Dimension 20’s Dungeons and Drag Queens is a cultural reset for queer nerds

polygon.com:

Dungeons and Drag Queens is a gift to nerds and the LGBTQ+ community — one that brings both groups closer together.

The latest season of Dimension 20 — its 18th — is anything but a gimmicky celebrity Dungeons & Dragons stream. In true Dimension 20 fashion, everyone at the table commits to the story they’re telling together (even if they don’t quite know the rules yet). What results is a perfect showcase of the Dropout ethos, the art of drag, and the magic of playing your first tabletop role-playing game.

Fans praise indie streamer Dropout for its inclusive programming, and Dungeons and Drag Queens embraces the LGBTQ+ community in no uncertain terms. However, while many of the D&D players (and Dimension 20 fans) I know are queer, most of the queer people I know don’t play D&D. They’ve been told it isn’t for people like us. Up until the last decade, they weren’t exactly wrong.

For most of its history, the system of D&D itself was not a safe space for queer people and people of color. Early guidebooks were written as if speaking to exclusively white, cisgender, heterosexual males. The primary goals of early D&D were looting the ruins of ancient civilizations and destroying strongholds of intrinsically evil races. In the last decade, the rise of actual play shows like Dimension 20 and Critical Role has brought more force behind collective pushes to decolonize the canon of D&D (to various levels of success). Even before that, though, marginalized folks prospered and made community in TTRPGs despite an actively oppressive system — something we have centuries of experience in.

Today, in a time when the LGBTQ+ community is under constant attack,Dungeons and Drag Queens is a beacon of nerdy, queer joy. Throughout the miniseries,