Look folks. The 80-year-old leather daddies that you see marching in our Pride parade in MPLS with a huge Leather Pride flag watched a ton of their friends die while our government and our society laughed at them. Their Leather families were sometimes their only families. 1/ People who are too young to remember AIDS need to take several steps back and learn some queer history. Those folks deserve our respect, and deserve our collective joy that they can be who they are now, and our collective grief that so many of them are gone.2/ Queers have been indicating to each other through various means since forever that they are queer whether it's where they're wearing their keys, or what color their bandana is, because they were afraid of getting killed by people If they were more overt, and rightfully so. 4/ Pride is the only time where we get to collectively publicly celebrate our queer elders who died so that we could stand here, and take advantage of the full freedom they fought for, such as it is. Erasing kink and especially Leather from Pride erases parts of our history. 5/ If you don't like it, don't go. If you don't want to have conversations with your kids about our dead elders and why those leather daddies are dressed like that, don't go. There are kid-friendly events all over the place. But corporate Pride is not our history. 6/ A lot of people want to enjoy the benefits that our elders fought and died for, without honoring the history, and frankly it's fucking gross. And it's gross that so many people are so loudly proclaiming their ignorance, and their lack of love for our elders. 7/ If you think Leather and kink don't have a place at Pride, you are not my ally. Just say you want to have a big party with all of the free stuff, and a giant parade, without having to learn anything about our history, and leave.
