Excerpt: The really radical act is to question the idea that any sexual act is somehow in itself transgressive.
There’s a certain inevitability to the annual “Kink at Pride” controversy, and it’s hard to imagine the month of June without one. It goes something like this: someone, somewhere, usually online or in an op-ed, will say that Pride should exclude kink because, won’t someone think of the children or, whyyyy must we be so sexual? There will be an explosion of commentary (and by that I mean, many tweets), and this will continue until July 2.
Let me state unequivocally that yes, Kink belongs at Pride. I actually think we’d all be much better off if Kink showed up more often in public, outside Pride, and that a world where we all practiced BDSM would be a better one. The problem with humans is that we haven’t quite figured out that most relationships (if not all, frankly) have to do with some kind of power dynamic, one that often shifts constantly in very subtle ways. We’d be a lot better off if we all had access to actual power play and let off steam that way but that’s just me, dreaming of a world where BDSM was easily affordable and widely available. Kink and BDSM aren’t interchangeable but they’re aligned enough in the public eye to seem that way (I’ll leave it to the experts to weigh in on all that). As with anything even remotely attached to sex or what we think of as sex (neither Kink nor BDSM are always about sex), we tend to forget that such practices are also embedded in wider relations of economic and political power—who can afford expensive gear, for instance, and how the increased elitism around such practices are also linked to matters like gentrification (Margot Weiss’s Techniques of Pleasure discusses these more explicitly).
But to return to the perennial controversy: when it came up in my feeds this year, I set about explicitly asking people to identify sources for these denunciations of Kink, to see if there were actual attempts, on the literal ground, to ban it from Pride anywhere. As to the last: I haven’t found evidence of such in the U.S. As for denunciations: It turns out that, with a few exceptions, the vast majority of online calls to remove Kink comes from anonymous accounts on social media (I’ve reached out to a few but have heard nothing back); my guess is that these are designed to attract eyeballs and followers and don’t indicate any real political engagement with the issues. Every single time I asked a friend or colleague to tell me what specific instance of Kink being banned they were referring to, the answer was that they hadn’t seen anything in particular but were responding in general to what they’d heard about.
It turns out there is at least one op-ed, this one in The Independent, which argues that BDSM and Kink should be excluded from Pride. Are there harmful effects of such resistance to Pride online? The website Logically thinks so, writing that online campaigns against Kink at Pride deploy the usual rhetoric against queers (that they are pedophiles seeking to harm children, that Kink and BDSM reflect violent tendencies, and so on), and that a lot of this bleeds into real life anti-LGBTQ legislation, such as bathroom bills aimed against trans people, teens in particular.
On this, the Logically piece quotes Sarah Kate Ellis, president and CEO of GLAAD, the media watchdog group: “There are real world consequences to what happens online. There are direct lines you can draw between the over 100 anti-trans bills that are now circulating at the state [level] and what’s being produced and pushed out within the social media world.”
Yeeaaah, weeeeelllll. GLAAD is that deeply annoying organisation you hear from any time a queer character in film or television hurts someone else. Its constant whining has guaranteed that we can only have deeply positive and anodyne representations of LGBTQ people, at least in the mainstream. Having fulfilled its mission to render us all characters on Modern Family, GLAAD is moving its greedy little eyes (someone needs to pay those executive salaries) towards the online world of “commentary,” a world populated mostly by bots or people who lob poison from the safety of anonymity.
Are, for instance, trans teens under attack? Yes, but as we know from journalists like Kate Sosin who do the excellent and necessary work of reporting on such matters, the brunt of the actual harm comes to them from real-life politicians who feel driven and emboldened to initiate harmful legislation because of what they imagine is some massive tide of hatred towards trans people. If we followed GLAAD in simply highlighting “direct lines,” we would end up mired in online battles filled with little more than snark. The work to resist and overturn anti-trans bills doesn’t happen online: it happens within in-person campaigns and resistance, when actual people contact their legislators and refuse the hatred. Twitter campaigns are generally meaningless. Consider, for instance, that all the online outrage, all the coverage, and even a hundred signatures from Emily Wilder’s co-workers did not result in her reinstatement at AP, which fired her for her past tweets on Palestine. You could be unjustly removed from your position at your church and receive support from every single parishioner but nothing will change unless the Pope (or a Cardinal) himself makes that phone call: “Listen, put her back in or else.”
What matters in the world is power, what matters is making the forces that wield power realise they have to intervene in the way you want them to intervene. Twitter is the opposite of power: it is merely an illusion of power. At times a change we want might coincide with a twitterstorm, sure, and justify the careers of those people we call “social media managers,” but such moments are only coincidences. Twitter storms blow over quickly because the Twitterati is easily distracted: its Dory-like inability to remember what happened seconds ago is what keeps your feed refreshed but that’s also why it’s a lousy place to enact social justice (tagging corporations to get your malfunctioning internet turned back on works but that’s not social justice).
As many have noted, the problems with Pride are bigger than whether or not Kink is allowed: Against Equality writers and others have long pointed out that Pride is mostly a corporate festival meant to boost the profiles of rapacious organisations like GLAAD, the Human Rights Campaign, and The Task Force which exist to perpetuate a conservative gay agenda (gay marrige, hate crimes legislation, and inclusion in the military, among others). It’s not that Pride shouldn’t exist—there are still places in the U.S and elsewhere where the public gathering of queer people is a combination of joy and necessary visibility. I have the luxury of being profoundly irritated and disgusted by Chicago’s Pride which is mostly a gathering of drunken and racist white gay men and drunken white straight people who feel emboldened to come up and literally, physically poke and prod at all the queers marching because, hey, it’s Pride and everyone can do what they want (a friend I was walking with at one Pride was accosted by a straight white woman who came up and insisted on jiggling my friend’s breasts, much to the delight of her husband who came by to watch). But Pride in Telengana is a different matter altogether, as is Pride in Warsaw: there, the stakes of representation are real, visceral, and can be either joyful or dangerous (and all of that is subject to change: I don’t want to fetishise Pride anywhere or not acknowledge that, sooner or later, any gathering of humans will descend into bigotry, pettiness, and spite). Pride can still matter, and our task ahead is to rethink what it and queerness mean, remaining conscious of the fact that queerness is not the same everywhere and that “solidarity” does more harm than good when we simply enable a cadre of elite gays everywhere to make decisions on the part of millions (Joseph Massad’s work remains crucial in this regard).
So: what’s the point of paying attention to online “battles” about Kink at Pride when there’s no evidence of a massive effort to ban it other than a lot of tweets and one op-ed? I submit that all of this manufactured controversy simply allows for many to virtue-signal in either direction, to indicate that they, above all, care about children and about being respectable enough for straight people or, on the other end, to wax on about the sacred history of Kink and how it empowers us all and blablahblah. Neither side has anything particularly new to say. If you’re actually concerned about Kink at Pride, contact your local Pride organisers and make yourself heard. If you’re on the other side and see this happening, contact your local Pride organisers, do the actual hard work of shutting that shit down by talking to actual people. If you see people trying to prevent Kink elsewhere, offer your solidarity in tangible ways. But sitting at your screen and yammering on about a threat to Kink at Pride which you literally have no actual knowledge of simply because it gives you the opportunity to prove how cool and Kink-positive you are does little more than, well, give you the opportunity to prove how cool and Kink-positive you are.
Meanwhile, in a world where power matters and operates quite differently, there are in fact issues that queers blithely ignore. Fundamental to all the bloviating on Kink at Pride is the idea that it is inherently politically radical and also inherently queer and that it makes us all feel empowered. In fact, it’s neither. Over at Vice, Daisy Jones quotes the anthropologist Jamie Lawson, “The BDSM or kinky communities recentre sex around pleasure, not reproduction. It’s no coincidence that the leather scene is so closely associated with radical, transgressive queerness…” Well, yes, except that both Kink and BDSM have always been popular among straight people as well. That it’s queer people who were more openly “transgressive” is what got them into trouble, historically, with a deeply hypocritical straight culture that was content to enjoy these same “transgressive” forms of pleasure behind closed doors. There’s also a complicated history of BDSM/Kink and Nazi fetishes but, oh, hey, we don’t want to get into all that, do we? (For the record: I think that Kink’s close association with signifiers of violence needs to be thought about therapeutically and psychoanalytically, not as a sign that it is by itself inherently, well, you know, Nazi).
I’ve written about why sex, especially supposedly “transgressive” sex, and the social relations attached to such are not inherently political (you can read the pieces here and here). Your sex is not radical, and neither is your Kink: they simply are. And pro-Kink/BDSM people were notoriously silent when it was reported that Donald Trump had engaged sex workers to pee on each other while he watched and that the whole incident had been captured on tape by the KGB. Even Dan Savage, who pretends to liberate us all from our sexual qualms, mocked Trump because, well, hey, Trump, so who cares? Mired in all the disgust and mockery hurled at Trump (who, let us be clear, deserves it all but for so much more) was also this sense of Ewwww, peeing on each other? Who does that? Lots of people, actually, none of whom felt empowered enough to pop up and push back against the demonisation of an act they might enjoy. Where’s all the Kink positivity when we actually need it?
Let’s also consider that there are any number of issues related to “transgressive” or “outside the norms of” sexuality that queers have long decided to be silent on and that some of these are linked to devastating legal and social consequences. In 2018, Florida’s Amendment 4 restored voting rights for felons, a huge breakthrough in an unfair system that systematically excludes vast numbers of people, mostly people of colour, from participating in civic life. But the legislation very deliberately also excludes certain categories, like people who have committed “sex offenses,” including those who have “committed prostitution while knowing they were HIV-positive,” and those convicted of murder. Those three categories are vastly overpopulated by people of colour. “Sex offenses” is an enormously broad rubric and deployed against the most vulnerable, who are often also non-white and economically marginalised (consider that most people put to death by the state for murder are men and women of colour and nearly always, always among the poorest). Where are all the Kinksters up in arms about the use of “sex offenses” to remove people from even the margins of civic life? Try finding a home to live in once you’re placed on a sex offender registry; try being poor, HIV-positive, and a sex worker and, despite taking all precautions, being able to actually tell your clients about your status.
Until sometime in the early 1990s, NAMBLA (North American Man Boy Love Association) participated regularly in Pride (how many and how often has been a topic of debate as is the existence of the group itself). You can respond with horror to the very idea of NAMBLA, sure, and today’s queers love to distance themselves from what they broadly describe as “pedophilia” but have you dared to think about the question of intergenerational relationships outside of the rubric of exploitation and abuse? Milo Yiannopoulos was much beloved for his quirky, British-inflected xenophobia and racism until he dared to engage in what may well be the only five minutes of his life where he made sense: when he spoke eloquently, even movingly, about the history of sexual relationships between older and younger men, including his own.
The very same queers who love to express their support for Kink and portray themselves as oh-so-rad-and-interesting-and-just-flamboyant-and-so-very-very-transgressive-darling! are silent on a topic that once engaged queers across the board. Yes, of course, as we see in the Catholic Church, not all intergenerational sex is that, and instead takes the form of blatant abuse, enabled by a culture of silence and abuse within families and the institution of the Church and a lot, a lot of money. But as the extraordinary and unrelenting work of Joann Wypijewsky and others has shown, there are also numerous examples where complicated lives and trajectories which involve older and younger men have been planed down into uncomplicated and easily digestible narratives about predation and innocence.
I won’t go into the long and complicated history of all that because, frankly, Dear Reader, you should do the work of researching and learning about it. If you’re a self-proclaimed Kinkster in particular, now is the time for you to sit down not with all the easy garbage about empowerment and transgressiveness that you’ve been fed for years, but the far more difficult, contentious, tendentious matters that both the mainstream and the ostensibly radical queers have avoided for years.
What do you know about the history of sex offender registries? And their connection to sexuality and queerness and how deeply arbitrary a “sex offense” can be (peeing in public is often one)? Can you think beyond even that arbitrary nature of “sex offense” (talking about arbitrariness itself implies that we should care about innocence) and ask, well, what of those who do cause actual harm to others? What do you know about the actual prison industrial complex and why abolition needs to look long and hard at matters of sexuality and gender within the complicated histories of how queers have found ways of belonging (often by running away from their homes and finding places with older queers in relationships that spanned the sexual and the non-sexual)? Do you actually care about all that or are you content to spend every June posting vapid articles that summarise vapid papers once written for vapid Gender and Women’s Studies courses?
Sex is hard, no pun intended. But it does us no good at all to only think of it as joy and transgressiveness and empowerment when millions are brutalised by the state because of the kinds of sex they seek or need. Will you fight for the sex worker entrapped in an alley whose HIV-positive status then becomes a sex offense, the imprint of which guarantees that she will never again live outside of poverty and desperation? Will you dare to speak up for the gay man accused of looking at images of boys, in a country that fetishies explicitly hypersexual child beauty pageants, or will you instead rush to declare that “pedos” are not part of our precious “community?” Can you, will you commit to a world where we can actually have complicated discussions—about what constitutes desire and sexuality, how we might create spaces for people who may or may not struggle with what they can’t discuss publicly—without driving them underground or into humiliating lives of exclusion and stigma?
The problem with the United States is not that it suffers from a Puritanical mindset around sex: that excuse is a few hundred years old and has worn thin. The problem is that we have gradually allowed ourselves to believe that sex is an expression of something—identity, or desire, or yearning—rather than a practice embedded in a network of regulations, entrapments, and forms of brutality explicitly designed to surveil and punish the most marginal among us. When Twitter explodes into contentious “debates” about whether or not Kink should be allowed at Pride, I roll my eyes because I know that nearly every single person insisting that it should be also thinks, Ewwww, pee! or It’s not like we’re pedos, we just want to express ourselves in open and healthy ways! The focus of the entire discussion, bound up in a manufactured controversy, is on “harm” and “consent,” as if simply deploying those words magically makes sex inherently radical and affirming.
But the central question for us all should not be, “Is someone doing harm?” It should, instead, be, “What does harm look like, to you?” The first question presupposes that some forms of sex are inherently harmful, without really questioning who determines what “harm” means in the first place. “Harm” is being HIV-positive and poor and a sex worker, if we only ask the first question. But if we ask the second question instead, we are forced to grapple with the origins of that supposed harm: why is someone who is HIV-positive compelled to continue with sex work and put herself at risk in a street economy, with clients who might go so far as to murder her? Ask that same question, what does harm look like? about any other categories of people on our lists of the reviled and undesirable and, suddenly, we see that the real harm comes from a system that prefers to stigmatise and push people out of the realms of civic life without grappling with the fact they exist as humans in the first place.
The next time we see this spurious “Kink and Pride” debate in our feeds, let’s all first check and verify that there’s actually something happening in real life. If there’s a Pride somewhere where organisers are threatening to ban Kink, let’s all show our support by contacting them in droves. But most of all, rather than focus on a topic that does little more than give us a collective opportunity for self-aggrandisement, let’s consider and read up on the complicated histories of Kink, sex, and sexuality, the sort we were never given even in our favourite classes or discussion groups. Take the discussion off social media and dare to have a challenging set of conversations about matters that are actually dangerous for so many. Consider that Kink is not some radical manifestation of transgressiveness but simply another practice that often happens to involve unusual forms of attire. The really radical act is to question the idea that any sexual act is somehow in itself transgressive and to instead consider how sex is about forms of power that remain invisible to all except the most marginalised.
Your Kink is not radical, but how you think about it can and should be.
For more:
“Your Sex Is Not Radical.”
“Polyamory Is Gay Marriage for Straight People.”
“From Queer to Gay: The Rise and Fall of Milo.”
“Bars for Life: LGBTQs and Sex Offender Registries.”
“Margot Weiss Talks BDSM and Sexuality.”
Don’t plagiarise any of this, in any way. Read and memorise “On Plagiarism.” There’s more forthcoming, as I point out in “The Plagiarism Papers.” I have used legal resources to punish and prevent plagiarism, and I am ruthless and persistent. If you’d like to support me, please donate and/or subscribe, or get me something from my wish list. Thank you.
Image: Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, by Il Sodoma, c. 1525