Pride (in the Name of Kink)

With June comes LGBTQ+ Pride and with it, the annual debate about who should get to march in the parade. This time I’m hearing that some LGBT people are uncomfortable with some of the more flamboyant elements of Pride, like the kink community in leather and harnesses, scantily-clad go-go dancer types, etc.

 

Some people apparently think the main Pride event should be very family friendly with any people they deem unseemly featured at a side event. The idea is that they didn’t consent to see someone walking in the parade in leather chaps or rainbow briefs. The idea of consent is important in things like touching or in-your-face nudity but I think at a Pride event, it’s more of a gray area. The more overtly sexual people aren’t necessarily in your face or forcing you into something. Nobody actually goes naked or touches you—if they did, I could see the problem with consent, but that’s not what’s happening here.

 

I think it’s different if you just see something that makes you uncomfortable or challenges you. I think then the onus is on you to adjust your behavior rather than on the person you’re seeing. You’re not always the center of it all. Just try to deal with something that makes you uncomfortable but isn’t necessarily pulling you into itself.

 

So I think people in the kink community and the scantily clad people should have a place in a Pride parade. The LGBT community should be a big tent and include as many letters in that acronym as we can.

 

I think the Pride parade is a “fair warning” event: You know you’re going to see some wild stuff there. It’s like when I saw Madonna in the Girlie Show, I wasn’t shocked at the topless pole dancer, because it was 1993 and I had fair warning about what I was going to because I’d been paying attention. Plus, guys—it’s a parade. It’s necessarily going to feature drag queens with a ton of makeup and sequins, twinks in rainbow briefs and all kinds of other pageantry, because a parade is about spectacle. It’s not going to be schlubs like me in Polo shirts marching down the street. Nobody would come.

 

I’m uncomfortable excluding some people in the kink community and people with a more outré appearance just because that makes people uncomfortable. Is there that much daylight between people in the LGBT community saying “I didn’t consent to see that” and homophobes saying “I don’t like when they shove it in my face”? One comes from an ally and one comes from a detractor but the message is the same: “You’re not publicly acceptable.” We shouldn’t send that message to anybody trying to join Pride. 

 

I’m not a flamboyant person. I’m perfectly happy living a quiet life with my husband and son. But I can’t forget—and the people objecting to the rowdier elements of Pride shouldn’t forget—that it wasn’t the clean-cut, well-mannered people who started the rebellion at Stonewall. It was Marsha P. Johnson and the trans women of color and the drag queens and the sex workers. It was people who didn’t fit in in many places and made people uncomfortable. I’m able to live my life with my husband and son, and we’re able to march down the street, because of the rabble-rousers and the shit-stirrers, who caused trouble just because of who they were and what they looked like.