Pride Month Streamer Spotlight: Nikatine on Twitch

June is the month dedicated to Pride and queer people, with the first march starting a long time ago, all the way back in 1970, after the so-called Stonewall riots that occurred in June and July 1969. Pride Month become an official recurrence just recently, with President Bill Clinton first acknowledging it in 2000 as "Gay and Lesbian Month," and then with President Barack Obama extending the celebrations to the whole LGBTQIA+ community in 2011. Yet June has been the month of Pride among queer individuals for much longer than that, and it is rooted deeply within the community across the world.

The Internet is now one of the go-to places to celebrate Pride Month and to connect with queer individuals, which often find great representation in Twitch streamers and content creators who offer a safe platform for everyone to be themselves fully. Among them, Veronica "Nikatine" Ripley sticks out for her popularity and for being always up for uplifting the voices of peer LGBTQIA+ individuals, especially those of minorities, like people of color and trans folks. The Best War Games talked to Nikatine about what it takes to come out, to be a queer Twitch streamer, and much more.

Last year, The Best War Games started a Pride Month Streamer Spotlight, which we’re happy to continue this year with several fresh streamers.

Nikatine's Coming Out Experience and Balancing Private Life Versus Online Presence

Nikatine's handle comes from the time when she came out to her dad, with her stating that she wanted to be called Veronica, hence the short for it being "Nika," and the rest is history. However, Nikatine was not done with coming out and discovering her own identity just yet and recently shared a tweet with another coming out story about being gay and in love with a woman. Still, her second coming out was not an easy one, because it meant worrying about sponsorships and managing her private life in contrast to her online presence.

Luckily, coming out is not always a traumatic experience, and Nikatine found all the love and the support she hoped for in her community and among her friends. No matter how challenging this experience was, it was also liberating to finally lift a weight off her shoulders and not feel like she was hiding something, keeping a secret from those who back her when needed. This also allowed Nikatine to set boundaries about what becomes public and what doesn't, including her girlfriend's identity.

For a long time, I deliberated pretty heavily on whether I should come out that way because not only was I nervous about the chilling effect it might have on my career, but also about the effect it might have on my private life with my partner, who's very important to me. I recognize that I have something very special, and I don't want to spoil it, I don't want to share my nice personal relationship with everybody. As a content creator, I'm almost forced to commodify every aspect of my life.

Nikatine's Comparison of Tanking in Video Games and Protecting Others From Haters

Resilience is not often something people can learn, but rather an innate skill, a feature that one simply happens to have, but Nikatine's story tells otherwise. When she first started streaming, Nikatine was worried about the things that haters and trolls could say to her to hurt her, which is often a reality in social media and platforms like Twitch. Being an openly queer individual can be very rewarding, but it can also attract the wrong kind of people to the streams who can say pretty much whatever they want in chat.

However, Nikatine's negative experiences became a way for her to become indifferent to haters, and instead, they helped the streamer create an incredibly safe environment for herself and her followers thanks to the efforts of a team of moderators and the tools offered by Twitch. It's indicative that Nikatine describes her experience and current role as that of a tank in video games, the character who protects teammates.

I think that's shameful that there's so much bullying of trans people, but I also recognize that the Internet is a wild west right now. Until there are major fundamental changes to the way we operate online there's not really a good solution to that. I'm willing to accept for now that people are going to say mean things to me sometimes. It's like tanking in video games. I'm happy to tank for other people because I don't get emotional about it.

What Can Change to Improve the Lives of LGBTQIA+ Individuals

Despite the world being in a much better place than it was just a decade ago with regard to LGBTQIA+ rights and safety, there is still a lot to do, and there are still so many positive changes to be made. Nikatine strongly believes that the narrative about trans people and other minorities needs to be told from their perspective because it's the only way to have a metaphorical seat at the table when important discussions take place, be it regarding laws or something else. There is also not a lot of trans representation in media, even though some shows and movies are finally starting to feature trans actors and actresses for trans roles, which is a great way of telling authentic stories.

Pride Month is the perfect time to uplift the voices of those people who are hardly heard during the year, and it's the perfect time to also become more accepting of those minorities. That's why Nikatine finds it extremely rewarding to be a queer content creator on Twitch, as she gets the benefits of the platform's reach to have a positive impact on other people's lives, and that makes all the difference.

I really want to reiterate that we're only ever as safe as the least safe among us, we're only ever as free as the least free among us. I want to see changes in the way that we discuss queer topics. I want to see more diverse representation for LGBTQIA+ people. I think that conversations about trans folks should really be told from trans perspectives. A lot of people who discuss trans issues tend to do so from a very theoretical standpoint.

What Nikatine Wants to See on Twitch in the Future

Although Twitch is ever-improving its means of protecting its streamers, there is still a long way to go. Something Nikatine would like to see is a collective block list that can be accessed by content creators in order to ban accounts within it that belong to people who have been hateful or trolled fellow streamers. Something like this is already doable on Twitter and through third-party websites by allowing anyone to subscribe to that specific block list and avoid unpleasant interactions without ever having to deal with them first-hand.

What Nikatine suggests is that there should be a team-based block list or maybe one that's simply an opt-in feature for content creators to subscribe to if they want, so that the experiences of one don't have to be the experiences of all. Twitch has already made important steps in the right direction with its moderation tools, and block lists would help keep minorities and LGBTQIA+ communities safe, which would be invaluable in modern times.

Twitch is great at dealing with really grievous accounts, but, like any system, there are always people who slip through the cracks. I would genuinely love a system where we can subscribe to a general block list. Maybe if your team has a block list, you can all just block the same people on all your channels at once. Like, if I ban someone from my chat, then that person is banned from everybody's chat in the team.