antifas:
localdiscountgoth:
tigerdrop:
there needs to be more kink and gay sex at pride b/c a lot of you need the lesson that something making you uncomfortable doesnt mean that its bad or that it should be hidden away. your discomfort is not the end of the fucking world and i promise you will survive the harrowing ordeal of seeing a man in leather
respectfully, no.
sure there can be space for kink and sex at pride in restricted areas.
showing off your leather gear in the parade is great, show it off. but please dont practice in the parade. ive seen that before and it does nothing but harm.
pride is basically the only place for queer youth to interact with their community. there are children at pride. they are underage. they can not consent. why is this so hard to understand.
there are people with sa trauma. you are hurting them.
there are lots of reasons that people should not have to explain to you why they do not consent to seeing kink and sex
you have to do it in areas of consent or you are not practicing safely.
if you are not practicing consent you are no better than a sex offender. pride is not an exception
pride needs to be a place of safety and accessibility.
- respectfully, YES.
- there are kid friendly pride events. if you don’t want to see kink go to those. it is far from “the only place for queer youth to interact with the community” and tbh that’s really disrespectful to people who have put time and passion into working with queer youth
- as a sa victim, kink making you uncomfortable is something you need to work on for yourself. if you’re going to pride, common sense means expecting to see these things and people don’t need to change themselves or their self expression because of someone’s trauma. if it’s hurting you that’s for you to work on. you can’t walk around expecting everyone to accommodate you. that will get you hurt way more than seeing a dude on a leash
- the idea that people need to “consent” to someone’s else’s clothing/self expression is a pathway to radicalization and puritan values. i’m not sure if that’s what your implying because your wording is confusing (not much difference between wearing leather and “practicing” it, that’s the same thing, so…), but it’s worth saying as that’d be the pipeline you’re going down anyways
- there’s a HUGE OVERLAP between kink and the queer community. why wouldn’t you expect to see kink??? it’s been part of pride for a very long time.
- no one is actually having full on sex so that argument is extremely irrelevant
- at the end of the day, this is about you needing to get over yourself big time
I want to tell a story. Because not everyone had a “known lesbian agitator” for a mother pre-2000s, and I get that means I had a lot of awareness of things others my age may not have.
My region had a thriving queer community. It had been built up during the AIDS crisis as a mutual aid system to support those who got sick, their surviving loved ones, and the youth who were entering the community.
By the time I came around, we had cafes, we had nightclubs, and most importantly we had a youth center. The youth center wasn’t explicitly queer only, but it was run and operated by the same community members that had taken on the task of sexual health education of young and vulnerable queer folks during the crisis. It was a great place. Gave kids a place to be that was safe, provided food, access to resources, social groups, sex ed, and a whole bunch of other stuff.
And then the propoganda came.
Endless discussions about how it was inevitable that any gay man interacting with a child was actually a child molester and any lesbian was corrupting the youth with promiscuity. People started looking at the commubity center. They started to whisper. They started to puff up their chests about how these *fetishists* were a danger to children, and you just KNEW it because they went to BDSM clubs in their private adult time, they talked about sex with kids and gave them condoms, they hosted family friendly pride events but they let boys dress like *sissies* I mean girls, and they let girls dress like *dykes* I mean boys.
Then we had the nerve to start asking for legal rights. And suddenly the broader community wasn’t whispering anymore. Suddenly they were fucking RABID with it.
I was five years old in a protest march with other staff and their families from the center when a grown man hissed “dyke” at me and tried to grab me.
I was six when my auntie lost her job at the local middle school because someone found out she was living with a woman.
I was seven when the center finally shut down because there weren’t enough people left who could/would staff it in light of the threat from the community.
I was ten when our favorite cafe shut down, and with it went the queer book club, the queer AA meetings, the political salons, and the last critical piece of infrastructure in our little underground system of care died when its doors closed.
My mother had been involved (and even run) a lot of these events, systems, and programs. She took in a lot of kids while they got on their feet after being kicked out.
She did her best to fund the programs she could with her salary from IBM, as well as from the profits of her selling BDSM erotica to others on what would become the internet but was at the time a specialized system with restricted access. She called in every favor she had from her days as the BDSM Queen of the Castro back rooms to try and keep these places running. When every other queer person in our community had given up hope, were too afraid of what would happen if they kept showing up, the people from her kink days were willing to step up.
And with every single one of them who stepped up to bat, the rumblings in the community got louder and liuder. It was proof they said, that we were all predators and child molestors. The fact that so many of our reinforcements were known “degenerates”.
But they were our reinforcements because they were often the only ones of us who knew they could survive/handle shit if the broader community decided to do a hate crime on them for trying to preserve the infrastructure we had built for queer youth.
They were our reinforcements because they loved those kids and wanted to keep them safe and they knew without them we couldn’t.
So whenever I hear the implication that allowing the kinksters of our community to be visible at pride is “taking spaces away from LGBT youth” I hear nothing but a middle aged man hissing “dyke as his fingers close around my wrist. I hear nothing but police raids on a youth center whose only crime was treating queer adults and children with dignity. I hear nothing but Bruce’s quiet sobs and the whispered reassurance from his husband when they locked up the cafe for the last time. I hear nothing but the assertion that it doesn’t matter whether we bled, fought, or died for your right to feel accepted and safe in the world if we did it while handing out orange juice and condoms at the monthly fetish party in their off time.
Simply put. It don’t sound any different to me than the people who destroyed our queer youth spaces on purpose out of bigotry. I’m sorry. That will not change.