vulgarweed:

iwantthatbelstaffanditsoccupant:

grace-and-ace:

jenroses:

thehoneyvenomhive:

butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway:

the-sunshine-cult:

I don’t know any history surrounding that but kinks and poly are not LGBT+. They deviate from social norms, certainly, but they’re adjectives, not subjects.

okay idk if that made sense im not an english major guys

Okay so I’ve made about a dozen of these posts in the last month or two, so I’m not going to get as exhaustive as I sometimes do, but here’s the history that my mother and aunties taught me about kink and polyamory as queer.

When I was growing up, I was told that the kink community was the physical space in which the queer community existed and that non-monogamy/polyamory as the concepts that exist today were born directly out of queer culture and the environments that shaped it.

Basically, back in the early years when most of queer culture was an arrestable offense and people mostly only got to meet their partners in the backrooms of old speakeasies and nightclubs, kink spaces were doing the same thing and were one of the only non-mob owned options for gatherings. Kink communities themselves were almost entirely made up of queer folks already anyways because surprise surprise a community made mostly of abuse survivors is gonna have pretty high rates of queer folks in it. And because of the semi-public nature of the spaces and the limited safe dating options polyamory and related non-monogamous practices became common place.

They became so common place in fact that queerness and queer culture completely and foundationally shaped the discussions around consent, relationship needs, emotional connections, and ethical behavior that became central to kink and polyamory as practices. They became so common place in part because it made sense, in part because the cultures all needed each other, and in part because, as my mother always said, “if society had already damned you just for being queer, what did you have to lose by trying all the other things society was going to damn you for as well?” This, incidentally, is also why there have historically been such high numbers of queer folk in illegal occupations like sex work and why my mom and aunties also used to consider sex work as a culture pretty fucking queer too.

But the years went by and your average, “respectable” white gay and lesbian folks with their picket fence day dreams started making progress. They started kicking people to the curb in an effort to make queerness look less “challenging” and different. Bye bye, bisexuals, bye bye drag and trans culture, bye bye non-monogamy what do you mean you actually think the “slippery slope” to gay marriage also leading to polygamy might be a good thing? Bye bye all you sex freaks, sexuality is something your born with and you can’t help who you love, it’s not like all that disgusting talking-about-sex-and-building-the-entire-network-of-sex-ed-information-we-used-to-desperately-try-and-survive-the-AIDS-crisis-ew-you-perverts-our-sex-is-beautiful-and-pure-like-marriage! And so on and so forth.

See, when it was all about survival, the distinction that Straight people drew between gay, kinky, polyamorous, trans, ace, etc was irrelevant. They’d kill us all the same so we might as well band together and make a world in which the next generation might not just live but thrive. But once it became about gaining access to state acceptance and making room within the legal framework that already existed, those of us who were too scary to Straight society, who still needed the hierarchy destroyed, not just expanded, became dead weight. Our labor, our physical space, our intellectual efforts all became irrelevant and all that mattered was when the Straights looked at White Cis Gays they saw Us instead. So the White Cis Gays fixed that by making it clear they thought we were just as disgusting as the Straights thought we were. They abandoned us and took our history and our language and our fucking lives with them and said we weren’t ~allowed~ to have it. And because those of us who were marginalized in many ways or who were doubly or triply damned were more likely to have suffered massive losses during the AIDS crisis and to still be living in poverty, in crime, and in general destitution of social capital, we’ve been fighting an uphill battle not to be erased ever since.

So now you have a whole generation or two or three who grew up being told a sanitized history where a “drag queen” threw the first brick at Stonewall, Pride wasn’t started by one of the bisexual Queens of Kink, and non-monogamy hasn’t been the natural progression of so many of our communities for generations. And they tell us we never existed, we’re just secret straighties thinking our gross sex lives make us queer, we could just choose to be respectable and “normal” like everyone else and then we wouldn’t be “bullied” (because god forbid our actual oppression be recognized) and they completely miss the irony.

And as much as I hate that I have to list my credentials in order for there to be a chance in burning hell for this response to be considered legitimate, I am the nonbinary, bisexual, polyamorous, kinky, intersex child of a bisexual, kinky, polyamorous woman who spent all of my life and most of hers in the heart of Queer culture and politics to the point that she put me on the stand in front of the entire school board and a third of the state at age 10 to fight for our right to participate in the Day of Silence without fear of suspension, expulsion, abuse, or injury/death. I was on my mother’s hip at the state capitol protests with police in riot gear ready to do whatever it took to prevent us from entering the building. I am Queer in so many ways, including ones no one can dare fucking argue and so was my mother before me and my aunties before her, and this is THEIR history I am telling and will keep telling until I’m dead because I will rot before I let people erase their memories, blood, and joy from our history by claiming that kink and polyamory don’t belong.

I apologize for that all sounding angry and upset. It is not aimed at anyone in particular. I am just very very tired and it’s almost Passover which means that my auntie’s are a lot more on my brain than usual and I am just so exhausted by the way I have been mocked and belittled for months now over things that were simply Truth when I was growing up. Please understand how much history is denied and how many ancestors are dishonored by this rhetoric of “who REALLY belongs in the community?”

We were not supposed to be an exclusive club with a guard at the gate. We were supposed to be a role model by which society learned to better itself and treat us ALL with dignity and humanity. And I am tired of seeing people pretend otherwise.

We were not supposed to be an exclusive club with a guard at the gate.
We were supposed to be a role model by which society learned to better
itself and treat us ALL with dignity and humanity. And I am tired of
seeing people pretend otherwise.

When I met my “First queer person ™” back in 1990, one of the things she said to me that I spent about 27 years unpacking was this:

“monogamous heterosexual relationships are patriarchal bullshit.”

I took offense at the time. But when you don’t let people use words like “queer” to describe “everyone who isn’t in this Normative Bubble of heterosexual serial monogamy”, you have to get pretty specific about the fact that STRAIGHT refers to this concept of being “normal” which in this culture has meant for many years “Straight, cis, monogamous (or doing your best to fake all of the above)” 

Quit fucking gatekeeping.

The people who hate us hate all of us. Joining them in their hatred doesn’t solve the problem. 

The way they win is if they get us to fight each other. 

I don’t reblog sensitive topics on this blog, but this is exactly what I had a long conversation about recently. I’m not young, and I remember shit like this as it was happening. polyamory is queer as fuck and learn to respect that

Ok none of this is pleasant conversation…but they weren’t pleasant times, nor enlightened POV: ( I was in high school and college during the AIDS crisis, and lived in sheltered surburbia, hours away from the Big Bad City, and then in a college town that was still very conservative. Both were in the US)

From my experience, this community patchwork of queer/gay/kinky/poly was a popular view in the 70s and very early 80s, and was a city phenomenon. After the AIDS crisis expanded, there was a sense that the disease was caused by a lack of “virtuous” behavior (not just spread that way..but actually caused by it), and morality would save us (George Michael videos promoting *monogamy*, for instance). I remember feeling safe because I was monogamous at that time. Doing what was “right” kept me safe.

And the shift went kind of like this: Accept gay people because they can be “sexually responsible” (read that as monogamous– because that was the “better” solution, as opposed to multiple partners. Remember, we didn’t know how safe you had to be for safe sex yet. We still thought toilet seats and sneezing were dangerous.) And bisexuals were seen as “contaminating” the straight community by serving as a connection with the gay community– the straight viewpoint was only gay people carried the disease.

Drug users were added later, though they were seen as decadent city-dwellers who were hanging with other “immorals”. (No one in suburbia thought they were in close contact with any IV drug users). Gay people were seen also as city partiers who had multiple partners and did drugs and everything else that came with being outside the boundaries of conventional society…and to an extent that may have been true, as @butts-bouncing-on-the -beltway describes. There is often a bond amongst the excluded. On Long Island we saw NYC as the Land of Decadence. And parts of it as actual Hell ( and my god some of it was so dilapidated, unlike today, that that image made a certain amount of sense)

And monogamous bisexuals simply didn’t exist. They were all liars out to ruin the safety and health of the straight community. So it really was a moral framework we were trying to fight our way into and people were trying to gain equality by being more like straight people.

The early marriage rights movement with Andrew Sullivan capitalised on acceptance by being just like straight people…so there was distance between marginalised groups now, depending on how *relatable* they could become. Lesbians were seen as the easiest to tolerate, because they weren’t child molesters. ( I know, I know.) This is why many who grew up during this time have issues with accepting some of the kinkier aspects of their sexuality. It isnt just being “born with switched wires that reverse attraction, poor you”. There is a point where deliberate choice for behavior is involved. And that is where the disconnect often is. When we bring in actions and choice.

That disconnect is what allowed me to take an oath to become a teacher( back in 1989) because I had to swear to exhibit outstanding, morally upright conduct, even when I knew it really meant “don’t be queer” because I hadn’t done any of those “questionable” actions yet. I chose not to. That made me moral. I could separate myself from “them”. I thought about this, at 17. Whether I was breaking a vow. It mentioned sexuality, but the oath never did specify exactly how I was being moral or immoral.

I try not to look upon those people, that whole generation, actually, which absolutely included myself, too harshly. In a historical context, we have always allowed for assimilation of any minority group ( religious, racial, ethnic..etc) based on the theory that the dominant group will see they are “just like us” (us being, in the USA, anyway,…straight, white , Christian males) underneath the surface. Then once that is established, we can began to see differences again and allow for them. No. We are not all the same and we do not all value the same things. We have our cultural differences. And we can still maintain our rights.

What is interesting now is there are new shifts where many, many Millenials do not consider themselves straight. The idea of “normal” behavior is dissolving.

One brief addition to this incredibly important conversation: the leather pride flag was designed by a gay man in 1989, as a symbol of pride and defiance at the height of the AIDS crisis, and debuted at that year’s International Mr Leather, which is a very very gay event although kinky people of all orientations attend it. It’s the second-oldest of all the pride flags; only the original rainbow one predates it (1978). LGBTQ Leather people have always been on the front lines of the LGBTQ struggle – and yes, have often made common cause with straight kinky people because there is definitely common cause to be made. Prejudice against kink affects all kinky people regardless of orientation. And lines often blur in the community because many people are perfectly willing to do BDSM play with people of a gender they aren’t technically sexually attracted to.