20 thoughts on “A great 1985 newpaper article on D&D.”

  9. Daniel Lewis This article is pretty great, and sadly reflective of the time. I remember when I was in the seventh grade, and my mom got called into a meeting with my school’s principal. Apparently, several parents had complained because I was running D&D and they thought I was a danger to their children. What was left unsaid, but what was apparent to my mom at the time, is that those parents were using D&D as a front to complain about my perceived sexual orientation. They used a lot of coded language, like “he’s not like the other boys” and “these games lead to kids being confused.”

    In fact, it is often under-reported that many of these kids taking their lives were doing so, not because of Dungeons & Dragons, but because of their self-loathing related to being gay. James Dallas Egbert, the most famous “victim” of D&D, was one such case, which is often overlooked by people who write about the Satanic Panic. In fact, like many things related to modern-day conservative activism, the Satanic Panic was very much about rooting-out and vilifying kids we would today consider part of the queer community.

    Dungeons and Dragons was a lifeline for me (as it was for lots of gay kids at the time). I basically had no friends until the sixth grade, when I started playing roleplaying games. Dungeons & Dragons gave me permission to be smart, dramatic, and a little fey, all of which were things that caused me to be ostracized before. Sure, I was still impossibly geeky, but at least I was a geek with friends.

    And now we have the Gauntlet. Note: our tongue-in-cheek references to Satan are a sardonic homage to the time period of this article.

    And I am absolutely using that heroin quote.

  10. Daniel Lewis This article is pretty great, and sadly reflective of the time. I remember when I was in the seventh grade, and my mom got called into a meeting with my school’s principal. Apparently, several parents had complained because I was running D&D and they thought I was a danger to their children. What was left unsaid, but what was apparent to my mom at the time, is that those parents were using D&D as a front to complain about my perceived sexual orientation. They used a lot of coded language, like “he’s not like the other boys” and “these games lead to kids being confused.”

    In fact, it is often under-reported that many of these kids taking their lives were doing so, not because of Dungeons & Dragons, but because of their self-loathing related to being gay. James Dallas Egbert, the most famous “victim” of D&D, was one such case, which is often overlooked by people who write about the Satanic Panic. In fact, like many things related to modern-day conservative activism, the Satanic Panic was very much about rooting-out and vilifying kids we would today consider part of the queer community.

    Dungeons and Dragons was a lifeline for me (as it was for lots of gay kids at the time). I basically had no friends until the sixth grade, when I started playing roleplaying games. Dungeons & Dragons gave me permission to be smart, dramatic, and a little fey, all of which were things that caused me to be ostracized before. Sure, I was still impossibly geeky, but at least I was a geek with friends.

    And now we have the Gauntlet. Note: our tongue-in-cheek references to Satan are a sardonic homage to the time period of this article.

    And I am absolutely using that heroin quote.

  11. Jason Cordova That’s a really interesting aspect of D&D hysteria that I was completely unaware of.  I missed peak anti-D&D craziness by a couple of years, so looking at old articles like this blows my mind.  

    The weird moral panic that I lived through was against M:tG where the local archdiocese actually shut down my FLGS.  Of course, now that I think about it, the manager was gay and was definitely accused of “tempting kids into evil”.  Those two facts were probably not nearly as unrelated as I thought at the time.

  12. Jason Cordova That’s a really interesting aspect of D&D hysteria that I was completely unaware of.  I missed peak anti-D&D craziness by a couple of years, so looking at old articles like this blows my mind.  

    The weird moral panic that I lived through was against M:tG where the local archdiocese actually shut down my FLGS.  Of course, now that I think about it, the manager was gay and was definitely accused of “tempting kids into evil”.  Those two facts were probably not nearly as unrelated as I thought at the time.

  13. Jason Cordova Daniel Lewis I grew up in both fear times. To this day I still deal with the stigma of using my imagination to be something different than who “God” made me. Any time I talk about it around certain people, I get a death glare. shrugs some folk can’t let go.

  14. Jason Cordova Daniel Lewis I grew up in both fear times. To this day I still deal with the stigma of using my imagination to be something different than who “God” made me. Any time I talk about it around certain people, I get a death glare. shrugs some folk can’t let go.

  15. I remember a story about a kid whose dice were talking to him. We thought that would be pretty cool. Really though these kids had mental problems that had nothing to do with the game. They simply needed help.

  16. I remember a story about a kid whose dice were talking to him. We thought that would be pretty cool. Really though these kids had mental problems that had nothing to do with the game. They simply needed help.

  17. Next you’re going to say that the Congressional hearings about negative impacts of comic books on children was unrelated to kids having mental problems in the 50’s :p

  18. Next you’re going to say that the Congressional hearings about negative impacts of comic books on children was unrelated to kids having mental problems in the 50’s :p

  19. Compounding the Egbert case in all directions, after he went missing, his family hired a private investigator to find him.  The PI publicized the D&D theory as a way to get information on the disappearance to the public (and not because he believed it likely).  He was attempting to protect James in avoiding what he considered to be the more likely theories, involving drugs, kidnapping, and/or staying with older gay men.  He eventually found James, with all the more likely theories in play at one point or another.  James begged the man not to make this public, as the truth meant that James’s little brother would likely be hounded at school because ha ha your brother’s a gay junkie.  So the truth was never outed, papers never addressed their hysteria, D&D stayed public boogeyman, and James still killed himself a year later.

  20. Compounding the Egbert case in all directions, after he went missing, his family hired a private investigator to find him.  The PI publicized the D&D theory as a way to get information on the disappearance to the public (and not because he believed it likely).  He was attempting to protect James in avoiding what he considered to be the more likely theories, involving drugs, kidnapping, and/or staying with older gay men.  He eventually found James, with all the more likely theories in play at one point or another.  James begged the man not to make this public, as the truth meant that James’s little brother would likely be hounded at school because ha ha your brother’s a gay junkie.  So the truth was never outed, papers never addressed their hysteria, D&D stayed public boogeyman, and James still killed himself a year later.

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