It was revelatory to me in the way late-‘90s queer films like But I’m a Cheerleader were - my palms sweating, clutching the side of the couch and furtively glancing at the door in case my parents came in. Nothing has measured up to that experience for me since, and of course, nothing could. The Mass Effect trilogy was the first experience I had with LGBTQ characters in a video game since my grandma bought me a Gameboy in 1990. It felt too big to laugh at.That was 2012. As it began, though, it hit me that I was watching an actual lesbian sex scene in a video game, between two characters I had grown to care about over a long period, whose relationship felt important to me. I thought it would be a scene I cringed through, a cynical product of my calculated romance option selections set deep in the Uncanny Valley. I joked about the lesbian sex scene in Mass Effect 3 to anyone who would listen at the time, whooped about it as if it was the novelty porn my flatmates and I had watched in our first shared apartment.
