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Kink at pride discourse sucks
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this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2023
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this is the definitive image on all LGBTQ+ gatekeeping discourse, in my humble opinion (but especially during pride month.) i am constantly obligated to say: i don't care if you think asexuals aren't valid, or bi/pan lesbians don't exist, or yadda yadda we need to keep pride safe for work. shut the fuck up! these don't matter!
and while i'm sure some people do hold them very sincerely: it's definitely conspicuous how i have almost never heard these positions expressed in any real-life queer space. these issues are so distorted by online spaces in terms of how prominent they are, and it's worth remembering that
I'd rather have kink at pride than exclusionists at pride.
100% Rather things that push the edges than nothing at all.
I'd rather have neither
Hard disagree. Kink belongs at pride. It's always been there and is a part of our history. Kinksters are often the people who work the hardest to keep us safe, and who will fight the cops beside us if needed. Besides, pride is specifically a celebration of freaks and weirdos, the kinds of people whose sex lives are condemned as immoral by the majority. Kinksters have every right to be there.
I can not personally like having it there but still support them being there if they so choose. I never said they didn't have a right to be there, I'd just prefer if they don't intentionally give more ammunition to those that don't like us.
Dude, this is PRIDE. This isn't "be ashamed and hide who you are so that other people aren't inconvenienced." Seriously.
Okay? And? You do you, feel free to do that in public, but don't expect me to respect you. The hostility for an opinion that doesn't affect you in any way is ridiculous.
Mixed messages. What you are expressing is shame.
you have a right to not like things, but please internalize that right-wingers are never going to care how much you sanitize pride and this kind of placation is useless. for them queer people existing is the ammo—the problem they identify with society—and the only acceptable solution to that problem is to drive queer people into the closet and kill the ones who refuse. if it wasn't loud, proud queer people they'd manufacture outrage about quiet, docile ones—and i know what i prefer personally.
This exactly. They always start with pointing at the most obvious, easiest targets, but if those people go down they'll just work their way inward to hate on """more normal""" queer people more explicitly than they ready do.
I'll bet you anything, if the current hate campaign against trans folks wins, it'll be gay people on the chopping block all over again, next. Same principle.
They like to divide and conquer, and we're stronger if we don't let them divide us, especially not just in hopes that they won't go after ourselves when they're done going after those weirder or kinkier or more whatever than ourselves.
See also: they have an entirely manufactured idea of what a trans person is and have no problem acting like a) trans men don't exist and b) trans women and drag queens are all pedos. They're not tied to reality at all in what they say.
Kinksters at pride aren't there to "intentionally give more ammunition" to bigots. They're there for the same reasons everyone else is. Pride and loudness and "I"m here" in the face of internalized, societally imposed shame, pride in the people who came before and fought for our rights, and so on.
Sometimes a subset of them make me kind of uncomfortable, too, but so do a lot of things - I can deal with uncomfortable.
The other thing that has kinda already been mentioned is that it's good to normalize being different. During the lavender scare in the 1950s, you could be fired for having a missing button on your blouse, because that suggested homosexual tendencies. Even if you were straight. This got so bad at one point that people started introducing themselves and including their wide and kids in their introduction just to allay any fears that they might be gay/bi.
We have pride parades to not only protect LGBT people, but everyone. So that the people with the missing buttons aren't reported by the Carols and Karens of the world, so that people with naturally effeminate mannerisms aren't bullied in schools, so that kids sho grow up in same sex families can live in peace in screwed up states like Florida or screwed up countries like Russia. Pride keeps the sort of tribalistic evil showcased in Lord of the Flies at bay.
good point! you're seeing this now with some of the anti-trans bills that pass too, where they're still impacting totally cis, totally heterosexual women because of how sweeping they are (and even if the drafters obviously intend for a bill to be selectively interpreted and enforced)
What alyaza said. No matter how you bow and scrape and try to be "normal," they will still hate you. You might as well be as loud and weird as possible.
You don't win by becoming normal. You win by making it okay to be weird.
Hard disagree. You don't gain acceptance by swinging the pendulum into the stratosphere. The argument is: "See? We're normal people, just like you" not "look at us exposing ourselves in public, accept it or gtfo."
The only people I've seen "exposing themselves in public" at pride are the nude bicyclists, who are a staple of pride in my city. And why shouldn't they? It's absurd that we've made the human body into a taboo. There's nothing inherently sexual or harmful about nudity. If they were, I dunno, visibly aroused that would be another thing. But the people having public orgies at pride are a product of your imagination.
Moreover, the whole point of pride is not that we're normal, it's that we're different and that's okay. There is nothing wrong with being a freak, weirdo, or societal outcast. If you want to live in a Satanic lesbian BDSM commune, you should be able to do that without the rest of society trying to suppress you. People should not have to conform to be accepted.
For a gay furry, you seem to have internalized a lot of conservative Christian propaganda. I don't mean this as an insult, but I think you'd do well to learn some queer history. The people who fought and died for the rights we queers enjoy now were not, for the most part, the sanitized gays you see on TV with their vanilla sex lives and 2.5 adopted kids and skinny white bodies. They were queers who called themselves slurs and were proud of it, sex workers who blurred the lines between trans and crossdresser and threw bricks at cops, people who had threesomes in back alleys and didn't care if they offended the sensibilities of The Normals. They were much more like the lesbian commune I mentioned than today's "respectable" gays.
As the saying goes, assimilation will not save us. And it's not gay as in happy, it's queer as in fuck you.
Maybe you would like to bring back the Annual Reminder. Historically, it was immediately superseded by the Stonewall Riots, then Christopher Street Liberation Day, then Pride. This sad placeholder during a time of disorganization became quite forgotten once there was literally anything else available.
But if you prefer it, organize it. Since the context has been changed so much, it would be way more pointless than the original. But nice an comfy and no challenging. Enjoy!
If you have a problem with people exposing themselves in public that's a fair line to draw. But it's not fair to draw an equivalence between that and kink generally.
Tough. Kinky people can be gay. Our sexuality is just as valid as yours. "Deal with it!"
Edit: I just notice you might be being ironic, saying you want to exclude kink but don't want to have exclusions.
Hi I'm gay. Kink isn't a sexuality. People who like Bluey can also be kinky, but that doesn't mean the show should show kink. You do you, but I still don't like seeing kink in public places. 🤷♂️
Genuine question: Why should anyone care what you like to see in public spaces? I'm honestly curious if you've examined that train of thought. Why should your personal feelings even enter into what is and is not acceptable in public?
Besides, you're a furry, yes? Every argument against kink in public is equally applicable to fursuits in public. "But those people do weird sex stuff and when I see them it makes me think about it" is every bit as true of furries as it is of kinksters.
Personally, I'm a little grossed out by some of the things I see among kinksters at pride. But I'm an adult and I can ignore harmless things I dislike.
Kink isn't "a" sexuality. It is a label we put on some people's sexuality that covers galaxies of different things. It can and often does refer to fundamental features of a persons sexuality without which they do not function on a sexual level. What they all have in common is being marginalized. Like you're doing now.