Sherrill is a bisexual, nonbinary Missourian in their mid-20s who describes themself as an “avid geek.”
They’ve been playing Dungeons & Dragons for years and spoke about how the fantasy tabletop role-playing game helped them find acceptance and a truer understanding of themself.
Alphabet Soup shares LGBTQ+ Missourians’ stories through portraiture and personal narratives.
Sherrill: I've always been dissatisfied with being a man, with masculinity, with the traits ascribed to it, but I've felt like there's nothing I can really do about it.
And I didn't really identify as not being a man until I was really started to be exposed to it at college, and suddenly people are asking me what my pronouns are when they meet me, and that's a whole new thing that I've never experienced before.
Then I joined this Dungeons and Dragons group where there's a transgender girl and two non-binary people, and like, we're having conversations about this stuff, and I'm like, “Oh, yeah, maybe I don't have to be a man. Maybe I can just be a person.”
And honestly, that's so recently, I'm still figuring stuff out about what that means for me.
I have a wonderful story about the first community of people that I could really be myself with was a Dungeons & Dragons group I was in in high school.
At this time, I've been a DM [Dungeon Master] for four years and I was a player for a group, and when you're a DM, you are all the NPCs [non-player character], and that means that you play female characters, male characters, characters of different races, characters that are uneducated dragons. You play everything.
So, when I go to play a PC – I mean, I haven't really questioned my gender at this point – but I didn't see anything wrong about playing a female character. She was a centaur. Her name was Priscilla Augustus.
But there was another person at this table who was a trans girl who had not come out openly about that yet.
They were playing a male character, and they were still presenting as male, and then when that character died in the campaign – very sad – they rolled up a new character, and that was a female character.
And then they come up to me, and they said seeing me – a macho man, which I think is just the beard – seeing a macho man play a really feminine female character has really inspired them to play a character that they actually identify with, and like people wouldn't think that they're weird for it.
And I was so so moved by that that I've rarely played male characters since.
But it's also really shown, to me, that fantasy is really a place where the things that make you unique are celebrated and where you can, just for a while, you can be someone you are, and people will accept it in this world we made up.
No one's going to be mad about you being a woman for just a little bit once a week on Saturdays.
