Reframing 'Kink at Pride' Discourse
The problem isn't really the kids—even if the kids are causing some of the problems.
The discourse is bad this year, folks.
It’s not just that some out-of-touch brosocialist thinks kink at Pride prevents Pride events from being “queer-friendly” (what does that even mean?). It’s that we’re losing sight of the real problem because we can’t take a breath.
So then. Let’s take five and refocus.
Elvert Barnes/Flickr (CC-BY-SA) Remix by Ana Valens
“Kink at Pride” discourse is, at its core, about whether queer people have the right to free and open expression in public spaces. This includes sexual expression—or rather, what’s perceived as sexual expression, as not all kink expression is actually sexual (curious how ace kinksters are often left out of the discourse because they do not fit the homophobes’ “hypersexual gay predators” narrative).
I don’t see how you can advocate for queer liberation without concluding that yes, duh, queer kink is integral to a queer Pride event. Leashes and o-ring collars are to leatherdykes what marriage rings are to straight couples. Skinny white women with no bras and exposed pelvises are paraded across Houston St in Calvin Klein ads, but a gay man walking to Stonewall in a tight pair of leather jeans is labeled a child seducer. The ‘70s are calling, they want their homophobia back.
Pride celebrates the things we are most vilified for in American society: Queer sexual expression, queer erotic desire, queer romantic urges, queer sensual longings, and queer bodily autonomy. Pride emphasizes the right to have a non-normative gender with non-normative sexual desires (including no sexual desire) and to show up and show it off, no matter what that means for you or how you do it.
There are many attempts to neuter Pride’s power through wearing down dykes and fags with bad faith insinuations, particularly around “exposing kids to sex.” I find this irrelevant. If you do not want your kids to see sex at Pride, then do not take them to Pride events for adults. This is considered understandable for other public events where sexual expression happens openly and freely—Burning Man, Coachella, even your standard dance party. Until that changes, I find the anxiety over Pride to be suspect.
There is also the larger question of how we perceive sex and why we believe public sexual expression is uniquely bad, which is something I outlined in my article on public sex last July. To quote Patrick Califia,
Why is sex supposed to be invisible? Other pleasurable acts or acts of communication are routinely performed in public—eating, drinking, talking, watching movies, writing letters, studying or teaching, telling jokes and laughing, appreciating fine art. Is sex so deadly, hateful, and horrific that we can’t permit it to be seen? Are naked bodies so ugly or so shameful that we can’t survive the sight of bare tushes or genitals without withering away?
All that out of the way, I think it’s understandably infuriating to see the young queers and baby gays parrot the homophobic talking points about kink, leather, and public sex. But the ongoing discourse on social media would have you believe the biggest problem is the kids. That’s just not true.
Let’s face facts: We all deal with sexual shame. Practically all of us went through phases where we questioned leather sexuality at Pride. Some of us did it during our closeted days, others grappled with internalized homophobia while coming out.
For most of us, shame is not a one-time battle, but a life-long war. Our relationship with it is rooted in trauma for our queer identity. We are led to believe we are dirty, unlovable, unfuckable, and broken perverts because we do not fulfill society’s standards. If 10-, 20-, even 30-year-out queers still struggle with it, then it’s unrealistic to expect newly out queers to have all that under control.
As someone who went from being anti-kink-at-Pride as a teen to a leatherdyke, I suspect most radical queers veer toward the pro-kink camp as they start to work out their own relationship with sex and shame. But if maturity is cyclical, then so is the anxiety. On some level we need to accept the fact that there are always going to be babies (be they 19 or 49) losing it over leather.
That doesn’t mean we need to stop educating people on leather and public sex at Pride. Rather, it lets us dilenate between those working their shit out, and those who position themselves against queer sexual liberation on principle.
As I outlined for Daily Dot earlier this year, there’s an enormous moral panic going on right now against sex workers and the adult industry. This moral panic works in conjunction with larger institutional forces that wish to punish and marginalize sex workers. So for example, TikTok teens spreading disinformation on “porn addiction” are bolstered by organizations, campaigns, and politicians that have a vested interest in oppressing sex workers. This is how we get the misleading claim that PornHub has an enormous child sexual abuse material problem, even though every major social media company hosts way, way more child sexual abuse material than PornHub does (Facebook alone has 20.3 million reports compared to PornHub’s parent company, which clocks in around 13,000).
Obviously, it’s bad that 19-year-olds think porn is a literal drug that rots your brain. But it’s particularly bad because it’s supported by institutional powers and cultural whorephobia. That’s what makes the moral panic a problem, and that’s why the solution lies in resisting the politicians and their policies, not just the TikTokers.
The Kink at Pride moral panic functions similarly. White, Christian institutional religion feels threatened by queer sexual liberation and creates propaganda demonizing queers as sexual predators. Hundreds of right-wing think tanks, political organizations, and politicians peddle claims that queers will molest your Christian family’s children and turn them into brainwashed liberal perverts. LGBT assimilationist groups partner with the political establishment to reinforce homonationalism, or tying (specifically) homosexual identity with state pride. Even on a local level this happens: Milquetoast liberal LGBT organizations work in conjunction with the police to get official permits for their rainbow marches, which means inviting the very forces encouraged to enact violence against queers expressing their sexuality. (There’s a very long history of this in the Village alone, and not just with Pride)
These institutional forces filter information and propaganda down to create moral panics that benefit them. In this way, the problem is twofold: The institutions and the moral panickers. You can’t have one without the other.
Here’s where the problem starts with Kink at Pride discourse. The young baby queers that swallow this misinformation and storm up some spicy opinions for their 53 Twitter followers are not institutional forces. They’re not even the TikTokers peddling the misinformation (Vaush is far more analogous). The newly out babies and the teen queers are the very bottom of the food chain, the pawns carrying out marching orders they learned from somewhere else (usually more than one place). When we hyperfixate on them and frame this conversation as an elders-vs-kids problem, we are not even identifying 10 percent of the issue. Not even 5 percent. The babies end up like this because of the other 95 percent keeping all of our heads under water, both them and us.
Now, all this isn’t to rule out real issues with online harassment, horizontal violence, whorephobia, anti-kink disinformation, or the burnout that happens from living through this sort of in-community discourse over and over again. That’s real. I’ve dealt with it a lot, I should know.
However, when it comes to solving the Kink at Pride discourse, we cannot end this problem by simply duking it out on Twitter (if anything, we’re just making Twitter more money). We have to look higher up. This is about institutional power reinforcing a homophobic, whorephobic, and heteronormative white Christian hegemony demanding the faggots and dykes play by the rules. The institutions want you to hyperfixate on the puppets and ignore the pupeteers, because once you start pointing out the strings, then the propagandists’ show falls apart.
I suspect many of these babies will grow out of their baby years, because queer maturity is cyclical. But the institutions are here to stay. If you want to kill a hydra, don’t just slice off its heads. Grab a torch.