Growing up in rural Vermont, Matt Conn felt like an outcast.

"It was really tough growing up as both geek and gay," he says. "I remember growing up, being super geeky, and I had to leave schools because I was so bullied and it was just really bad. And that was when I was like 9 or 10. So when I came to terms with my sexuality, I was so afraid: My life was already kinda not great, if I have to deal with being gay on top of that, I feel like I'm condemning myself to a life of shittiness."

Conn had difficulty finding a community he identified and felt comfortable with. The geeks and gamers he fell in with seemed to be uncomfortable with his sexuality. The LGBT groups didn't "get the geekiness." In his college years came a ray of hope, online communities like gaygamer.net and Reddit’s r/gaymers. All of a sudden, Conn had access to thousands of other LGBT geeks like himself—but only online.

He looked, but did not find a gaming convention that hit the intersection of his and thousands of others' queer geekiness, where LGBT geeks could feel open and comfortable without the fear of harassment, judgement, or any of the social pressures they face on a daily basis. So he made his own: GaymerX.

Now officially known as GX: Everyone Games—Conn wants to be clear that it's about inclusiveness, not LGBT issues specifically—the convention is finishing up a successful Kickstarter drive today for its third annual convention. The outpouring of support illustrates that Conn's show is filling a need felt keenly by many gamers.

"There's a need for certain communities to feel safer," said Mattie Brice, a game developer, media critic and former GaymerX panelist. "To feel explicitly welcome. And I think a lot of people don't realize what is needed for people to feel welcome."

"There's a lot of things baked into gamer culture that make it unwelcome for certain kinds of people, and because that's what 'gamer' is, our mainstream conferences don't address those types of qualities, traditions, and attitudes," Brice said. "GaymerX does."

So I Said, What if We Had a Convention?

In 2011, while working for a startup he co-founded, Conn created a Facebook group called SF Gaymers, a local complement to the communities he had found online.

The group quickly grew from around 20 members to more than a thousand in only a few months, organizing events and meetups at bars and members' homes. Many of the members who joined didn't live in the San Francisco area, and wanted to try to organize similar offline meetups. But this was proving difficult since they didn't have San Francisco's uniquely dense population of gay geeks.

“So I said, ‘What if we had a convention?’” Conn told WIRED, over coffee in San Francisco's Mission district. “A one-day event where everyone could come and just hang out with one another. That would be fun!”

People flocked to the idea, and soon the first GaymerX convention had raised almost four times its $25,000 Kickstarter goal. Huge game publishers like Electronic Arts and Microsoft offered their support.

The convention was a success; around 2,300 people filled San Francisco's Hotel Kabuki and Hotel Tomo in August 2013. Events included a cosplay contest, a musical concert, and a special appearance by Portal voice actor Ellen McLain among others.

"What's really funny is how typical it is," Brice said. "There's an expo, a show floor with booths for people to go around and pick up merch. There's arcade rooms and showrooms for people to play games. There's panels. It's all very typical. The stuff that's atypical is the wide range of people who are there. And the way they choose to express themselves. And the varying kinds of topics."

One game on display at GaymerX earlier this year was Fragments of Him, a short interactive narrative about about a man grieving the unexpected death of his husband.

"But then there's also League of Legends," Brice said. "How much more mainstream can you get?"

Conn never intended GaymerX to become a sustained annual event. But attendees decided otherwise.

“People were talking about how much it meant to them,” Conn said. “To have a place where they can just be themselves.” Swept up in the moment, he agreed to do another year. GaymerX2 earlier this year was again a success. The only problem was, it wasn't quite the success that Conn and his fellow organizers needed it to be.

Attendance floated around 2,100, with similar events and activities to the previous year, such as panels featuring Reddit's Alexis Ohanian, Dragon Age writer David Gaider, and sci-fi author John Scalzi. But Conn had this time booked the centrally located but more expensive InterContinental San Francisco, and when the convention failed to sell all the rooms it had signed up for, Conn was docked several thousand dollars.

“We tried going a little bigger than we probably should have,” Conn said.

Tens of thousands of dollars in the hole, the organizers announced they were throwing in the towel: They knew there was an audience, and a need, for a convention like GaymerX, but they couldn’t go another year sinking money they didn’t have into a project that wouldn’t make it back.

Then, insult was added to injury: NIS America, one of the sponsors of GaymerX2, told Conn they wouldn't be able to pay him the $3,000 they had pledged because they had run over budget. After Conn went public with the news, NIS apologized and paid up—but not before sparking a social-media surge that prompted game companies such as Devolver Digital, Dim Bulb Games, Blizzard Entertainment and more to donate more than $66,000 to the convention.

The donated funds gave GX a new lease on life. They knew how much Kickstarter money to ask for, they knew how much sponsorship funding would be coming in, and they knew about the hidden fees that snuck up on them the first time around. As long as the Kickstarter hit its goal, GX3 would happen. As of September 15, three days before the end of the campaign, they had secured enough funding to keep the show going.

Why Does This Need To Exist?

That’s the question Conn and his fellow organizers say they get most often: "How is this not like segregation?"

"There were tons of hugs, offbeat fashion, gender-bent cosplay, and general joy [at GaymerX] that I never witnessed at PAX East, the only other convention I've attended," said Gil Almogi, a 32-year-old account manager and part-time games writer from Somerville, New Jersey.

Penny Arcade Expo has explicit anti-harassment policies, but even so is not without its share of controversy. "PAX East was tons of fun and has a larger exhibition hall, but the experience is couched in the status quo," says Almogi. "You don't know who you can approach about meaningful issues, and although most people I came across were friendly, you'd occasionally overhear unsavory stuff."

Conn likens GaymerX to the role that gay nightclubs have played in LGBT history, serving as a safe space to interact with people you share commonalities with. But while he says San Francisco’s gay district is becoming less and less necessary as queer people feel safe and comfortable out and about elsewhere without the fear of being harassed, he doesn’t think that safety always extends to queer geeks.

Courtesy MidBoss

“The reason why GX exists is that a lot of people don’t feel safe,” Conn said. “Whether it be at other conventions, or online, or within the gaming community in general.” Conn points to the recent campaign of harassment against women who make or write about games, in which game developers like Zoe Quinn or critics like Anita Sarkeesian have been the targets of harassment that has occasionally extended to death threats.

“Even if you completely disagree with everything someone says, they’re still human,” Conn said, “and these people treat them as if they’re not human. They set up these organized campaigns to discredit them or harass them—it’s just cruel, and I don’t get it. This isn’t slavery. We’re not talking about embezzling millions of dollars. We’re not killing people. This is videogames. We all have that commonality. I don’t understand why people can’t just treat people with respect.”

A Space For Everyone

GX’s main focus is creating a safe space where everyone is welcome. In part, that simply means being publicized as “the LGBT gaming convention,” resulting in a safety-in-numbers atmosphere filled with like-minded, similarly-stationed individuals. But it goes much further than that. It means practices such as having a space on attendees’ name tags to denote their preferred gender pronouns, having gender-neutral bathrooms, and mandating gender and diversity training for staff and volunteers prior to the convention.

Conn says that the name change from GaymerX to simply GX is to encourage those outside of the gay-geek community to attend, too. “There are a lot of people I talked to who said, ‘That's your safe space, I don’t want to invade it,'" he said. "That’s not the goal. The goal is to be inclusive.”

“Gaming has become kind of xenophobic, and almost rightly so, because people want to protect their own and ‘keep it within the family,’” Conn said. “But I don’t think that should mean that we can’t grow either. It seems like there are a lot of people who resist even the idea that a lot of culture isn’t exactly the most friendly to women or gays or queer people in general. But there are small changes that I think won’t affect most people—that won’t harm the culture of gaming—but will make a lot of other people feel a lot better and more welcome and accepted.”

Ultimately, Conn says he would like to see GX simply become redundant.

“If there comes a point in time where queer people really are on the same level,” he said, “I would be happy to say ‘our work is done.’ All I ever wanted was for queer people to be online and feel welcome."

"If that happens and I lose my convention, I’d rather have that.”