#the kink community was where we were safest
Assimilationist gays repeat the same rhetoric as conservatives and that’s a fact.
If you’re making fun of the angry queers, the punk queers with funny hair, the ones who dress funny and augment their bodies, the ones who thrive through drag and kink and polyamory, the ones who reject the 2.5 kids and a white picket fence, then guess what?
You have sided with the status quo, and I do not trust you.
For the record, I’m getting really fucking tired of people deciding to read this as
“Ren said wanting to have 2.5 kids and a white picket fence is bad!”
and
“Ren said you’re bad for not being Gay Enough!”
and
“Ren said kink is inherently queer!”
when the actual point of this post is that bootlickers mocking and tearing down all us freaks for being “too weird” and “too controversial” is assimilationist bullshit that needs to stop.
#but also#kink is an important part of queer history#so you can jot that down#you ain’t gotta be into it to acknowledge#that the kink scene was where we used to be the safest
“kink scene is where we used to be the safest” oh my god. literally oh my god. being sexualized and treated like a fucking fetish is not “safety.” please fucking go outside.
@renniequeer and the tags that @aeondeug posted are right though. Acting like they “did nothing but sexualise and fetishise” us is wrong and regressive.
In fact, during the AIDs crisis, the leather community was largely blamed because the majority within this community are queer men and women who were blamed by outsiders for spreading the disease and treated like how you’re treating them, despite practicing and being very adamant about safe sex. All of these links discuss the community’s outreach efforts which included becoming caregivers to those impacted by the virus, sexual education (as mentioned above) , even when non-leather queer people refused to.
(Ofc the links talk about sex/sex education so they are nsfw to an extent.)
I’m begging y’all to educate yourselves on the AIDS crisis and much of the activism that came before, during, and after it, because it would largely not exist without these people. Uneducated, arguably REG mindsets like this are harmful, and incorrect, and do nothing for anybody except allow cishets to continue acting the way they do.
Queer people voluntarily participating in kink or seeking and finding refuge in kink communities that were predominantly if not completely queer too is not “being sexualized and treated like a fucking fetish.” Kink communities were a place queerness was accepted, and specifically not sexualized and fetishized. Like it’s literally the opposite. Kink communities would have been one of the only places queerness wasn’t perceived as sexually deviant and predatory by default.
