Bucky Barnes

The reason you, gen Z queers, need to be kink positive isn't because you support those kinks. It is okay to be disgusted by them, actually.

The reason you need to support kinksters is because "these kinks are disgusting" is the framework the alt-right is using and will continue to use to outlaw you. They don't think you're any different from the guys at Pride in leather puppy suits. They think your ENTIRE EXISTENCE is sexual. They think you holding hands with someone of the same gender, or existing as a trans person at all, is the same as a straight couple playing tonsil hockey in public.

YOU ARE A FETISH TO THEM. That is all you will ever be to the alt-right. They will never see you as human. When they talk about "our children being exposed to sexual perversion" they don't mean BDSM like you think they do. They mean YOU.

The only way to preserve your own existence is to fight for the right of kink to exist, because the instant kink becomes taboo or outlawed again*, rest assured, the alt-right will become MUCH more transparent about just what they think about your existence.

When you harp on about disgusting kinks and how they need to be hidden or outlawed and how they're harmful and everyone who does them is (insert thing here), you are giving the alt-right the tools they will use to imprison you as soon as they have unchecked power to do so.

THAT is why kinksters have been part of the queer community, part of Pride, from the start. Because the only way to keep our community safe is by truly ensuring everyone has unlimited sexual autonomy so long as the activity is taking place between consenting adults. It's just like how abortion-related laws are the lynchpin for all manner of medical autonomy laws.

The queer community can't stand without kinksters and vice versa. Even if you yourself aren't a kinkster and find them disgusting, like it or not, that is just how it is.

The classic argument against being gay? Bringing up anal sex. A lot. In as graphic terms as possible. Just talking a lot about poop and anal prolapse and other viscerally disgusting things... and then using that as the reason why two men shouldn't hold hands in public. Because holding hands is actually signalling that you practice coprophagia, obviously.

(I am not exaggerating: spend any time listening to someone like Alex Jones talking about gay men, or reading anti-gay pamphlets from the 90s and early 2000s, and it's just nonstop discussions of poop and poop-related things)

One of the classic ways of othering immigrants? Talking about how disgusting their food is. Koreans eat rotten cabbage. Chinese people eat dogs. Fuck, there's a scene in It's A Wonderful Life where Mr. Potter is trying to flatter George Bailey and get him to give up the Building & Loan (while being extremely bigoted about the people George Bailey is helping), and he calls Italian immigrants "garlic-eaters." Because garlic is gross and smelly, obviously.

Women? Talk about how gross menstruation and vaginas are.

Trans people? Call a neovagina an "open wound" and wring your hands about how testosterone makes people smelly and hairy and ugly.

Unhoused people? Complain about how they're pissing and shitting in the street.