Woven foundations of the queer community
Making the case for why kink, leather and BDSM belong at Pride
If you have ever attended a Pride parade, you may have experienced the vibrant festivities featuring an endless stream of colourful floats, merchandise and ecstatic music. This is, as cisgender, heterosexual and white-dominant society deems it, a palatable celebration of 2SLGBTQIA+ community.
In conflict with this “ideal” representation of the community is the supposedly distasteful involvement and attendance of the kink/leather community at Pride. Consider the following controversial, now deleted, viral tweet: “Please don’t bring your k*nks/fet*shes to Pride, there are minors at Pride and this can sexualize the event.”
Although it is understandable that parents have a desire to specifically curate an ideal environment for their children, this unfortunately manifests as a relentlessly regressive attempt to hide any semblance of sex and kinks from youth. This rhetoric is harmful on innumerable levels, emphasizing that sex and sexual desire is inherently gross — that sex is taboo.
As such, attempting to eradicate any mention of sex and kink from Pride both serves to appease the cishet, white and able-bodied world. It connotes that queer sex specifically is dirty and shameful. In essence, stigmatizing sex and kink at Pride contradicts Pride’s intent: a protest spearheaded by sex workers and various intersectional subcultures within the 2SLGBTQIA+ community aiming for consensual queer sexual and cultural liberation. Queer sex, in itself, is inherently an act of rebellion.
This distaste towards kink and leather at Pride is also based on a fundamental misunderstanding on what the subcommunities themselves stand for. While it is easy to categorize them as being simply overtly sexual, it is important to emphasize that these were, above all, communities by and for queer and trans individuals to find family and the sex-positive empowerment that they were denied. For countless individuals who were rejected by friends and family, leather bars and clubs became safe spaces for them.
The Stonewall Uprising itself additionally has connections to kink, considering that numerous patrons of the bar were Black and Latinx trans women of colour, drag queens —which at the time, were considered cross dressers by cishet police officers and were policed — and leather daddies. Essentially, the kink and leather community, a notable number of which are Black and Latinx Trans folks, laid major groundwork for queer rights.
During the height of the AIDS epidemic, when cishet political figures, including Ronald Reagan, the then-President of the United States, were dismissive towards the so-called “gay plague,” patients with AIDS were estranged from society and effectively othered. It was the kink and leather community who stepped up, dedicating their time to embrace AIDS patients when disease transmission mechanisms were unknown. Such AIDS patients and Leather caregivers lived in “leather families,” communities of individuals who would unconditionally care for one another when biological relations refused to. In addition, the Kink and Leather community began hosting parties and BDSM events to fundraise for patients' costly care funds.
The Kink and Leather communities’ contributions during the AIDS epidemic and to the 2SLGBTQIA+ community were so great that the city of San Francisco recently openly commended them for their work, some appreciation long overdue.
No one has any right to litigate how individuals should identify, behave and express themselves to be valid within the 2SLGBTQIA+ community. Yet, unfortunately, we see this narrative occurring frequently, both from cishet society and the 2SLGBTQIA+ community. We witness society expressing transphobic rhetoric, questioning as to whether or not asexual and aromatic folks really belong and debating the validity of the leather and kink community, even considering their immense contributions to queer rights. However, it is essential to note that nobody should need to contribute to 2SLGBTQIA+ advocacy in order to prove their validity. They are valid simply for being them. To uphold such an expectation is to aid in reinforcing the homophobic and transphobic narrative created by dominant white, cisgender, heterosexual and able-bodied society.
We cannot abandon community members without reinforcing our oppression by cishet society's homogenized and “pristine” ideal of what the 2SLGBTQIA+ should look like. Kink and leather belong at Pride because above all, they are woven into it’s foundations: queer joy and sexual liberation for all.
