To a homophobe, even the most chaste kiss on the cheek between gay people is exactly as disgusting and degenerate as a hardcore BDSM orgy hosted in the town square, so you may as well ally with the BDSM orgy enthusiasts to throw bricks at the cops who are going to try and arrest all of you together anyway.
I once held hands with my husband at an event where my wife was also present, and a concerned parent lectured me about how she didn't want us to "influence" her son. Our icky gay polyam hand holding was such a threat to this woman that she made a point to corner me away from my partners and get me on my own to lecture me about being "indecent." If she had been inclined toward violence, I would have been fucked.
Hand holding. That's all it fucking took.
So catch me at Pride in a leather harness and holding a bat, because if hand holding is all it takes, we owe it to each other to stand together.
We're here. We're queer. Get fucking used to it.
The sheer number of LGBT people who have called me a "degenerate" and a "pedophile" and an "abuse apologist" and a "homophobe" and a "woman-beater" over this post, in the less than 24 hours since I have posted it, is proof that it needs to be said.
Call me a degenerate if you want. I don't care. It has always been the degenerates protecting each other when the cops raid our bars and inspect our clothing and haul us away for being cross-dressing, family-destroying, society-polluting, tranny dyke faggot freaks.
I know who I'd rather have on my side, and it's not the self-loathing pieces of shit who would rather destroy their own people than dismantle systems of oppression.
You will never be wholesome and pure enough for the bigots, no matter how much you distance yourself from the kinksters. Once they've killed all us degenerates, they're coming for you next. And we won't be here to fight for you anymore.
Once in middle school I tried to write a story for creative writing class where two girls kissed—just a small, chaste kiss right at the end of the story, in a class where people had written stories about violence and war and kisses between straight people without any issue—and after I read it aloud, the teacher cornered me after class and lectured me about it being “inappropriate”.
This was in a homeschool co-op right around the time when same-sex marriage was about to legalized, and my other formative experiences there included:
1) My best friend of several years finding out I was queer and her mom forbidding me from coming to her house anymore in case I “tried something” with her ~8 year old sister, followed by my best friend telling me I was a disgusting sinner who was going to Hell and she didn’t want to be my friend anymore. All of this happened because I updated my sexual orientation on Facebook to “lesbian”
2) Having “should gay marriage be legalized?” as a regular topic in debate class, where people (including the teacher) would passionately argue that it shouldn’t be legalized because queerness was immoral and disgusting and wrong
3) An incident where a new girl started at the co-op and I mentioned “[new girl] is really cute” to my best friend, which my mom overheard and later lectured me over because “you can’t just say those things in public, obviously if [new girl] hears she’ll be so uncomfortable, and you don’t want to make her uncomfortable, do you?”
All of these experiences and more meant that from the age of ~13, I internalized “because I like girls, I am inappropriate and predatory, and if I ever so much as signal to a girl that I think she’s cute, she’ll be uncomfortable and I’ll be a predator”. I literally thought that me saying “I think [girl] is cute” was on the exact same level of harassment as adult men catcalling my 13 year old friend because puberty hit her like a truck and she had H cups. I thought that expressing any form of attraction to girls, no matter how chaste, made me as bad as a literal pedophile.
And it’s taken over a decade to get over that. I’m turning 26 next month and there are still times when I panic because I expressed some form of attraction to my literal actual wife and I’m terrified that makes me a predator. Everything I expressed as a 13 year old was incredibly chaste, incredibly age appropriate, and I still had grown adults telling me I was a sexual predator. To reiterate one of my previous points, the simple act of changing my Facebook sexual orientation to “lesbian” made my friend’s mom—who had previously expressed that she viewed me like one of her own children and who I viewed as a second mom—ban me from her house because she thought I would sexually assault an eight year old.
There is no form of same-gender attraction that homophobes will ever view as okay, because to them, the simple act of a 13 year old identifying as a lesbian makes them a sexual predator. Homophobes don’t care how “pure” or “wholesome” your queerness is, they don’t care if you only have the most vanilla sex imaginable, the very fact that you are not cis and straight makes them view you exactly the same as the hardcore kinksters you spend your time trashing online: to them, you’re all just violent disgusting sexual predators.
And you know what helped me get over thinking I was a predator? It sure as fuck wasn’t the “wholesome” queers, many of whom uncritically parroted the exact same rhetoric that traumatized me and who stated that making someone feel uncomfortable was basically the same as sexually assaulting them. The thing that helped me (start to) get over this was getting into kink and surrounding myself with other kinksters, who helped me dismantle my internalized homophobia, who said “Actually, it is not the end of the world if your presence makes someone uncomfortable, they can deal with it or leave”.
And now I have to get online every day and see queers saying that kinksters are evil, that kink is amoral, that it’s degenerate. But guess what, buds: you were the ones who made my internalized homophobia worse. Kinksters were the ones who helped me. And I feel confident that if a homophobe tried to attack me today, the “wholesome” queers would be the ones turning away from me and finding a reason why I was problematic enough to deserve it while the kinksters and drag queens and freaky queers would stand by my side. That’s who allies with me, and that’s who I’m allying with.
Respectability politics won’t save you. You will never be pure or wholesome enough for homophobes. If you let them tear me apart, they’ll turn on you next. So you’ve got a choice: do you wanna ally yourselves with the people who would throw bricks to defend you or the people who would happily kill you if they thought they could legally get away with it?
