Review
Comfort, Comics, and Queerness
Review: Cleveland Heights LGBTQ Sci-Fi and Fantasy Role Playing Club by Doug Henderson
I was very excited to see a book like this from University of Iowa Press with such close proximity to one of the most prestigious writing programs in the nation (Iowa Writer’s Workshop). I knew it would be interesting to see how Doug Henderson would traverse the lines between the fantasy genre and literary realism in his debut novel, The Cleveland Heights LGBTQ Sci-Fi and Fantasy Role Playing Club (April 2, 2021).
This is a book about early adulthood and establishing self in your mid-to-late twenties. A common experience in the LGBTQ community that goes down much easier for straight folks in their late teens and early twenties. Often, untangling cultural norms and expectations around gender and sexuality as an LGBTQ person takes more time and gets more pushback socially and emotionally, depending on our experiences with homophobia.
Henderson opens with the main character, Ben, looking for his dice bag while heading out for the weekly Thursday Dungeons and Dragons game in the backroom of Readmore Comics. Its description reminded me of Houston’s Third Planet Sci-Fi Superstore, with more real estate, minus Readmore’s insistence on a smelly gorilla costume for coaxing customers inside. Henderson uses this particular detail well as a way to remind us of their connection to Readmore even when they aren’t in the backroom. You don’t really forget a gorilla mask when it enters a scene.
Comic enthusiasts clog the aisles of Readmore and peruse other heroic wares before closing when Valerie, a fellow DND player, and comic store employee, kicks them out each week before their Thursday game. One in particular, curiously, believes himself to be a vampire as he sprints away in a cape hissing at her. This is just the introduction to the DND world we will be invited into as these friends all over the gender and sexuality spectrum engage in an evening of regular RPG gaming. Much like my previous review of Be Dazzled (Ryan La Sala, Sourcebooks Fire, 2021) costumes and characters take a prominent place. We are introduced to two sides of each member of the ensemble, their real-world selves, and their more fantastical personas.
Henderson does not present Dungeons and Dragons in a childish or patronizing way but uses it to create agency and community for his characters. It’s a weekly ritual that has value to all of those involved and intersects with their daily lives. Even though I wasn’t familiar with all the details, I was given enough to understand and was pulled into the conflict and what it might mean even when they left the gaming table.
Readmore is located in urban Cleveland. From its doors, our protagonists can walk to a diner, a Chinese restaurant, a record store, and a straight bar without breaking a sweat. Each location in this block of Coventry Road is given some scene time, but their first imaginings are almost always in the world of the game first. This is a regathering tool that is useful in more ways than one as it reflects the world and its characters in new ways and angles that can be read into their real-world happenings.
I also really appreciate Henderson’s attention to the setting. Coventry Lane feels like a real place similar to Armistead Maupin’s Barbary Lane. Henderson is not shy about letting setting define character as much as their actions do. It really helps anchor what’s happening especially when we are going in and out of fantastical worlds throughout the novel. The neighborhood likely got its inspiration from the Castro District, a prominent area of San Francisco known as the first historic gay district in the U.S.
Whether it’s Celeste, dungeon master and transgender woman, constantly dodging her mother’s invitations to church or Ben trying to reel his feelings in for a new gamer, Albert, that joins them, the regular Thursday night DND games offer them ritual and control, dipping into a world that is fully affirming and aware of how they navigate the world — even if there are challenges and teamwork involved.
Ben uses that energy to understand his feelings for Albert. Albert uses it to figure out if the man he’s with at work is worth the effort with all their differences. While Mooneyham and Huey navigate their long-term relationship and changing dynamics as things get more permanent and fixed. Relationships form, strengthen, and dissolve but will their RPG bond survive those changes?
I was worried as a reader that these DND meetups would devolve into something akin to Tolkien’s bloated dinner party exposition scenes a la Lord of the Rings, but I really appreciated them. These interactions build expectation and concern for what may come. Maybe the characters aren’t traveling to the underworld outside the game, but they are mining complex feelings and emotions in a world that isn’t built for them whenever they leave that room. And they can’t exercise the same level of trust in a dungeon master to get the endings they hope to find in the real world. It’s likely a feeling DND fans will find familiar and comforting.
Interstellar Flight Magazine publishes essays on what’s new in the world of speculative genres. In the words of Ursula K. Le Guin, we need “writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope.” We use affiliate links and Patreon to pay our writers. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
