Magic Incarnate

To my knowledge and from my research, within Ds and/or Ds there are a few articles and sections of books that deal with elf psychology, sociology and similar, but of those, only three have had anything to do with elven sexuality, romance, courtship, and associated norms. Those are The Complete Book of Elves (1992, 2nd ed.), "Leaf and Thorn: The Secret Life of Elves" in Dragon #279 (Jan 2001, 3.0), and Races of the Wild (2005, 3.5). Neither "The Elven Point of View" (Dragon #60, April 1982) nor The Quintessential Elf (I or II, 3.0, Mongoose Publishing) nor Elves of Golarion (PF 1e) covered such topics, at least that I saw. There might be other articles or sections of books elsewhere that I'm unaware of. However, this suits my purposes just fine: because I have one source per numbered edition/version, I will be labeling them as such instead of by title.

D&D has had three distinct treatments of elf "love": a direct transfer of lore from Tolkien with some details changed to fit restrictions on D&D (2nd ed.), one that gets hung up on the elven lifespan so much that it has to change it again (3.5), and a fairly sex positive attitude (3.0) that is best summed up by a friend's allusion to Austin Powers: elves shag like minxes.¹

2nd. Ed.: Tolkienian Catholicism, but...

2nd ed.'s treatment of elves is basically that they're Catholic: they form an incredibly deep bond (i.e., marry) one individual and are reticent to remarry after their bondmate (spouse) has died (divorce is not discussed); those that might only do so once. This is not terribly out of step for the period: the Women's Liberation Movement had only recently ended (not that feminism had, just that particular brand/wave of it) and divorce, while a thing, was still frowned upon. (We're talking only 18 years after the Equal Credit Opportunity Act had passed, which allowed women in the US to take out credit cards in their own names.) Attitudes were changing, but we hadn't hit the point where media was starting to offer treatments of the impact of divorce on children (which was a big thing for the rest of the '90s and into the early oughts).

However, the biggest cultural milestones around an American company putting out a book discussing a fictional race engaging in very white, Anglo-Saxon, 20th Century Anglosphere norms of sex and romance were the Satanic Panic and the Murphy Brown controversy.

For those unaware, Murphy Brown was a TV work sitcom that ran from '88 to '98 (though I don't remember it lasting past the Bush Sr. administration). Brown (the role for which Candice Bergen is best known) was a middle-aged investigative political journalist, but also a single working woman and recovering alcoholic -- stati which were already pushing cultural normative boundaries. As you'd expect, the character was extremely competent and tough as nails. With a character like that, you know the show was going to deal with topical, controversial matters. In the 1991-92 season, Murphy became pregnant and brought the baby to term -- again, as a single mother. VPOTUS and noted imbecile (no exaggeration) Dan Quayle tried turning this into a culture war talking point, but his statements made it seem like he didn't understand that Brown was fictional, showing his windmill tilting for what it was.

Aside: Quayle isn't the only person who has embodied the caricature of conservatives that Democrats et al. like to imagine, but he was absolutely the main one prior to Dubya's 2000 campaign. I cannot overemphasize how much that stereotype is modeled after him.

The Complete Book of Elves came out in the middle of that season at a time when D&D was still dealing with a moral panic. The AIDS epidemic had destroyed the gay community and given the religious right extra ammunition against them; in the wake of that, radical feminism had spawned and was already targeting trans people, who were a very long way away from receiving any popular sensitivity or even recognition. The LGBTQ+ movement had not made it to a point where many people were willing to come out and those who did faced rampant discrimination at a minimum. There was no major social impetus to cater to queerness and plenty to go against that. So it makes sense that this book would take a very traditional approach to sex and love.

And yet, there is the elf communion ceremony. Elves in this book retain some of the vague telepathy from Tolkien, so they can do certain things which don't really impact the game but which allude to abilities which absolutely should. This act in particular is a form of mind-melding very much akin to that in Stranger in a Strange Land for which Heinlein coined the word "grok." The elf communion ceremony can take a fortnight of preparation, only works with other full elves, and requires complete trust (including being under the influence of no mind affecting spells) and serenity to perform. So, y'know, the sort of mystical descriptions people frequently give to lovemaking.

This is where we get into the queerness. You'll be happy to note that this can be done with up to four participants and gender is not mentioned at all in this section or in that about the marriage-like bond. So yes, even in the hidebound days of the first Bush administration and the continuation (though gradual disintegration) of the norms that got Reagan elected, elves had some queerness attached to them -- but with enough plausible deniability not to offend.

3.0: Slutty Elves

"Leaf and Thorn" is only five pages long and has sidebars, enlarged quotes, and illustrations to shorten that length (in typical magazine fashion). Even so, it does more in its discussion of the elven perspective and way of life than basically any other source I've read within D&D. This is because it better understands the implications of an extremely long lifespan and a chaotic good alignment than the other sources I've looked at do and does so without feeling the need to cater to human sensibilities. It is a better attempt at xenofiction, however grounded in American cultural perspectives it may be.

The section on sexual experimentation takes up nearly a full column (>1/12 of the article) and treats elven sexual behavior as shockingly lurid to other races, specifically in how prone elves are to having casual sex and fuckbuddies. There is a bit about elven fertility rates being extremely low and that resulting in little to no worry on the part of female elves (and a following sentence that says elf communities don't give a fuck about children being "illegitimate" -- the community will raise the child communally and that child will be loved), but nothing about venereal disease (N.B.: in 1st-3rd eds., PF included, elves have a Con penalty, so that's worth discussing).

Another section on courtship and marriage is a full column. While a lot of this is more mysticism (soulmates at first sight) and other aesthetic bits you'd expect of elves, the penultimate paragraph ends with "The wild debauchery that begins after the husband and wife have retired to the nuptial bed might surprise them." Again, elves shag like minxes. Divorce is given a sidebar two columns wide and roughly a third of the page tall (with an accompanying illustration that spans all three columns but isn't quite as tall) and is treated as something sorrowful but done in a mostly amicable way (which is hilarious to me: I've read enough divorce transcripts and heard enough about others to know that no legal action is as fueled by spite as divorce -- and spite is a quintessentially elven emotion).

For all of this, there is no mention of queerness. At all. There is plenty of room for there to be queerness, but there's no direct mention of it nor anything that lends itself to a queer interpretation of sexuality beyond elves having a culture of sex-positive promiscuity. This is also true for gender: it does describe some gender roles as not rigid, but in no way does it try to dwell upon gender nonconformity of any kind, be it transitioning, cross-dressing, marrying a same sex partner, or any kind of identity or physicality.

Why? Well, a few reasons.

By 2001, USese had gone through moral panics in the wake of countercultural trends for about 20 years. The Satanic Panic was just one of them. I mean, for context, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's/Sorcerer's Stone would release in theatres later that year and it was already the subject of moral outrage. Those who were not seized by the outrage were getting tired of a new controversy every few years. Meanwhile, treatments of sex and sexuality were becoming more accepting, though not dramatically so. Like, the Austin Powers installment I mentioned earlier and in the footnote focuses on the contrast of late '60s hippie culture sex with late '90s "responsibility" culture. Having an explicitly sex positive elf culture would somewhat shocking for the period, but not so controversial as to draw the ire of anyone within the gaming/D&D communities.

But for all that, the LGBTQ+ movement was still recovering. Ellen had come out. There had been a few movies that dealt with LGBTQ people and themes (The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert; The Birdcage; Mrs. Doubtfire; To Wong Fu) and Nathan Lane had come into the spotlight. But queer people weren't accepted and queerness was not acceptable.

3.5: And Then Came Some Regression

The Races of series was 3.5's answer to The Complete Book of and The Quintessential series (2nd ed. and 3.0, respectively) when it came to races because 3rd edition did not release supplements on individual races (or classes) but groups of them. This one, Races of the Wild, covers Elves, Halflings, and Raptorans (a race made for this book that could fly, which was a big deal at the time).²

3.5 tries to strike a balance between 2nd ed.'s Catholic monogamy and 3.0's free love. Elves once again tend to marry once and only once, but only when it comes to other elves. They'll be happy to have serial monogamous relationships with humans because the prospect of centuries of commitment is a lot (enough that the book goes on to say that they take frequent, years-long vacations from their partners), but a fling lasting about as long as typical elven courtship with a spouse who will grow old and die in that time is nothing. Elf maturation has shortened to twenty five years (that's entirely from this book: beforehand, elves reached adulthood at roughly age 110), elf parenthood typically lasts from ages 100 to 200, the fertility rate is still low, and children born out of wedlock face no social stigma, so you've got more than 75 years of sexual appetite without any consequences. There's otherwise a sentence given to elves being "flirtatious" and having "long-term dalliances."

There's not a whole lot I can say about the historical context of this book that I didn't say in the post about Corellon. Probably the biggest bit left unsaid is that this book was coming out in the wake of numerous state legislatures (my own included) adding bans on gay marriage to state constitutions. That was for no real reason: the gay rights movement was still working on recognition at this point and the big push for gay marriage wouldn't really start up again until closer to 2008. Brokeback Mountain had not been released to act as a watershed moment and the murder of Matthew Shepherd years prior did not yet have a major impact on popular culture or popular discourse. It wasn't that queerness was as widely closeted as it had been, but it was still mostly the object of ridicule.

What about Hanali Celanil and Legolas?

Ho boy.

For those unfamiliar, the Seldarine is the elven pantheon in D&D. Hanali Celanil is its goddess of love. Her first appearance ("The Gods of the Elves" in Dragon #60 [April 1982, 1st ed.])³ is about the earliest tidbit we have about elf sexuality and presents it as thoroughly heterosexual, even as it says that she almost always appears as a female but sometimes will appear as a male. The same rare genderfluidity is in Demihuman Deities (1998, 2nd ed.) but not Monster Mythology (1992, same ed.), which is fairly terse, or Faiths and Pantheons (2002, 3.0), which has very little to say about the goddess apart from her cult. Races of the Wild also discusses her, but it's the same but more so of Faiths and Pantheons. Almost none of these have much of anything to say about elf romance or sexuality.

The one bit that could be construed as queer is that Hanali's priests are called to shelter and provide "succor" to young lovers, who are seen as guides to the true paths in life. This suggests that elf society will sometimes ostracize or otherwise persecute people over romantic entanglements, contrary to what other sources have suggested, and implies queerness mainly in that gender isn't brought up here. However, one of the goddess's blessings and the only one dealing with love instead of beauty is a two-point Charisma boost on occasion for the purposes to stoking heterosexual love -- with the heterosexuality enforced by the rules.

If you were looking for a canonical treatment of queerness, sorry.

Legolas was the subject of much fan attention in the early oughts because The Lord of the Rings was current and he was young and attractive. Fanfic had a field day with him; yaoi was popular. But this was yaoi written by women for women (or at least girls for girls). While it is true that many authors and readers came to grips with queer identities through such stories, it's also true that yaoi was used to provide heterosexual women an outlet. There's been a lot written on this topic, so I won't belabor it. Suffice it to say that Legolas was the image of queer elfdom for several years.

Footnotes

¹ I had forgotten about the original quote, so I thought my friend was alluding to minks and just accidentally Smeogol-pluralized them. The original quote is "I bet she shags like a minx" from Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. It's a strained simile even then.

² Counting the setting-specific books (of which Races of Faerûn is one in name only), there are six installments: Destiny, the Dragon, Faerûn, Stone, and the Wild. 5e players will be interested to know that these were the origins of Dragonborn and Goliaths. Athasian (Dark Sun) Half-Giants and Krynnish (Dragonlance) Draconians had already made it into 3rd edition and plenty of dragon-people races already existed in and before the edition.