This is such a bad-faith argument that I don’t even know where to start, @disabledstemstudent. But… let’s treat it like it’s in good faith and you’ve just got some shit to unpack.
Let’s start out with this: no one is fucking in public at Pride. Pride isn’t the Folsom Street Fair, which I often see it compared to, and all of the “look at this man getting fisted in public” or whatever comes from Folsom and is presented as taking place at Pride. It’s technically true that Folsom is a Pride event, because it’s a Leather Pride event, but you aren’t going to stumble across someone fucking in public at Folsom. You have to deliberately enter the closed-off area where Folsom takes place, so if you’re seeing fucking in public at Pride, you’re either at Folsom and that’s on you, or someone is doing something they shouldn’t be. We’ll come back to that second idea in a minute, but for now, let’s reiterate:
No one is fucking in public at Pride.
So what are we really talking about, here? What’s the real bugaboo that people are discussing?
Two things: public nudity and “leather/fetish/kink clothing”.
(I put quotes around the latter because what we normally refer to as “fetish clothing” is only a very narrow segment of what people wear for kink purposes, but I’ll get back to that, too.)
What is it that people are really objecting to, here? “I don’t want to see almost naked people in public. I don’t want to see clothing which I consider to be sexual signaling. Someone wearing a pup mask in public is engaging in a public scene and I don’t consent to being part of that.”
All of this hinges on the concepts of 1) consent and 2) how queer sexuality is viewed as opposed to cishetallo sexuality. So let’s start peeling all of that apart.
So let’s first talk about Folsom vs Pride. Folsom Street Fair in SF is literally what the ‘this should be in an 18+ space’ crowd is advocating for! This IS that space!
But people are (deliberately in many cases, ignorantly in others) conflating Leather Pride, in September, with the Pride which sprung from the 1970 Christopher Street Liberation Day March organized by Brenda Howard, among others. That March, a continuation of the East Coast Homophile Organization’s 4th of July Marches started in Philly in 1965, gave birth to Pride Month.
Folsom, by contrast, began as a protest in San Francisco against gentrification of a historically gay neighborhood, and was specifically a queer/Leather pushback against people trying to re-closet the queer community during the AIDS crisis. San Francisco was specifically using the AIDS crisis as an excuse to close bathhouses and regulate bars, which started in 1984, so it’s not a surprise that the first Folsom Street Fair took place that year.
Both were protests against the ways in which white cishetalloperikyriarchy has tried to crush our community over the decades, but they are independent events with independent origins. They should not be conflated; if nothing else, it’s a disservice to our history.
However. Pride is not, and never has been, a family-friendly event; this protestation that it should be is rooted in protoTERF & white cis-gay sanitation attempts & ignores the history of the event itself. Pride was begun by kinksters, including Brenda Howard, famously quoted as saying, “Bi, Poly, Switch - I’m not greedy, I know what I want.” She was a Jewish disabled leather-community sex worker, & that identity is emblematic of the people who founded Pride in the first place.
This ‘santization/cishet-friendliness’ of Pride completely plows over & astroterfs (not a typo) its roots:
All of the central figures in Stonewall were not cis, or gender-conforming, and Stonewall itself? Owned by the Mafia, since only they would bankroll gay bars at the time. (In fact, the rename of it was an attempt to keep the Mafia from having ‘ownership’ since they owned Stonewall - there were concerns that the Mafia would say ‘this is our event, you’re using the name of our bar.’ A far cry from Wells Fargo & Merck sponsorships, that.)
A scant few years later, in 1973, people were booing one of the activists from Stonewall, Sylvia Rivera, because the TERF-and-cis-LG pushback had already begun. The cis white LG’s were beginning their calls for respectability. This is the famous ‘Y'all Better Quiet Down’ speech. People who were NOT at Stonewall were already trying to sanitize Pride, & there’s video from a radfem screaming at Sylvia and misgendering her. I will not name said radfem, may her name be obliterated.
Pride has ALWAYS included Leather and has ALWAYS included Kinksters because it was founded by them and this sanitization started as soon as the Comfortable felt like they could take Pride from the Most Afflicted and those who had been there. Like, the group Sylvia and Marsha founded was called Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, run by trans sex workers for trans sex workers. This was NEVER the neat-and-tidy acceptable-to-straights corporate-friendly bullshit that people seem to think it is/should be now.
So now we’ve established that this event sprung from the “unrespectable queers” because the respectable ones had been doing the organizing before then and had resisted joining with the unrespectable queers, the kinksters and the leather daddies, because they didn’t want to be seen as “like that,” but when Pride became successful and actually got somewhere, they sure were happy to swoop on in and literally tell Sylvia and Marsha “you can’t march with us because you’re not respectable and you would drag us down.” (They showed up and walked in front of the parade.)
Well, so what? Why does it matter if they wanted to exclude trans sex workers who weren’t respectable in appearance, amirite? If the Respectable Gays wanted to swoop on in and take from the Unrespectable Queers what the latter built?
Well, aside from the fact that what they did and tried to do was shitty? Because the whole thing started because of sumptuary laws. Pride literally springs from cishetallos deciding what clothing is “acceptable” for queers to wear in public based not on how much of their body is covered but upon the perceived queerness of their clothing.
Stonewall began because cops were enforcing vice laws targeting trans and gnc people. At the time, it was illegal to wear more than 2 items of clothing associated w/‘the wrong gender,’ so a trans woman wearing bra, panties, and a skirt was illegally dressed. So they were literally raiding bars, getting people’s IDs, and comparing their junk to their clothes and deciding who was illegally and immorally dressed.
Let that one sink in for a minute, in context. I wonder why Pride had so much emphasis on kinky queers & trans queers & GNC queers being out loud & Proud in whatever the fuck they wanted to wear on this ONE DAY when they were all together & physically more people than the police could stop. (Not that Pride wasn’t a permitted march from the first - it was - and it was a protest, not a party.)
And now that we’ve established that Pride, the protest March, not the street fair for corporations, is and always has been by and for the leather daddies and the Dykes on Bikes, the revolutionary contingent who got into fights with cops over the right to wear the clothes they wanted to wear – and had been doing so for years, by the way, Stonewall was just the first well documented violent conflict between cops acting on repressive vice laws which targeted femme queens in specific and the people they were oppressing with the weight of the law…
… let’s actually talk about consent.
Those vice laws were based on consent. The idea that the general public didn’t consent to seeing trans women in public. The idea that the general public got to have a say on whether or not they consented to seeing trans people in public was the whole basis of those laws. I don’t consent to seeing you queers and recognizing you as queer.
But it’s different! The anti-kink-at-Pride crowd cries. This is explicitly sexual clothing!
First of all, no. It’s not. Kink is not inherently sexual.
Second of all, even if kink is inherently sexual, even if what you object to is clothing which signals sexually to other people, why is this particular clothing which signals sexually to other people what you object to? Why is it this?
Why aren’t you objecting to cishet women in plunging necklines or wearing tiny bikinis to the beach? Why aren’t you protesting billboards where m/f couples in almost nothing, or sometimes totally nothing, literally have their tongues down each other’s throats?
Is it because this clothing is indicative of what you think of as deviant sexuality?
I’m willing to bet it is, and if that’s the case, then there’s an awful lot to unpack there about who and what has a deviant sexuality and why we hypersexualize and condemn queer displays of sexuality, especially QTPOC sexuality.
(There is a lot of very racialized bias in this conversation but that is not mine to unpack – I just need to stop and say YES THIS EXISTS, because boy it sure does.)
Why exactly do we think queer sexuality displays require MORE consent than the hypersaturated cishet sexuality surrounding us like a dank BUYTHISNOW miasma every time we turn on a TV/walk out the door?
The answer is internalized homophobia & transphobia. That’s yours to unpack, and it is not the job of a random stranger to change their behavior because you see queer sexuality as inherently more sexual or aggressive, nor is it their job to regulate their clothing according to the possible sexual trauma or sexual orientation of others.
The idea of consent in sexuality and discussed in BDSM/Leather communities centers around the idea that someone should not do something to you without your consent. It’s a good concept! I like it! It’s correct that it is a cornerstone of BDSM and it SHOULD BE.
But, and this is really important, so I need you to read this several times and really sit with it:
The idea that someone simply wearing a pup mask in public is doing something to you while a woman in a thong bikini is not requires you to be examining the world through the homophobic lenses which society smacks on all of our eyes.
Read it again. Think about it. Be okay with the fact that this fact makes you uncomfortable and resistant to recognizing it. Be okay with your discomfort so you can actually unpack that.
The idea that you need to consent to seeing a leather daddy in a harness, but skinny cishet white girls at clubs aren’t doing something to you by wearing bondage pants & harnesses (which they do, all the time, & no one blinks) comes from internalized homophobia and transphobia.
The way that we view queer sexual signaling no more overt than what cishet people do constantly and base entire economic systems around as doing something to us in a way that requires us to consent to even seeing it is based in homophobia and transphobia.
It is exactly the same mentality that meant my school administrators in the 90s fired a gay teacher because kids might see her at school events with her partner.
It is exactly the same mentality that meant that the administrators first barred the only lesbian couple at my school from holding hands & kissing each other goodbye in the halls and then barred the straight couples from doing so too when rightful claims of discrimination flared.
And? All of this argument requires us to think of Pride as a singular event with no variations, striations, separate areas, etc. This is clearly not the case. If you look at the slate of events for any major city’s Pride events, there are very clearly multiple different events across multiple days for most of them. If you want to create a PG-13 event, or attend one, most places have those!
Expecting the entirety of Pride to be kid-safe is ahistorical, treats adults like children, and requires you to smack them homophobic glasses right back on your eyeballs and insist that the Bad Queers go back into the closet.
And, of course, this all ties into the “pedophile” and “groomer” bullshit which has sprung back up like fucking mushrooms. Oh, those bad nasty queers who are … wearing leather pants in public and going bare-chested and wearing a face mask and a leash! Oh no! They’re making things unsafe for our children by wearing clothing less revealing than the average beach!
But it’s bad clothing because it’s queer clothing and queer sexuality is, in this mindset, inherently threatening and doing something to you. So engaging with this argument supports that shit, and honestly… it’s fucking obscene.
Using this argument against queer adults who are literally just there enjoying the company of other queer adults is fucking violence. This argument and its root implications are the accusations which got (and still get) queers evicted, fired, and beaten to death.
How dare you come to an event founded by kinksters and swarm around them like the other animals clamoring at the Little Red Hen for the bread she baked?
How dare you look at the leather daddies who survived AIDS and say “we climbed on your back to where we are now, where big corporations see the dollar signs in the queer community rather than condemning us to literally die in the streets, now go away, because you’re unsightly and we don’t wanna see you anymore?”
How dare you engage this in an environment where they’re literally trying to make social transition for minors illegal. What is social transition? Clothing. So now we’re back to “wearing the ‘wrong gender’s’ clothing” is the crime they’re trying to make a Thing again in Florida.
How dare you and everyone making this shit-ass argument year after year look at Dykes on Bikes who nursed and buried their dying friends when no one else would and say “mmm, you’re a pedophile actually because you want to go topless in the sun and show off the tattoos that you got in defiance of a world that didn’t want you to live, and ride through the street with your lover’s arms around you for one day, pretending this world still doesn’t want you dead?”
How dare you wield the very important language of consent like a fucking scythe against your fellow queers?
That is a tool, not a fucking weapon.
Do not use it to attack our history, this event that your elders made for you.
Strangers on the street are not responsible for your sexual trauma, and if your trauma is so bad that you can’t walk around in public and see people wearing sexually-signaling clothing, then I commend you to mental health care and wish you the best of luck, because that’s almost all the clothing that people wear, in one form or another.
It still isn’t the responsibility of adults wearing clothing they are otherwise permitted to wear to change that clothing because you don’t like the messaging it sends about who they fuck and how they fuck. A leather harness and a slinky black dress both convey that information, so why is only one of those things objectionable?
But Spider! What if I’m walking down the street at New York Pride and a dude has his dick out and is getting a blowjob right there in the street!
Well, buddy, then that’s bad regardless of whether the dude in question is wearing leather pants or a polo shirt and khakis, but…
… why did you only picture one of those two images when you read that sentence? Why did you immediately conjure up a specific image in your mind, and why wasn’t it a dude in jeans and a t-shirt? Trust me, the gays in polo shirts and khakis fuck just as much as the ones in mesh shirts and latex dick slings.
Yeah. That shit is yours to unpack and deal with, not other people’s to cater to.
