In part one of this series, I introduced our narrative, definitions, set my expectations and goals. Today, I am going to share how I got to this space. When I first started to come out, and challenge my small town catholic/christian conditioning, I was very defiant. Lots of, “fuck the world.” They have so much to learn, why don’t they just catch up. As life does, I was reminded no one is done learning. If you are not green and growing, you are old and rotten. I still had really challenging lessons to learn, a big one being: Prioritizing queer joy in your Games is important as much you are queer as it is if you are not.

K, So Why Does It Matter In Games Though?

In one of my earlier professionally DMed groups, I had a player leave my table after few sessions. They sent me a sincere message thanking me for the game, and in the end it just “wasn’t for them.” In the end, the group didn’t last much longer than a couple more sessions. Honestly, it happens. There was no animosity, and I didn’t think much of it until I ran into that first-to-leave-player months later at my friendly local game shop. They told me again they had been excited to play with me; just kinda sad they couldn’t play their character. “What do you mean?” I asked.

“I just felt like I wasn’t really being heard or seen.” they said. It turns out, they’d tried to play a nonbinary rogue, the rest of the table kept misgendering their character, and nobody including me stepped in. That was a gut punch. I had failed that player by both not being attentive, and assuming my “queerness” or “inclusive vibe” would take care of itself. It didn’t.

Another example comes in the mid-late 10s while I was attending university. I was part of a group that was organizing a space for queer and diverse gamers. The experiences I gained with this group over the couple years I was with them is The GM Tim’s Canon Event. Like Uncle Ben’s death, it shaped my life dramatically. I worked really hard in the role I had with them and made some very dear friendships that still exist today. Sadly, I had not really learned the intersectionality of othering in society, even though I was studying it within my degree. That would be a hard mistake lesson to learn, I would piss off some cool people before I finally understood that my ignorance of my privilege and my belief of “well, not me” was actually doing more damage than any benefits and support my queer contributions to the larger group was. In fact, it was holding back my own queerness and hindering my own abilities to strive for equanimity.

Prioritizing Queer Joy Over Tropes

For decades now, if queer people exist in culture: texts, movies, books, TV, TTRPGs, etc., it is usually as tropes. We are punchlines, tragic deaths, or dangerous deviants. A flamboyant queer coded villain. A “confirmed bachelor” who sacrifices himself for the straight couple’s emotional growth. A lesbian whose only function is to die and motivate her (usually male) party member. Not to mention the gross queer baiting trope that has found new life on social media. A lot of it is damage done to our culture from things like the Hays Code followed by McCarthyism that never really went away. These moral codes still affect today’s culture ratings; they became patterns.

Patterns don’t tend to add diversity, instead they feed on or create stereotypical extremes. Reliance and ignorance of the patterns lead to interpreting culture offensively wrong and blinding people, who might think they are creating something good, into erasing particularly important aspects from the source culture.

We can change patterns. It’s not difficult to include diversity appropriately. In Cruising Utopia author José Muñoz described queerness as imagining and rehearsing a better, more joyful future. Intentional, joyful inclusion in games isn’t just about better representation now, it’s about building play spaces that anticipate and rehearse a better world, one that affirms queer lives as thriving, whole, and ordinary.

I once ran an Adventurers League game at a convention where the characters did a shopping pitstop and short rest. To add flavour to the short rest I had the female merchant’s wife bring lunch. That moment showed me the power of what I now call the 3-Sentence Rule. After the game, one of the players said to me, “I liked that a queer couple in a game wasn’t… a thing. It was just there. Thank you.”

That’s the power of joy over trope.

Why TTRPGs Matter: My Journey to Queer Joy

I grew up in the Canadian rural north. It was the kind of place that I describe as, “where men are men, and moose are nervous.” I was closeted, it didn’t matter—everyone either knew, or had decided, I was gay, before my naive self even knew what that meant. I got beat up weekly though middle and high school. Culture and people around me told me that I would die from AIDS, cause that’s what happens when you’re gay. My christian friends (and even some parents) would causally remind me I was going to hell, enough that at one point I even decided I was cured and joined their church. That didn’t fix anything. I still had people go to my bosses trying to get me fired cause “their kids would catch the gay.” Even my first sort-of-not-really boyfriend, whom I met at that church, told me he had to marry a girl so he “wouldn’t be in sin” with me and we couldn’t talk anymore. I walked away from religion and faith after that. All of that happened in roughly a ten year span from the late 1990s to the late 2000s. Not that long ago.

I’ll tell ya, you make some pret-ty poor life decisions when you are that worn down and desperate for affection or inclusion.

The Love in The Game

Somehow, through all of it, I found a group of friends to play TTRPGs with, including the guy who taught me how to be a GM, my Yoda. In those games I truly got to exist! I never properly dated they way straight people got to, except my character could. I had one in-person actual boyfriend for about 7 months (remember those poor decisions I mentioned), in-game I got to have one before and after him. I got to be someone else, somewhere else. I wasn’t a target. I wasn’t an experiment drunk, late at night. Our GM never mocked, always actively included me, and generally made me feel safe and welcome. I was allowed to play being loved, because with this group of friends, I was.

That group, those games, they gave me a safe enough space to finally feel pride in who I was. They are a key part of what gave me the courage to start Pride in that small town.

It’s still going 23 years later.

Ch-ch-changes. Kinda Sorta Advancing-Not-Really

The 2014 D&D Players Handbook really lead the industry with that subtle, yet intentional, paragraph about diversity in sexuality and gender of your character. Actively including this in the book was such a big deal. Fantasy and sci-fi offers opportunities to introduce themes and ideas that can redefine the definitions of social constructs like gender, sexuality, and any ‘othering.’ This was one of the first mainstream TTRPGs books to overtly make this effort. Blue Rose, Thirsty Sword Lesbians, Queerz!, and Monster Hearts all are great and very important queer dominant TTRPGs, yet they have not hit the mainstream that D&D has. That paragraph got attention and importantly encoded non-cishet norms directly into the game, rather than having them remain an assumed concept.

Taking that paragraph out and washing it into a couple sentences in the 5.24 edition made me sad. Especially with how many queer people work in the industry. It could have been an oversight, or maybe it was believed to not be important enough to be in the book anymore. To me, it felt a little like an abandonment at a time when we need support the most.

Come back Wednesday for Part 3. I’ll give you four concrete steps you can start implementing at your gaming tables right away.