lot of folks, I still don't feel comfortable or like I always fit in. A lot of places, there's a blatant hostility towards people who are outside a certain assumed demographic."
As Blake noted about opening Opal Grove Games, "A big part of why we opened the store in the first place was that we didn't feel like there was a place where we could have a real gaming community that was welcoming of anyone. In particular, I had plenty of experiences where I'd go to a hobby shop with Ben, and I'd get ignored or people would be rude."
The need for these spaces becomes clear when examining gaming demographics alongside representation gaps. While 17% of gamers identify as LGBTQ+, less than 2% of console video games include LGBTQ+ characters or storylines. Tabletop gaming offers something different — the freedom to create inclusive narratives.
One of the featured games at Gen Con, The Excellents by 9th Level Games, exemplifies this approach. The game about being a Saturday morning cartoon princess includes a section on gender: "Gender is a complicated subject that is a bit outside of the scope of this game; that said, we want you to know that who you are is important. You are valuable. How you express your gender is awesome."
The game goes on to say that everyone is a princess: "There are girl princesses, boy princesses and nonbinary princesses. Some princesses are trans, some princesses are cisgendered… What is important is that everyone is a princess."
At Gen Con, this philosophy extended beyond individual games. "C" Heaps, a trans gamer from Kalamazoo, ran a session of The Queer Agenda, a party game similar to Apples to Apples. They observed that there are now so many queer vendors at the convention that they can't all make it into the Gaymer Quest (the quest is limited to 10).
Games like Stonewell Rising, "a two-player deck building game in which players are either 'The Man' or 'Pride,' fighting for or against equal rights" and which "covers multiple different decades of queer history," demonstrated how tabletop gaming can educate while entertaining.
Perhaps most powerfully, Yazeba's Bed and Breakfast told the story of "trans youth who have been kicked out of their homes and go into the forest and find an elderly trans couple running a bed and breakfast. They have encounters with various forest animals and things that help them process that."
Heaps pointed out that representation matters because queer designers create games that normalize queer existence without making it the sole focus and where the problems characters face aren't rooted in homophobia or transphobia.
This normalization extends to Gen Con's programming. Every night, the Tabletop Gaymers hosted sold-out Gaymer Gatherings, social events in which people met, played games and made plans. They provided comfort clips to indicate whether the wearers considered themselves to be an extrovert, introvert or somewhere in the middle.
Educational programming flourished alongside social events. A seminar called Queer Worldbuilding for All, led by Jaclyn Lewis, ended up joining forces with less than 10 minutes notice with the seminar Play Fair: Designing Equitable Games, led by Jesse Anderson, because of a mix-up that scheduled both for the same room at the same time. They bounced back and forth between queer worldbuilding and applying universal design techniques to accommodate people with disabilities as if the two topics were always meant to go together.
Friday night's highlight was Dragons, Dice and Divas: A Dragventure Extravaganza. Blending a drag show with role playing, the Dungeon Daddy (aka Daddy's Beard) and his NPCs hosted four Indy-based Queens as they adventured through a story that dragged them through portals into board game worlds where they rolled dice, sang karaoke and interacted with the enthusiastic audience.
The numbers tell their own story about the value of inclusive gaming. GLAAD's research shows that "for LGBTQ+ gamers, a safe and inclusive environment goes beyond the game itself — with nearly 70% indicating they are less likely to buy from a studio with a history of mistreating LGBTQ+ workers."
Gen Con 2025's record-breaking attendance of more than 71,000 attendees generated an estimated $82 million in economic impact, demonstrating how inclusive spaces drive both community and commerce.
Lones observed that, while a vocal minority still reacts loudly whenever a queer character simply exists in a video game, that kind of hostility is notably absent at tabletop gaming conventions.
"It's becoming a whole lot more welcoming and a really safe space," Lones said. "It's like [you can] come and be yourself at these places, and I feel like we've had a part in helping with that."
The evidence supports his optimism. What started as just a few free ribbons has grown, Lones said, to nearly 30 — one for every Pride flag, along with "Gaymer," "Ally" and pronoun ribbons, including a "write your own" version.
These events, gatherings and products are part of a broader shift: queer gamers are no longer just participants; they're innovators, educators and leaders, reshaping what tabletop spaces look like.
From ribbons and roleplay to history and hospitality, queer gamers aren't just playing the game — they're changing it.
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