When all felt lost, I found myself again at chess club

Emerging Queer Voices is a monthly LGBTQ arts and culture column that features different up-and-coming LGBTQ writers. You can read more about the series and find all published editions here.

When I was a kid, my mom was addicted to enrolling me in extracurricular activities. I played baseball and soccer, and I took lessons for tap dancing, piano, vocals and acting. 

My after-school undertakings served a dual purpose — yes, they were edifying, but they also gave my single mother precious alone time to do whatever it was she needed to do between working and cooking and entertaining her only child. 

I mostly endured it all until I made it to Sunday afternoon, when my mom took me to the local recreation centre for my favourite activity of all: chess club.

I was never great at sports and felt ostracized by the other boys, who seemed to have coalesced on some masculine wavelength I'd never been privy to. And the performing arts stuff I did just made me seem like more of a gay freak than I already was. But at chess club, everybody shared in loserdom. 

I recently read Sally Rooney's Intermezzo, her latest novel. One of its two protagonists is the socially stunted Ivan, a 22-year-old chess prodigy who plays exhibition games in rural Irish community halls. 

His resentful brother, Peter, sums up Ivan's awkwardness by joking that he speaks his own language, International Chess English — a catch-all term for the off-kilter, uber-analytical manner of speaking that people who spend their days studying old Bobby Fischer games share in. At my childhood chess club, everybody spoke a dialect of ICE.

We'd spend an hour taking lessons and solving puzzles with our chess master, Aris, and then we'd get two hours to play as much chess as our hearts desired. I revelled in those two hours, when I'd get to hang out with kids in the same social stratum as me. We'd babble over checks, pins and forks, and we'd gloat when we won and pick fights with each other when we lost. Then we'd collapse our pieces and start over. 

You can study to become a great chess player, but there are many kids who possess a baseline of talent for the game. I was one of those kids, and while I was no prodigy, I also wasn't a slouch. In my circle of chess dorks, I was well-liked and admired for my talents — something I couldn't say about myself outside the walls of the recreation centre.

We had seasonal tournaments at the club. I was always paired against the best players and generally placed in the top 10, which was nothing to sneeze at, but I had always hoped to steal a win. 

When I was 12 and about to age out of the club, I played my last tournament. I made it to the finals, where I was pitted against Malcolm, a bona fide prodigy. He was pompous and mean-spirited and had become arrogant after winning all the tournaments he'd competed in. I'd played Malcolm many times in non-competitive matches and had lost every time. 

Chess is a magnificent game. The chessboard — eight squares by eight, cleanly divided between black and white — is perfectly rendered for battle. The pieces, each possessing their own powers, are calibrated for maximum potential. The game on its face is simple: force your opponent's king into a spot where it is both under attack and unable to move, before they do the same to yours. 

But in chess there are infinite possibilities, unlimited ways to make your foe acquiesce. No two games are exactly the same. You have to be studied yet agile, precise yet bold. You must command the board while reading your opponent's mind. It is not just a board game — it is a sport and an art. 

When I'm playing good chess, my brain feels illuminated, fluorescent with stimulation. Each stroke of a piece is an unrivalled thrill, inching you toward a satisfying and pleasurable checkmate. 

Malcolm and I were in the throes of a game like this. A game of chess is as much about strategy as it is about avoiding blunders, and we were evenly matched in that regard. 

We were in the thick of the middlegame when I realized Malcolm had made a fatal error — he had left his rook hanging, vulnerable to attack. I captured it, and the game tumbled in my favour. I cornered him into a checkmate and won the tournament. 

I got a trophy and everything. My mother, who had first taught me the game, snapped a picture on her digital camera. I felt I was leaving chess behind on the highest possible note.

Over a decade passed, and chess had fallen away from me. I'd play the occasional game when people were willing, mumbling something about being rusty, then annihilating them in 20 moves. 

But last year, looking to do something other than scroll on Instagram, I downloaded the Chess.com app. I started competing against strangers and felt pleased as my rating rose. Eventually, I hit a plateau and kept losing, so I turned to chess YouTube. 

I became obsessed with videos of peppy Swedish master Anna Cramling and her subdued grandmaster mom, Pia. I started to fray at my plateau, and my game got better; and then I learned more openings and I got better; and I began doing daily chess puzzles and I got better. It was a pastime, but it kept me confined to my screen and it was a solitary activity — one I dabbled in to keep the loneliness at bay. 

In the fall, at the height of my online-chess obsession, my loneliness quotient also happened to be at a high. My relationship of four years with someone I loved deeply — which had done a great deal to heal the sad little gay boy who used to get kicks from playing chess and which I thought was hurtling toward marriage — imploded in a dramatic fashion (needless to say, the details are beyond the scope of this essay). 

Two months later, I was let go from my dream job — terminated without cause. My career and my relationship were the pillars of my adult life, and they had simultaneously crumbled, leaving me directionless and feeble. 

I would spend long days at the library playing chess on my laptop, because it was the only place I could go for free and my one-bedroom apartment was beginning to feel smaller than ever.

One day, I saw a poster on the library walls: 

Chess
Fridays
3 p.m.-5 p.m.

Say less, I thought.

The following Friday, I wandered into the library's rec room, where eight tables were laid with green and white checkered mats — the same rollable plastic chessboards I'd played on in my childhood club. 

A lanky, pimpled man about my age was playing against a tween boy at one table, and at another sat a man who looked about 40 with long gray curls tumbling over his shoulders. The seat across from him was empty, so I took it and we began to play. He introduced himself as Omar. 

I hadn't played a real over-the-board game in five years and had no idea what to expect. On Chess.com you're paired against people of a similar ranking, but no such number hung over Omar, and I assumed he'd beat me. 

Omar's phone, a bulky Android, sat illuminated beside the board. He explained that he had to keep an eye on it because he had placed bets on a basketball game and he wanted to follow the score. I thought he must be a great player to be able to divide his attention like that. 

I was mistaken — I trounced him. Then we replaced the pieces, and I trounced him again. I swapped spots with the child and played the pimply guy, and I beat him handily too. Two hours flew by, and the supervising librarian kicked us out of the room. 

I walked home feeling confident, assured that although I was single and unemployed, I was at least good at something, and being good at something lent me some worth.

Friday chess became my new pillar. My days were long and dreary and still, lacking in shape and structure, and so I hinged my weeks on those precious two hours when I got to play chess with strangers. I went every Friday, and while some folks did the same, new faces would rotate in and out. 

I found that International Chess English remains the common tongue in chess clubs, and it turned out that despite the social skills I'd developed, I was still fluent in the language.   

One chilly Friday, I walked into the rec room and found that no tables had been set up. I went to the front desk and was told that chess had been cancelled that week. I was crestfallen — I'd suffered through dreary days so I could be rewarded with chess at the week's end, and my reward had been unjustly taken from me. I hung my head and turned to leave, when I heard a voice call out "KC?"

It was Nick, with whom I'd shared many lovely conversations at house parties, but whom I hadn't seen in several months. "Nick!" I said. "I came here for chess, but they said it's cancelled, so I have nothing to live for." Half-joking.

"I came for chess too," he said. "We could probably take out a board if you wanted to play."

We borrowed a chessboard from the front desk, went to the empty rec room and began to play. Nick and I caught up a bit, then fell to silence when we realized we were equal players. He was an excellent opponent. 

As the game intensified, others shuffled into the room and laid down their own chessboards. Unwittingly, Nick and I had founded a guerilla chess club. 

After a masterful move from Nick, a subtle but calculated push of the pawn, I asked him how he'd got so good. He explained he'd also played chess as a child and placed in provincials and competed in nationals at a very young age. 

I've always known Nick to be measured and kind, quick-witted and caring. He has an admirable relationship with a lovely man, and he has bold highlights in his black hair and rocks skirts and dresses. It never occurred to me that such a socially successful and evidently self-actualized person could have grown up with the same loserish passion as me. 

Two kids began a match beside us. They looked about 12. One was clean-cut and boyish; the other, androgynous with orange streaks running like currents through their sandy hair. They were taunting each other and giggling, boasting ferociously after each of their moves. 

They reminded me a lot of myself at their age, and Nick and I exchanged a look and it occurred to me he might have been thinking the same thing: that we were two reformed gay losers, playing chess beside two kids who seemed like younger versions of us — children enviably and unabashedly attached to their dorkiness. 

As I meditated on this, I realized I had sorely neglected my king's side and Nick's pawns had needled dangerously close to the eighth rank. My position had collapsed before me, and my beloved king could not evade an untimely death. 

Nick pushed his pawns and toppled my king. We laughed and shook hands, and I placed my fallen pieces back into place. And I put my pawn on E4, renewing the game once again.