The middle-aged, White men who I grew up with said they were “fine” with gay people as long as they wouldn’t be subjected to PDA - as long as all signs of queer love could be outwardly erased. It’s a sentiment that tolerates queerness only if it stays within parameters - offering the kind of acceptance that comes with a catch. If this all sounds familiar, it’s because anti-kink rhetoric echoes the same socialized disgust people have projected onto other queer people when they claim that our love is not appropriate for public spaces.
Co-opting the language of sexual autonomy only serves to bury that truth and muddies the seriousness of other conversations about consent. But kinksters at Pride are not engaged in sex acts - and we cannot confuse their self-expression with obscenity. The most outrageous claim is that innocent bystanders are forced to participate in kink simply by sharing space with the kink community, as if the presence of kink at Pride is a perverse exhibition that kinksters pursue for their own gratification. When my own children caught glimpses of kink culture, they got to see that the queer community encompasses so many more nontraditional ways of being, living, and loving.Īnti-kink advocates tend to manipulate language about safety and privacy by asserting that attendees are nonconsensually exposed to overt displays of sexuality. Instead, homogenizing self-expression at Pride will do more harm to our children than good.
I agree that Pride should be a welcoming space for children and teens, but policing how others show up doesn’t protect or uplift young people. Thousands of users supported these posts, claiming that kink at Pride crosses a line because minors also attend events. That was pointedly the case this year when Twitter users argued that kink at Pride is a highly sexualized experience that children should be shielded from. Those hoping to oust kinksters often cite the presence of children as their top concern. Still, every year as Pride Month approaches, a debate erupts about whether kink belongs at Pride at all. It's not huge, but it's a meaningful step forward from an unexpected source.The kink community has participated in Pride since its inception - risking their jobs and safety to be authentically themselves in public. But it's a rare network show that actually cast transgender actors (a demographic who rarely get cast to play trans roles) as some of the most revolutionary trans women in history.
Contrasted with the 2017 movie Stonewall, where the protagonist is a fictional white gay man, this Comedy Central video holds true to its own narrative and paints a better story. Where many trans stories would cast a cisgender male actor to play a trans woman - like in the 2015 movie The Danish Girl - Drunk History cast trans women to play Johnson and Rivera and centered the story completely on them. Weirdly enough, one of the best retellings of the Stonewall riots was on Comedy Central's Drunk History. In fiction, Stonewall is rarely seen, and when it is, it's often sanitized to be more palatable to a "mainstream audience" (i.e., straight white people). Gay Pride March, New York, NY, June 26, 1994. It's an excellent starting point for further research. Johnson covers the revolutionary life of one of the women integral to Stonewall. However, the Netflix documentary The Death and Life of Marsha P. Unfortunately, these stories are rarely told on screen, and people enraged by injustice today can't see how similar protests worked more than 50 years ago. Pride itself owes its very existence to a riot, and it took radical acts of change to just start the conversation about LGBTQ+ issues in America, a conversation that continues to this day.
When they demanded to do sex verification checks on trans women, a spontaneous protest broke out, and at the forefront of those protests were trans women of color like Marsha P.
On June 28, 1969, police raided the Stonewall Inn, a meeting place for LGBTQ+ New Yorkers. And it's important to honor and remember that now more than ever. However, as Pride and the Black Lives Matter movement collide in 2020, it's worth remembering that the LGBTQ+ rights movement owes its very being to riots led by people of color. Normally, this would mean a stream of rainbow logos and vodka-sponsored parades, but between the coronavirus pandemic and the protests against police brutality, celebrations have been scaled back. Pride month started on Monday with less fanfare than has been typical in recent years.