Pokémon Is for the Gays

This piece is a joint publication between COYOTE and Aftermath, a worker-owned website about video games, the internet, and everything that comes after.

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The most colorful, expressive place in the Bay Area this weekend might just be downtown San Francisco, where instead of the usual hustle and bustle and aggressively straight tech bros of the corporate world, you might see something more whimsical.

Pikachu, Charizard, and the trainers who love them are descending on San Francisco, as organizers are expecting more than 50,000 people to attend Moscone Convention Center throughout the weekend for the Pokémon World Championships, taking place from Aug. 28–30.

It’ll also be, like so many other elements of Pokémon, extremely gay.

“There is a level of this that is just, Pokémon is for everybody, everybody has a favorite,” says DJ Burtch, a Pokémon content creator and speedrunner. “It’s very present in the games that there are all kinds of people.”

Before I knew I was queer, my favorite character from the Pokémon anime was James from Team Rocket, a purple-haired, eccentric, loveable diva always trying to steal Pikachu away from the protagonists. I just thought he was so “funny;” I didn’t even know what “queer-presenting” was for the early part of my life. I even went as him for Halloween in 2021, right around the time I was finding my queer identity. 

I have been a Pokémon fan since I was about 3 years old. When I grew older but before I came out, I called myself “culturally a lesbian,” which is cringe, but also all my friends were queer and I liked all the nerdy stuff they did, like Pokémon. I was building a community through Pokémon before I really identified with why.

Having racked up $147 billion in revenue as of 2024, Pokémon is the highest-grossing media franchise in the world. Once an 8-bit video game released for the Game Boy in 1996, it now extends to trading cards, movies, an anime, and even theme parks. This year marks Pokémon’s 30th anniversary, making the World Championships a bigger event than ever. 

Madelyn Brannan competed in an Orlando Video Game Championships (VGC) regional this year, and her brother will be in San Francisco this weekend to compete in the trading card game. She believes that the chosen family aspect of Pokémon is a draw for queer fans.

“The way you can pick whatever Pokémon you want to use and your character doesn't talk, so you can kind of imagine for yourself, like, the relationships you form with the other characters in the game, especially in these later games where [the games] give a lot of personality to the characters,” she said.

“You want and imagine your own journey being whatever you want it to be, whatever is meaningful to you. And being able to talk about that with other people because we all played the same game, but we all played in a different way. I think that's something that has really colored my experience and my relationship with the franchise over the years.”

Fan bonding aside, Pokémon itself has so many camp elements. Obviously, there’s Team Rocket, who I loved as a kid. The game features a handful of canonically queer and trans NPCs, including a transfeminine Beauty Nova in the X/Y games who talks about her transition and says that just half a year prior, she was a Black Belt, which is a male-exclusive NPC category. And there are at least two recurring nonbinary characters in Pokémon Go, in Team Mystic’s leader, Blanche, and ultra space traveler Rhi, who uses they/them pronouns. And who can forget the choose-your-own adventure Eeveelutions, where the adorable Normal type can evolve into whatever it wants to be?

“In the game, the first question they ask you is, ‘Are you a boy or a girl?’” Burtch said. “I think what kind of made me realize I was trans in hindsight was when I played Pokémon Black for the first time, and I picked the female character, and I was like, ‘Why am I doing this?’”

Game Freak and the Pokémon Company have never blatantly given messages of support for the queer community. Still, the internet is full of essays such as “The Genderqueer Rule of Mewtwo,” “21 Pokémon who are totally, absolutely, definitely queer,” and “Fairy Pokémon Have Become A Queer Calling Card.”

Even some of the Pokémon themselves are hard to see as anything other than queer representation. Some Pokémon seem super on-the-nose, like the trans flag-colored Sylveon. Burtch cited Gardevoir, a feminine humanoid psychic Pokémon, as one the queer community claims for its gender androgynous vibes. Marill is also embraced because a coding quirk in older games caused one in three female Azurill to evolve into male Marills.

Then there is the queer icon known as Amoonguss.

Amoonguss is a mushroom-shaped grass and poison type Pokémon that is popular in the competitive circuit mostly because of “Spore,” a move that puts both opponents to sleep with a 100% success rate.

In 2024, a screenshot went around on X in which a prominent VGC player, Neil Patel, had allegedly written that he “will never support people changing their gender, that’s mental illness.” 

During the finals of that year's Orlando Regionals competition, Patel was matched with former world champion Wolfe Glick in a hotly anticipated bout. In their final battle, which would break their one-to-one tie, Glick’s unassuming Amoonguss carried him to victory after defeating Patel’s stacked team, which included three legendary Pokémon.

According to Dot Esports, Patel’s comments began to spread after that event. And from there, the legend of trans rights icon Amoonguss became unstoppable.

“I for one welcome Amoonguss as our new Trans Rights icon,” VGC commentator Gabby Snyder tweeted, reposting artwork of Amoonguss in colors of the transgender flag. A YouTube commenter wrote, “amoonguss threw the first brick at stonewall.”

The video game space has often been toxic online for anyone who isn’t a cisgender white straight man, but Pokémon has mostly been an exception to that. This weekend will be a competition and commemoration of the franchise, but also an opportunity for queer fans to celebrate community. The Stud, a queer, worker-owned bar in San Francisco, already hosted a Warped Pokémon party earlier this month, and 620 Jones Bar & Restaurant is hosting a Pokémon drag brunch on Sunday.

While the weekend’s schedule is jam-packed with official events, I think the most exciting part of the Championships will be found outside of the Moscone Center, where the community will be out in force displaying their homemade cosplays and trading cards and finding each other organically. That’s how queer fans have gathered and expressed joy in the Pokémon world since the beginning.

Brannan appreciates the uniqueness of everyone in the Pokémon community, and she believes that her fellow fans also see that as something to be celebrated. “And I know,” she says, “because they love this franchise too, that they must share those values with me.”