Here’s one for the terminally online.

Before we go forward I want to position my stakes in this argument. I’m pretty open on this blog about being bisexual. I mean of the 16 reviews I wrote in 2021, seven have either featured a textually queer protagonist, were created by a queer artist or both. But I’m also a parent (this is why four of the 16 2021 reviews have been of children’s media.) And as such I am a cause of kids at Pride parades as, prior to COVID anyway, I regularly brought my daughter to Pride.

Now another important question is why I want to bring my daughter to Pride parades and the answer to that is because I want her to grow up with a broad understanding of the ways love and enjoyment of others can manifest. I want to raise a child who understands these things well so that she can make healthy choices about her own life that will forward her happiness. I am not bringing my daughter to pride just for a parade with a bunch of rainbow floats (though she does appreciate those.) Pride parades are political actions. In fact, the bank sponsored displays, mainstream political parties marching for publicity and, worst of all, uniformed authority figures are the parts of Pride I have the least time for. On the other hand, I supported the 2016 Black Lives Matter action at Pride in Toronto. I also supported the right of QuAIA to march in Toronto pride parades and was aghast at the municipal interference to silence them. There has never been a time that Pride parades were not fundamentally political actions – and sites of political struggle. With that in mind we should not be surprised to see bigots attempting to use Pride as this vague notion of an event as a site of political struggle now. But I do think it’s important to understand who is doing this and why.

It’s fucking nazis

In 2020 4chan nazis got some attention for Operation Pridefall – a concerted effort by far-right participants of that hellish site to alienate the general public from the LGBTQ community. It’s significant to note that children were a preferred target. One participant said, “Tiktok -> Convince any gen-z sibling or relatives to do some kind of shitty gesture / charade / whore dance, then add LGBT critical captions on top of it and repost.”

The general operating procedure for Pridefall was to post anti-LGBTQ memes and generally do as much as possible to shift discourse such to present queer people, specifically participating in pride month activities, in a negative light. And, wouldn’t you know it, but this has become a predominant image shared around the web in May 2021 – just in time for Pride month!

Let’s be clear about a few realities of this picture. The kinksters in it are not touching the girl, menacing her or causing her any discomfort. The girl in the picture is obviously happy to be there. She’s got a flag, and several strings of beads on, she’s smiling and reaching out to pat the dog-man as if her were a puppy. He’s acting like a dog. This isn’t sexual. It’s just play. And frankly this man is dressed in no more revealing a manner than any number of guys you might encounter on a beach or at a swimming pool.

It’s something of a mistake to assume that kink is just sex. As many people have pointed out, there are a fair number of asexual people who participate in kink. They aren’t there for the fucking – they’re there for the play. People within the BDSM community refer to their games as “scenes” and there is certainly an element of theatricality to the bondage scene. People engaged in kink might and deriving sexual pleasure from their activities. But they’re definitely either putting on a show or playing games every time. Regardless of if there is any sexual pleasure there is, in BDSM a performative and playful pleasure that need not have anything whatsoever to do with sex. And it’s that performative and playful enjoyment on display here. These three very good boys are playing dog. The little girl, who looks to be just around the right age for play-acting games, is obviously enjoying the scene. Nobody’s boundaries are being violated. Nobody is being compelled to do anything. Nobody in the scene is making use of a power differential to impose upon another outside the bounds of adult affirmative consent. But for nazis this photo provides great mimetic fodder for a “think of the children” narrative that is divorced from reality and instead cleaves directly to the revulsions of the straights for the queer.

Fucking nazis using manipulative framing of pictures like this is the core of this awful discourse. And honestly we should be reminding any concern trolls popping up that they’re carrying water for nazis. Fuck nazis.

Children

The phrase “puriteen” has been tossed about for the last few weeks. This is a mythical child who is incensed that their internet experience includes adults who sometimes talk about sex, share sexually explicit information or are just, in general sexual beings. Note, the “puriteen” isn’t a person responding against sexual harassment but is rather somebody who proactively attempts to censure third parties for engaging in sexualized behaviour in digital public spaces.

There’s a fair bit of hand-wringing about kids today who don’t know how we all struggled but the reality is that these “puriteens” are really two separate phenomena:

1. Overly sensitive adolescents.
2. Nazis pretending to be overly sensitive adolescents.

The solution to both is the same: block, disengage, and if they fall into making overtly bigoted statements report. There is nothing to be gained from arguing with children. There is even less to gain from arguing with 4chan nazis. The former are not yet at the point where they should be having any say in how adults at an adult event comport themselves. The latter should should be suffocated under the weight of deafening silence.

And all the rest

There are also various concern trolls and online entertainers who make money off of inserting themselves into arguments. None of these people should be taken seriously for the simple reason that none of these people have any actual stakes in the argument. They’re just in it for the clicks. I will not mention who these people are because hate-clicks are clicks too. Needless to say there’s never a good reason to engage with a Twitch debater.

But what about accessibility?

This isn’t a thing. I know a fair number of asexual people. As I said, a few of them are into kink. The vast majority aren’t interested in sex for themselves but are perfectly happy to see others getting it. The few sex-revulsed asexual people I know probably wouldn’t ever be interested in attending a Pride parade in the first place. See the push to make Pride child-friendly is just garden-variety neoliberalism. The semiotic signifiers of Pride are being decoupled from their original use and repackaged as commodities to sell: cute tee-shirts and rainbow flags. This is what lead to the discomfort that mainstream society had with the QuAIA people and with BLM. Divisive politics! At a parade? Where’s my fainting couch?

This sense is engendered that Pride Must Be For Everyone. And that means sanding down all the rough bits. The leather daddies are welcome too, as long as they leave the harnesses at home. After all There Are Children In The Audience Who Might Ask Questions. The assimilationist wants Pride to be an affirmation that society is now OK with The Gays. And if people do things that interfere with that – if people express their diverse strange desires as diverse and as strange that would put lie to the affirmation. It would show that, in fact, society is not yet OK with The Gays. Society is OK with an abstract idea that some people have otherwise heteronormative relationships with people of their own gender, but don’t be weird about it.

And of course don’t be weird about it is defined with a particularly cisheteronormative lens. Two men kissing is allowable. We can pretend that one is “the girl” in the relationship. But drag queens or, heaven forbit, trans women must be rendered invisible. If they can’t pass they can’t participate. After all the bounds between kink and play never really existed. So the drag queen, who lives entirely in the theatrical, entirely in the domain of play, is a figure of fear and disgust. And the transphobes make no distinction between the drag queen and trans woman – who they are desperate to pathologize, to flatten to a paraphilia, a sexual deviancy.

The question of “kink at pride” is certainly one of access. But it’s one that prefers the access of people like me – heteronormatively passable queers who bring their kids for the party – over the people who still face real obstacles to access everywhere else. Now I need to be clear: I have never seen the risk that my child might see a person in a state of undress, or in a state of unusual dress, as anything even remotely resembling a barrier of access to Pride parades. But remember when I described Pride as a site of political conflict? I know whose side I’m on here. And the access of trans women and leather daddies is not something that should not be denied so that people who already have perfectly reasonable access to the world can continue to glide about with minimal resistance. I reject the premise that the presence of “kink” denies access to parents with children. But even if it did, as I said about science fiction conventions before, universal communities don’t exist. The Pride parade is a moment of explicitly political direct action to show that queer people in all our beautiful and strange diversity exist. The access of those who will not pass as normal should be preferred. It is their parade first and foremost. If that means a few sex-discomforted teenagers feel like they cannot access it so be it.

One influential online personality argued that Pride should be as open as possible in order to help normalize queer desire. This guy is in much the same boat as me – in that he’s so normal-presenting I didn’t actually realize he wasn’t straight. This personality is also, as usual, dead wrong. Fuck respectability. Coddling normies doesn’t move the struggle for liberation. Rights aren’t granted – they’re taken.

This gets to my last point. A kinkster I know pointed out that this whole argument was silly because they’re going to turn up and march anyway. They’ll come out with leather harnesses, cuffs and collars, they’ll come with dog masks and with rings affixed to chains around their necks and it won’t fucking matter if some children on twitter don’t think they should be there because the leather daddies, drag queens and dog boys know their right to present as they do has nothing to do with permission. Something is a right when it cannot be taken from you. If it’s a conditional acceptance extended as long as you’re not weird about it, it isn’t a right. The Pride march has always been about creating a right. The old phrase is, “we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it,” not, “we’re here, we’re queer, please like us.” It is a show of force, a presentation that some strangenesses will not be surrendered. If you want an all-ages, de-sexed, pride event, make your own. But in the meantime, don’t expect you will stop the kinky from marching.