Dungeons & Dragons
I’m finally gonna get my D&D on, y’all — for realz!
Since I was in middle school, and first heard about the then pretty new role-playing game, I was destined for that shit. Hell, I was a DM (that’s the lingo for Dungeon Master), before I even knew that Dungeons and Dragons as anything other than a Saturday afternoon creature double feature. For as long as I remember, I was marshaling groups of my friends into organized games of make-believe, where I would describe the world we were in and then we’d go into our roles escaping volcanoes, avoiding giant alligators, or hunting vampires.
I was already gender queer by the age of six. While the boys who played with me—there were never girls involved—chose names like Jack and Michael, I was always Susie. None of the boys seemed bothered that I’d identified as female. They seemed to dig the hell out of saving me when I play-fainted, carrying me to safety. It would be years before playing “girl” became a taboo kind of thing. By then, I’d kissed most of the boys on the block.
The time comes when childhood games get set aside, and adult interests creep in to replace them. The boys found sports and “real” girls to occupy their time—at least some of them did. Some boys still managed to find stolen moments here and there to escape to the closet with me for a little hot snogging. We called it the hootchie-kootchie. My love of boys and make-believe followed me into adulthood, though. My taste in men seasoned, of course—I like them fully grown with a little salt and pepper on top—and the play now gets shrouded in so much professionalism to where it ain’t no fun at all.
It’s a fucking miracle I came across—during a pandemic, no doubt—a group of so-called adults who, I guess, think that playing make-believe is a still cool thing to do. I’ll be starting my first D&D adventure in just a couple days and I am so frigging excited, my damn head could explode. I’ll be playing as a Half-Elf named Ouran. They’re gender non-conforming and magical AF. I’ve already written an elaborate back story and plan to send the final tweaked version to our DM later today.
I’ll let y’all know how it goes, but I wanna urge folks: Please find ways to play together. Just because things are uncertain AF, doesn’t mean we can’t squeeze every ounce of joy out of life we can. We only get a little slice. Eat up, beeyotchez! Lol!
