Excerpt: The really radical act is to question the idea that any sexual act is somehow in itself transgressive. There will be an explosion of commentary and by that I mean, many tweets , and this will continue until July 2. Let me state unequivocally that yes, Kink belongs at Pride.
But to return to the perennial controversy: when it came up in my feeds this year, I set about explicitly asking people to identify sources for these denunciations of Kink, to see if there were actual attempts, on the literal ground, to ban it from Pride anywhere.
Are there harmful effects of such resistance to Pride online? The website Logically thinks so, writing that online campaigns against Kink at Pride deploy the usual rhetoric against queers that they are pedophiles seeking to harm children, that Kink and BDSM reflect violent tendencies, and so on , and that a lot of this bleeds into real life anti-LGBTQ legislation, such as bathroom bills aimed against trans people, teens in particular.
Yeeaaah, weeeeelllll. GLAAD is that deeply annoying organisation you hear from any time a queer character in film or television hurts someone else. Its constant whining has guaranteed that we can only have deeply positive and anodyne representations of LGBTQ people, at least in the mainstream.
Are, for instance, trans teens under attack? Yes, but as we know from journalists like Kate Sosin who do the excellent and necessary work of reporting on such matters, the brunt of the actual harm comes to them from real-life politicians who feel driven and emboldened to initiate harmful legislation because of what they imagine is some massive tide of hatred towards trans people.
