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“I know I addressed this briefly when I chose to delete the posts but I...”
I still don't know how I feel about kinks at pride events. I guess it depends on how explicit people are being. I don't know how explicit people are about it. I've never been to many things like that since I live in the country.
Here’s a video of the Leather Daddies marching in Philly Pride last weekend:
Always love it when the Leather Daddies march.
A post shared by Jess Eskow (@jessicapierogies) on Jun 9, 2019 at 11:55am PDT
I can’t speak for every person with a Leather Flag in every Pride parade or Pride event everywhere, and I am sure that, as with every community, there are bad actors who carry Leather flags, but I can say in my experience that this how the vast, vast majority of the queer leather/kink folx behave when they’re in public at Pride.
I genuinely encourage people to think very critically about this. What do you see in this video? Because what I see are people in no less covering clothing than you’d see at the beach, and a few people wearing puppy masks. No one’s flogging other people or engaging in a Scene (and if they were, it would be wrong whether they were wearing leather underpants or a pair of khakis and a polo shirt).
Clothing isn’t activity, and the activity of the people pictured in this video? It’s no different from anyone else in the parade. They marched. They waved their flags. They held hands in public, unafraid and unashamed.
The queer kink community belongs at Pride, as their whole selves, as part of the community that they, as kinky queers, helped build. And again, look: some of them had leather flags (again, designed by a gay man long before the Bear Brotherhood or Bi flags existed, let alone the Trans, Non-Binary, etc.) and some of them had Bi, Bear, etc. flags. Because ... that’s who they are.
Feel however you want, honestly. No one’s telling you that you have to be comfortable with kinky queers being in public, just the same way that bible-thumpers don’t need to be comfortable with queers being openly queer in public. They just have to leave us alone and let us be in places where we belong. That’s all that kinky queers want: to bring their whole authentic selves and to be part of a community that kinky queers helped build. Brenda Howard didn’t differentiate between the parts of herself, and often wore a button to marches that said ‘Kinky. Queer. Poly. I’m not greedy, I just know what I want.’ And if the Mother of Pride thought kinksters belonged at the March she helped found, and named...
