Everything You Need to Know About the “Kink at Pride” Debate
By Elliott Robinson
Ah, the month of June. A thirty-day celebration of unapologetic queer joy, where rainbow flags flutter as far as the eye can see, and bedazzled strangers party together up and down the coasts and everywhere in between. Pride Month embodies the undisputed pinnacle of LGBTQ+ community, an open-handed invitation to all people who have been kicked to the curb by our aggressively heteronormative world… Or at least, that’s what the original Stonewall rioters intended over fifty years ago when they took up bricks and bottles to defend trans individuals from unlawful police raids.
Today, while still fiercely exuberant, Pride Month is also marked by political division. So as corporations shake the dust from their rainbow advertisements and slogans, and drag queens perfect their eyeliner in a crooked bathroom mirror, this perpetually unsolved debate rears its head once more: where do the kinksters belong?
If you’ve attended a Pride march, particularly in places like New York or California, you’ve probably seen them. Leather daddies in tight-fitting jackets and stylized bike caps, perhaps accompanied by someone sporting a harness and puppy mask. Collars, chokers, leashes, and handcuffs often make an appearance. Or maybe it’s as easily recognizable as someone wearing almost no clothing at all — but either way, these visual cues indicate an aspect of queer community that not everyone wants to support. These are the kinksters.
The growing sentiment among many queer individuals is that kink does not belong at Pride. After all, there’s no ‘K’ in the seemingly endless amalgamation of acronomic letters that make up the LGBTQ+ community, because kink isn’t so much an identity as a broad descriptive term encompassing a variety of subcultures. And while some of these subcultures are explicitly queer, others encourage participants of all genders and sexualities — meaning that cisheterosexual people can, and do, engage in kink without any detriment to their everyday lives. In other words, kink seems to defy the shared experiences of systemic discrimination that otherwise unite the queer community, which makes its inclusion at Pride, to many, seem antithetical at best.
On top of these ideological disagreements, some critics have also raised ethical concerns about the use of fetish gear at Pride. Ball gags and nipple clamps aren’t typically seen as family-friendly attire, and many people believe that consent (or lack thereof) should be taken into account when it comes to kinksters’ clothing and accessories. To be clear: the issue isn’t that sexual activity is actually on display, but rather, that specific clothing items carry sexual connotations, and shouldn’t be allowed in public spaces where the average person has not consented — and where children cannot consent — to seeing them. It’s an issue of safety — one that takes the very legitimate consideration of accessibility into account, especially when queer youth are some of the most at-risk members in our community.
Plenty of large-scale public events rely on dress codes to keep things PG-13, and for opponents of kink, Pride parades shouldn’t be an exception. These codes could effectively prohibit fetish gear or any type of clothing that invokes images of bedroom activities, ensuring a family-friendly environment and preserving the true spirit of the LGBTQ+ community, which has always been completely and wholly divorced from whatever those deviant kinksters are doing.
…Right?
In reality, kink and queerness have always been intertwined — and this is doubly true for the origins of Pride in the United States. In particular, as one of the most visibly recognizable kink or fetish-adjacent lifestyles, members of the leather subculture are often the most targeted by critics of kink at Pride, denoting the unfortunate truth that fewer and fewer generations realize these communities’ connections with queer history.
The setting is post-WWII America, a time of political and cultural regression thanks to fears of nuclear warfare and Soviet retaliation. The queer men — as well as a handful of queer women — who had returned from serving their country felt particularly adrift in this tumultuous landscape, which lacked the familiar comforts of servitude, clear-cut power dynamics, and strict moral codes that they’d grown accustomed to in the military.
The leather community was founded by these veterans — who may have also engaged in BD/SM lifestyles prior to the 1940s and ’50s, although a lack of surviving documentation prevents modern historians from anything more than educated guesswork. But even the early days of the leather scene demonstrated significant differences from BD/SM or other kink practices. Leather subculture was a deliberate way to maintain military traditions and culture in the context of S&M dynamics, emphasizing displays of honor, respect, and servitude such as one might expect between a decorated general and his fresh-faced subordinate. Hyper-masculine images of bulging muscles and bikes appealed to the former servicemen and women who felt alienated by the more mainstream queer scenes of the era, which preferred campier styles — but also spoke to the widespread popularity of motorcycle and outlaw culture at the time. By the 1970s, leather subculture had successfully reached its heyday, with dozens of clubs and bar dedicated to the lifestyle across major U.S. cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, NYC, and Chicago.
Leather was, and is, undeniably queer — and, as a result, it has played a large part in the fight for queer liberation. In 1969, members of the leather community stood side-by-side with the drag queens at Stonewall and campaigned fiercely against police raids. In the 1980s and early ’90s, lesbian leather women worked tirelessly to care for gay men who were afflicted with AIDS — despite the leather community facing intense backlash from both mainstream society and vanilla queer individuals who blamed kink, BD/SM, and other “extreme” sex practices for the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Contrary to these stereotypes, however, leathermen and women have long been educators and advocates for safe sex, with many protocols of the community requiring political activism and community service in order to “earn” specific leather garments. And although the impacts of their work often go unnoticed, queer history is nevertheless altered because of it. A San Francisco leather event led by the lesbian motorcycle club Dykes on Bikes, for example, was officially renamed the San Francisco Pride Parade in 1994, and to this day remains one of the largest Pride Month celebrations in the country.
Much of the modern backlash against kinksters at Pride is a simple repackaging of the same respectability politics that leathermen and women have battled since the 1940s. It’s easy to dismiss the most outwardly different members of our community when times get tough — and even easier to ignore a history that is rarely taught or talked about in the first place. But leather subculture is an integral aspect of queer identity just like drag or ballroom culture, and deserves to be celebrated in the same way.
Ultimately, to reject members of the leather community is to chip away at what makes queerness so radical, so revolutionary, and so destructive to the shackles of heteronormative society. And if we’re willing to sacrifice the kinksters for a mere inch of approval from our oppressors, then who among us is truly safe?
About the Author
Elliott Robinson is a queer author, journalist, poet, and teacher located in central Indiana. He received a B.A. in English from Butler University, which is where he first encountered Matthew’s Place, and his work has been published in the Butler Collegian as well as in several editions of Manuscripts Literary Magazine. Elliott is extremely passionate about LGBTQ+ advocacy and volunteer work, and he strives to use his talents as a writer and educator for the betterment of his community.