Games Done Queer made queerness part of the speedrun

Games Done Quick has been running charity speedrunning marathons since 2010. Speedrunners complete games as fast as possible, often destroying world records in the process, while a live Twitch audience watches, donates, and absolutely loses their minds in chat. In time, GDQ grew into one of the biggest charity livestreaming events in the world, raising over $60 million for various causes across dozens of events. It also just so happened to become one of the most visibly queer spaces in gaming.

Speedrunning has never been only about what happens inside the game. A live event like GDQ gives the person behind the run room to be visible, and queer runners have long used that space to make themselves known within the community. But it's safe to say that Games Done Queer changed the scale of that visibility when the event launched on Oct. 31, 2025. This event differed from all those that came before it because queerness was no longer something individual runners brought onto the GDQ stage. It became the reason the stage existed in the first place.

Every time donations crossed a $1,000 milestone that first weekend, the stream flooded with the same two words: I'm gay. There were hosts encouraging the words from their desks, and the chat repeated it back in thousands of cascading messages. Every time it felt as if the commentary was dying down, it kept going, whenever the stream raised another $1,000, for three days.

What GDQ is, and what it has been

GDQ didn’t get here by accident. The event’s reputation today runs on two things, which are its scale as one of the biggest charity speedrunning marathons in the world, and the goodwill it has earned with marginalized communities. For a long time, the second one was a much harder sell.