Well, it’s been an interesting couple of days, huh?
Amid panicked thoughts about whether I will be able to continue to do this job at all if *he* takes office again, I remembered this piece I wrote back in 2021 for Patreon when a weirdo conservative troll made a comment under a meme that has since been deleted (because Instagram censored the shit out of me in 2023!).
I wanted to revive that post as the U.S. gets more and more unhinged just to remind everybody not only what I’m about, but what BDSM is about.
Send it to someone you love. Or hate.
You can also support the work here by booking time with me at Ask A Sub Office Hours! Get 30-40 minutes with me to get some attention on what you’re going through. We need each other now more than ever 🥺🥺🥺
Let’s get into a hot button issue, shall we?!
Last month, I received a string of comments on a meme that was so absurd I wasn’t totally sure it wasn’t satire. In case you missed the since-deleted shitstorm, someone took issue with me using the phrase “straight vanillas” in a meme to describe — gasp! — straight vanilla people. The person goes by [REDACTED] and calls themselves a “conservative fetishist.” Their Instagram bio contains a selection of the English language so cursed, so ignorant, so triggering, I have no choice but to share it in its entirety here:
“2A!* Don’t take my guns and whips! Sexual flagellant.
Pronouns: Flog/ger. Bull/whip.
Trump supporters welcome! Republican af. Whip fetishist.”
(*for our overseas friends this is a reference to the second amendment of the constitution)
This person slid into the comments on that meme and demanded to know why I was lumping straight and vanilla together, and inversely lumping all kinksters in with queer people. Here, I should mention that I bear no animosity to straight people (I’m a sub to one!) or vanilla people (I have vanilla friends!). But for the purpose of humor, at times it is worth naming phenomena that I, as a queer kinkster, stand outside of. This was one of those times. [REDACTED] disagrees, and their comment was as follows:
“Why did you say straight vanilla. I’m straight and kinky. It sounds like because someone is straight they [are] vanilla. I’m a straight, white, conservative, Christian, monogamous, kinky and proud woman. Make bdsm less queer again!”
In case your blood, like mine, is boiling at the thought of someone paraphrasing our demonic 44th president under a queer person’s kink meme, don’t worry — about 100 people schooled this person in a pile-on so epic I was cackling maniacally behind my phone that entire day.
But [REDACTED]’s misguided crusade calls our attention to a larger issue — the intersection of the kinky and queer communities.
Being kinky is a lot like being queer, in that we don’t choose our kinks. Beyond that, kinky people are scattered at random throughout society, just as queer people are. So no one could possibly claim that having kinks is exclusively a queer thing. However, being kinky and expressing those kinks through the safe structures of BDSM, are two different things. Sadism and masochism have their own histories, as do rope bondage and practically every single impact tool. But BDSM, as a concept and a cohered set of practices is, unarguably, inherently queer.
The understanding of BDSM as queer is not a tumblr-style hot take, it is a historical fact. The practices and culture we currently understand as BDSM evolved from the Leather communities that cohered in the United States after World War II, when gay men and lesbians had their first contact with other people like themselves in the context of the same sex living conditions of military life. After the war, a subculture of gay and lesbian motorcycle clubs formed. Within that underground scene, kink play became synonymous with the leather gear the bikers wore. Leather culture belonged to those queer people, and was passed down in person-to-person mentorship in a traceable legacy that spans the remainder of the 20th century (you can read more about this in the book Life, Leather, And The Pursuit Of Happiness by former Leather columnist Steve Lenius)
This may be rudimentary for many of you, but I’m willing to be the “I took some LGBT Studies classes in college” guy and give you the broad strokes of American post-WWII queer history in the next couple of paragraphs so we can track Leather culture alongside it.
Post-WWII, the queer social scene expanded and became more visible. And when marginalized communities live their truth in the U.S., we know the police harassment isn’t far behind. In response to police violence, the queer political movement fractioned into two generally opposite sides — assimilation versus liberation. Assimilationists were focused on gaining marriage rights and other forms of social acceptance by showing how well they could assimilate into mainstream culture. This side of the movement is often associated with white middle to upper class gay men. Meanwhile the liberation crowd turned their attention to creating their own worlds, living loudly, and playing by their own rules — the mindset here might be described as “human rights are inherently deserved, not something you earn.” Often people of color, people who weren’t cis, and kinky folks fit into this second category, because by virtue of their other identities, they were not as close as well-off white men to acceptance. These identity associations are definitely an oversimplification, but it's important to think about them as part of the equation.
Fast forward to the 1980’s, and the AIDS crisis hit the LGBT+ community hard. It was during this time, as many gay men were forsaken by the Reagan Administration and relegated to the disorganized cruelty of the American medical system, that the need for marriage rights became more urgent than ever before. Horror stories from this time abound, as queer partners of AIDS patients watched powerless as their partners were hospitalized, and since their unions were not legally recognized, their partner’s (often homophobic) next of kin were put in charge of medical decisions. The urgency inspired by this time is thought to be responsible for the LGBT community's pivot towards assimilationism. Assimilation and “playing by the rules” of the wider straight society appeared as a tantalizingly fast track to gaining those rights whose absence had been deadly in an epidemic. And those leather people out on the floats at pride? Well, they weren’t taking this urgency seriously.
Even though they often saw themselves as a marginalized community within a marginalized community, Leatherfolk in this era fundraised for AIDS patients and their partners, and participated in political actions as well. Regardless, Leather culture was frequently criticized and rejected by the wider LGBT community. The prevailing discourse of the time framed Leatherfolk as violent fascists, or self-indulgent, or mentally ill, or all of the above. You know that “kink at pride” discourse that happens on twitter every year? Yeah, Gen Z didn’t invent that. Kinksters have long been scapegoated as “bad queers” not only by the wider world, but within our own communities as well.
To crystallize this attitude in one incident, I turn to leather historian Mark Thompson, writing in his book Leatherfolk: Radical Sex, People Politics, and Practice:
Radical sexuality has undeniably shaped gay and lesbian life… yet leather sex has usually been condemned. By its very nature, S/M is a topic infused with ambiguity and contradiction. What appears to be one way on the surface is usually the opposite underneath. Perhaps it is this capacity to both attract and repel that accounts for S/M’s controversial reputation. Leatherfolk and the issues we raise have been as difficult for gay Americans to accept as our heterosexual neighbors.
This intolerance takes many forms, sometimes crudely so. In early 1991, for instance, police busted into a Boston home where members of the local leather community regularly met for private parties. No warrant was presented; words like “f*gg*t” and “f***ing AIDS carriers” were used by officers the night they brutally searched the house and the 30 men inside. Three organizers were arrested, and the names and addresses of others entered into public records. One man was so traumatized by the raid that he killed himself soon thereafter by jumping off a freeway ramp. Still, few in the Boston gay community expressed outrage over the trespass. “What a colossally stupid waste of time,” stated the editor of a local gay newspaper. “Let’s hope our organizations spend as little time as possible on it.” Said another community leader, “[The raid] doesn’t seem like a gay and lesbian issue.”
If you have this kind of understanding of BDSM history, and the people who fought like hell to create this practice and keep it sacred, it is natural to be touchy about newcomers throwing on a leather harness and calling themselves BDSM players. What may come across as gatekeeping is actually an urge to protect the core of how this culture has evolved. Over the last 30 or so years, we’ve seen BDSM go from the underground to so popular everyone and their mother knows what it is. And naturally when a community experiences a quantum leap of this magnitude, it may be impossible to reach a consensus about what unites everyone within it. Maybe nothing. But if we are all going to be relying on the foundational rituals of BDSM safety, we must do so understanding where they come from.
Zooming in on my own life, I do sometimes experience frustration with my straight kinky friends. When we get coffee and they tell me all about the kinky sex they’re having, the focus is often solely on how fun and taboo and titillating the play is on an individual level. While I’m always happy for people who are having fun and experiencing pleasure, I do come away from these conversations feeling like a piece is missing from the puzzle. And that piece is an understanding of how this type of play can (and should) fuck with the power structures of the outer world. Without using BDSM to learn about power and understand how it functions more deeply, it feels like disrespect for the people who built BDSM on their backs and in some cases died for it.
Regular straight kinksters aside, let’s turn again to [REDACTED], the person calling themselves a conservative in America, which increasingly is just a polite term for being a fascist. I only have one thing to say, and that’s if you’re a Republican in leather, that harness you’re wearing is stolen valor. Oh, and one more thing — fuck you.
If you’re a Republican in leather, that harness you’re wearing is stolen valor.
All that said, I shudder to imagine a world where straight people can’t practice BDSM. The more people there are practicing aftercare, negotiation, and active consent, the kinder and safer our society becomes. And I really believe that. There are certainly queer people who would disagree with me, and I respect that. But at this point any hope to contain BDSM to a certain identity group is hubris — the cat is already way out of the 50 Shades bag.
I think the path forward, as always, is education. No matter who you are or how you identify, when you put on those leather accessories, or tie somebody up, or buy a cute paddle, just do so understanding you are stepping onto hallowed ground. And the cost of standing on the shoulders of our queer elders is that you have a duty to study consensual power exchange in your private life, and use those lessons to go out into the world and dismantle oppression wherever you find it. Do your reading on leather history, but also listen to and amplify the voices of the marginalized wherever you can. That’s your duty. That’s the trade off.
I want to add one more thing here, writing to you now from 2024, which is that BDSM, in a historical sense, is an American thing. I, like most of you, look at American flags and see them as symbols of jingoism. They alienate me. Fourth of July pisses me off. And yet there are beautiful things here, kink being one of them. Maybe part of this reckoning with power is to understand that with all the darkness comes the special resilience of those of us who believe this place could still be something beautiful.
With that, I’ll leave you with one last quote from Leatherfolk:
Leatherfolk, looking at the brutal acts of Dominance and submission that are carried out in America every day, know that in such rapacious and nonconsensual acts lies the real sadomasochism that plagues our time. In our audacious explicating of society’s roles and violent tensions, leather folk mirror the deadly games that a culture dishonest with itself plays. Perversion, in this case, is a symptom of the beholder. I know this is true from personal experience. When I admitted to my own interest in S/M, two things happened: My sense of humor improved, and I became more socially aware.
May we all be awakened this way.
xo Lina
Fantastic history lesson that hopefully makes bigots and fascists do some self reflection, even if it’s just a teeny tiny bit of it.
Gods, I LOVE this post (and you for writing it).