"We can't have kink at pride because there are kids there!"
Pride isn't for kids. Full stop. Pride is for queer people to celebrate themselves and make it clear that we're not going back in the fucking closet. There are kid friendly events at pride, and by all means bring your kids there, but pride isn't for kids.
So many people seem to have forgotten that pride was a protest and frequently a riot, and all prides today carry the implicit threat that if you try and force us back into the closet they will be riots again. The corporate sanitized version of pride is just a fucking smoke screen to allow companies to use the event for marketing and to pay for permitting and shit.
Back in the day, being queer was itself considered kink by broader society. Hence why it's so frequently mislabeled as a choice or a life style, and not an indelible part of someone's being. You can't choose to stop loving who you love, or being who you are, but to the cishets, it was seen that way, and if some groups had their way it would be considered that again.
If you accept the premise that we need to sanitize pride to make it acceptable to those who previously rejected us (and we fucking don't) then you accept the possibility of our identities being erase from public life again the moment they stop being "respectable". Nobody ever won their liberty by politely asking the boot to get off their neck now please, it's won through blood, sweat, and direct action.
An entire fucking generation of queer people died of AIDS to get us where we are today, and by playing into respectability politics you spit on their graves. None of them were afforded dignity while they lay dying in hospital beds, their chosen family forbidden from seeing them while their birth families refused to acknowledge their existence. It didn't matter how 'respectable' they were before they contracted HIV and it advanced to AIDS, they were refuse from that point. Marked as disposable and left to die by the Reagan administration.
Respectability won't save you. Assimilating won't save you. The people who want us gone do not care how much you conform to the white picket fence and life in the burbs with 1.5 kids and a dog. They want you eradicated no matter how respectable you are. They want you to go back into the closet. They want queer people to stop existing in public life. They want to kill those of us who refuse to suffer in silence.
The only way we survive and thrive is by being loud, being proud, and refusing to apologize for who we are.
Happy fucking pride everyone.
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