Wings Over Sealand

As readers may already be aware, my main hobby to distract myself from my day job in the profoundly depressing world of politics is to delve into retro videogaming via my Retropie. It’s an endlessly rewarding fount of discovery and entertainment for many reasons, but sometimes the two spheres collide in extremely unexpected ways.

So let’s talk about GORF.

Midway’s 1981 arcade hit was a pioneering and innovative game. It was the first game to be comprised of multiple highly distinct sub-games, boldly including direct lifts of other people’s coin-ops in the form of Space Invaders and Galaxian. And while it wasn’t the first arcade game to feature synthesised speech – it was beaten to that punch by the likes of Berzerk and Wizard Of Wor the previous year – it was famous for the extensive and iconic vocabulary with which it taunted and goaded the player.

It got numerous conversions of variable quality to various home systems, whether as contemporary licences or later homebrew ports, and that’s where we come in.

Last week saw the release of an excellent ZX Spectrum version of GORF, which led me to update the collection on my Retropie.

In the process I ended up playing quite a bit of Jess Ragan’s fantastic 2010 homebrew Game Boy Advance port, which has a whole heap of original additions – most notably the Mission Matrix mode containing lots of mini-challenges that unlock even more modes and features.

One of the bonus extras you unlock is a gallery, and that raised an eyebrow.

That’s because female arcade game designers were a vanishingly rare breed in 1981 – the only commonly-known one was Dona Bailey, co-author of Centipede – so I had a little nosy at the GBA port’s documentation.

Okay, consider my journalistic curiosity engaged.

And it turned out that sure enough, back in 1981 Jamie Faye Fenton was the distinctly more dudely Jay Fenton.

In uncut footage for a TV interview in 1981 or 1982, he can be seen demonstrating and discussing, in a deep and resonant baritone voice, a preview of a never-released GORF sequel which with the benefit of hindsight is aptly named Ms GORF.

Slightly earlier in the clip he says this:

And, y’know, he wasn’t kidding.

(The “Autogynephilia Poster Girl” blog was posted on 1 April 2005, but doesn’t appear to be a joke – the link went to a real page, and the www.transgender.org site is still active 20 years later and appears to be a genuine trans activism site.)

Autogynephilia is more commonly summarised as a paraphilic disorder in which men become sexually aroused at the idea of themselves as females.

Fenton’s reference to a “Lawrence Blanchard” is odd. As noted in that Wikipedia entry, the pre-eminent academic studying the phenomenon is Ray Blanchard, and the only detectable relevant reference to a “Lawrence” is of Anne Lawrence, a transwoman who adopted Blanchard’s theories after recognising the behaviours in himself.

Fenton’s blogs are full of eye-opening content.

Perhaps most striking are the articles written by his ex-wife, identified only as “E. Fenton”. They are very far from enthusiastic or complimentary about the experience of being married to someone who transitions. 

(“Even Genetic Girls Get The Blues” seems to be from 1998, but it’s not clear how long she stuck it out because there’s conflicting evidence about when Jay became Jamie Faye. Wiki says he transitioned in 1998, apparently based on the evidence of the Metroactive interview, but his own blog says he was 59 in 2013 and was diagnosed with autogynephilia at the age of 38, which would suggest 1992. There seems to be a roughly 10-year gap in his online history between the mid-80s and mid-90s in which nobody appears to know what he was up to, and then another one from 2013 until the present day, broken only by a single appearance at a 2018 art exhibition.)

The blogs are also admirably willing to air and discuss disagreements about his views and theories on the subject of transgenderism and autogynephilia. His disarmingly candid and chatty writings are a fascinating rabbit hole it’s easily possible to fall down for a couple of hours, and frankly he sounds like a fun and decent chap.

It’s not much of a secret that the videogames business has long been a haven for trans people. (Though of course, never enough for transactivists to stop complaining.) Indeed, it’s extremely likely that it’s the most trans-friendly industry on the planet, with highly disproportionate levels of representation both in terms of content and staffing. In 2001 Fenton told Metroactive:

And there’s no shortage of evidence to support the assertion.

But we digress. While the name is an acronym for “Galactic Orbital Robot Force”, GORF was really so named because its proprietary baddies look a bit like frogs.

And there’s a satisfying symmetry about that fact.

Jamie Faye Fenton is now 71 and has lived most of his adult life as his interpretation of a woman, and seems not to have bothered anyone very much while doing so. It’s very unlikely that his life has been made any easier by the appalling, violent, deranged and counter-productive actions of trans activists over the past decade or so and the growing (and massively justified) public and political backlash that’s resulted from them, which may or may not be why he’s largely disappeared from public view since transactivism became super-visible around 2015.

It’s a shame that unlike his colourful life story, Ms GORF will never see the light of day. But it’s an even bigger one that as well as all the dreadful suffering inflicted on women, gay people and children by the vicious cult of gender ideology, people like him who just wanted to get on with their lives in peace have been made victims of it too.

Let’s hope that its end draws near, Space Cadets.