The Same “Kinks at Pride” Discourse: Summarized

 

The “Kinks at Pride” debate is arduous and long-lived. Every year, it recirculates the media in June, and every year, my opinions slightly change. 

As Vox remembers: “In 2018, the Advocate reminded us, listicle style, that Pride has always been about sex; in 2019, parents debated openly about kink and whether it was suitable for children; and in 2020, it was written that the debate will never go away.”

You can find endless sources of varying opinions on this topic all through the month, but here are the main areas to consider.

The Conflation of Queerness and Sex

There is a natural association between sexual orientation and sex. For many people, sex is a large factor of intimacy and love. 

However, despite its relative importance to many members of the community, sex is still only a part of sexual orientation. Conflating sex with queerness can lead to many harmful misconceptions about queer people, including fetishization and the exclusion of groups like the asexual community.

These misconceptions may additionally isolate people who might not identify as asexual but view their sexuality as secondary to their romantic attraction. Members of the queer community who have a specific combination of sexual and romantic attraction (such as biromantic and heterosexual) might also feel uneasy at the conflation of sex and sexual orientation.

Asexuality exists on a spectrum. In general, “ace” people “may have little interest in having sex, even though [many] desire emotionally intimate relationships.” Asexual communities, as do all queer communities, deserve to be visible at Pride.

Sexual Liberation

At the same time, sexual liberation also certainly has a place at Pride. Queerness draws attention towards breaking boundaries and binaries, and sex under the patriarchy is often used as a force of oppression to control women, members of the LGBTQ+ community, or both. Safe sexual liberation, including sex-positivity movements and sex work, fights this oppression and often allows us to regain control of our own bodies.

The presence of kinks certainly represents sexual liberation for many, but it could contribute to the conflation of sex and queerness. A possible solution involves decentering sex and kinks at Pride without excluding them from the celebration. The issue lies in determining the boundaries of exclusion and centralization. 

“Family-Friendly”

The term “family-friendly” is not very friendly when it comes to Pride. When associated with queerness, the phrase can trigger varying levels of negative reactions from LGBTQ+ communities. Just typing out this paragraph sparked a small simmer of frustration in my chest. 

The reason? Homophobic and transphobic families and institutions have long since used the term “family-friendly” to control queer people and their actions. Earlier this year, homophobic social media users took to Twitter to criticize Lil Nas X’s song “Montero” because they deemed the music video inappropriate for children.

This week, a group of White women allegedly asked two women to stop kissing in public due to the presence of children. When confronted and filmed, “Deb from Oakland’ stated, “Do you have any children? Good, because you’d be a f**king terrible dad.” 

The White man accompanying her pointed in another direction and said, “You have kids here still. Still have kids here.” 

All children and adolescents are vulnerable and deserve to be protected, but queer/trans minors especially require our protection. In my opinion, they should be allowed to enjoy Pride and find solidarity within their community. But how do we determine what is truly “family-friendly” when homophobia and transphobia continue to use that language to control our actions to this day? 

Kinks may or may not be appropriate for children, but it is essential to detangle that criticism from homophobia before making any conclusions. Personally, I do not know how to draw those lines, and I do not know who would be the authority on doing so.

Consent

Most recently, the topic of consent has appeared in these conversations. As an essential component of safe kink (and all other sexual) practices, consent is considered a necessary “opt-in” dialogue that requires the ongoing agreement of all people involved. 

Vox writer Alex Abad-Santos scathingly describes the current discussion of consent and kinks at Pride. “The idea is that, hypothetically speaking, a person — not just unsuspecting children with their parents — who shows up to Pride and sees an exposed piece of flesh or a glimmer of genitalia did not consent to it and could possibly be harmed by it, thus limiting their access to Pride.”

Abad-Santos and many other queer writers support the narrative that kinks belong at Pride. Vice correspondent Daisy Jones emphasizes that this discourse needs to retire. Author of Rainbow Revolutions Jamie Lawson explains that the goals of the queer and kinky communities have similar aims. 

“[Q]ueer people offer a different view of what sex is from what mainstream, capitalist, Western society wants it to be – reproductive... The BDSM or kinky communities recentre sex around pleasure, not reproduction.”

I feel a little less cynical towards this idea of public consent. I do believe that witnessing sexual acts in public does require resounding agreement from all parties. However, I don’t believe that this agreement is necessary for all kinky expressions. For example, in my opinion, wearing leather is not a sexual act on its own and therefore does not require consent. 

This example is relatively tame. Many other kinks, like wearing a dog collar as your sexual partner controls the leash, fall into a gray area of audience participation and sexualization. It is not easy to determine which kinks require or do not require consent. It seems as though social acceptance guides this determination.

This social “respectability” is a central issue to Pride itself. If Pride is a celebration of resistance against social norms, how can we look to social acceptance for guidance on regulations? To many members of the community, this valid discussion of consent seems to suspiciously echo the “family-friendly” discourse in regards to gatekeeping Pride.

Yale professor of LGBTQ philosophy Robin Dembroff told Abad-Santos, “Respectability politics is the wedging weapon that conservatives have always used against the queer community — getting us to turn against each other by always trying to live up to their ideas of what a human should be.” 

Abad-Santos writes, “If you’re willing to exclude people based on their bedroom fetishes and kink, the worry is that then you’ll exclude already-marginalized LGBTQ members like sex workers, incarcerated people, and substance users.”

Maybe a solution is separating different groups into different times (family-friendly mornings and 18+ nights) or different communities into different regions (BDSM tents away from ace-oriented tents). Maybe not. Overall, I believe that kinks belong at Pride, and I also believe that asexual and aromantic communities and children and all queer subgroups belong at Pride as well. The overall goal should always be inclusion for all groups, and there is no reason to assume that this is impossible.

 
Jennifer Marerbatch 4