We in North America live under a culture handed down by puritans, who saw sex and sexuality as shameful and sinful. As queers, kinksters, faggots and dégénérâtes we reject this conception of fucking and sucking as sinful or shameful. We reject the notion that our relationships or sexuality should be obfuscated from the public and kept behind closed doors. That who we are, how we love and how we fuck is beautiful and radical. We have to reject cultural pressures to hide ourselves and live out loud, on leash, in front of humanity.

Reactionary Disgust

Where is the motivation against public kink, public queerness and public sex coming from? It comes from disgust. Disgust is an emotion that arises telling us that there is something that is toxic or dangerous to us. When we see molded food or smell rot our brains yell “that’s toxic! Don’t eat it!”. Our culture teaches us that there are more things out there that can “infect” or “defile” us. People fear to catch the gay, or that children will become queer because they see queerness. Yet there’s no evolutionary origin to this disgust, there is no base reproductive or survival purpose to having disgust at sex and sexuality. Rather, disgust based reactions to queerness and kink are rooted in hierarchical power structures of church and state created to police behavior and maintain positions of domination. Even as a devout Buddhist who has practiced strict celibacy, I see only harm in perpetuating shame and guilt on others who engage in sensual pleasures. If someone gives up sexual desire, it should not be because we have blamed and shamed them for it.

Disgust is not a valuable or reasonable metric for deciding moral action. Even if there are theoretical evolutionary motivations for prioritizing procreative sex at the expense of pleasure based sex, these motivations become irrelevant in our modern state of both being able to produce children in the absence of sex and our astounding human population. Meanwhile, policing others behavior on the basis of disgust recreates harmful social domination of acceptable and unacceptable sexualities. Disgust based domination leads queer and kinky people to feel depressed and isolated and at worst leads to our lynching. Any abstracted or potential benefit to forcing sexuality into absolute privacy is the tiniest benefit compared to the real and lasting harm of maintaining cultural disgust.

Puritan moralists will decry public kink and sexuality as afflicting the children with harm. This is a fabricated harm and any potential harm of a kid misinterpreting kink dynamics is a consequence of a refusal to have frank and honest discussions with children. It is part of the ongoing oppression children experience, to be treated as unthinking reaction machines that cannot parse an explanation. When I live in a land squat, there are kids present. Once I had a total breakdown because I was working through trauma, the following day one of the kids in our community asked me what happened. I was able to be honest and genuine with her, explain how I used medicinal assistance to process my trauma, yet it became emotionally overwhelming and I had to break down. She, at 11, was able to process seeing an adult completely break down into tears and need immediate support from their community. We can explain kink to children, at its most simple, that people can willingly and consciously make decisions about their relationship and sexual dynamics between one another that can include power dynamics from leash holding to incest roleplay. We can explicitly explain how adults exercising power (sexual or otherwise) over children is wrong and should be brought to community attention. Kids are young, they aren’t incapable. Stop treating kids like pets and treat them like people.

Fake Consent

Some people are like to use the language of consent culture to police the behavior of others, using language made to protect bodies and minds as a weapon to enforce Puritan morals. This is an abuse of ideas made to enable autonomy being twisted to curtail autonomy. Consent, as a concept in sexuality and in life generally, is made to protect our bodies from being used in ways we don’t want and our minds from being directed in ways that hurt. Consent is for the protection of your autonomy and the vanguard against domination.

Where consent becomes necessary is when we directly involve others within our dynamics and engagements. Walking your adult, consenting, daughter down the street on a leash doesn’t need anyone’s consent other than the daughter and mother. Asking someone else to hold the leash needs consent. Bending a puppy bunny over the park bench needs the consent of yourself and the puppy bunny, on lookers can get fucked. They aren’t required to stop and watch, no one is forcing their eyes open, you can keep walking. Anyone’s disgust is their disgust and must be managed by themselves. The same way a homophobe being physically revolted by gays holding hands is their disgust to manage so too is all disgust in response to the consensual behavior between others.

The Social Species and Kink Sexuality

There’s a growing acceptance (in the US at least) that overt queerness is acceptable and disgust reactions to it are unreasonable. Let’s be real, queerphobes aren’t lying, they are experiencing real disgust. Yet we have decided that the romantic displays of being queer are acceptable. These displays aren’t implying a trad cath innocence either, in the same way a cis het couple saying “we’re trying for a baby” doesn’t imply “we’ve applied with the party for a permit” it implies “we are doing creampies on the regular”. A family with kids implies “we’ve had quite a few creampies in our day”, as does two men holding hands imply “I do in fact take dick up the ass”. Displays of romantic dynamic and evidence of our sexuality are not shameful and the implication of kissing, hand holding and kids carrying with it the knowledge of sex and cum does not mean those acts should be publicly forbidden. Rather the opposite, that because these acts which imply more are socially acceptable, fucking on the park bench ought to be too. What justification is there that would deny this beyond reactionary disgust?

By this same token, kink dynamics and furry identities that imply a greater sexual behavior must move to become as acceptable as modest cis het couples holding hands. There is nothing implied in a pregnant person holding someone’s hand that is not also implied by a mother holding her daughter’s leash. So why is one acceptable but the other isn’t? Only puritanical moralizing about acceptable sexuality changes the frame. 

These public displays of relationship are not changed by social validation seeking. We as humans are highly social animals and we inherently seek to have our behaviors and ideas validated and reflected in the community sphere. When we hold hands in public it is saying to our local community “we are in a thing”. We as humans take joy in expressing who we are and what we do to the wider humanity. There is joy in pride. Conversely there is suffering in shame, where behind closed doors I am readily called mom even with my pants on. My kink is a facet of my sexuality and in the same way hetero and homosexuality displays itself in holding hands, my kink sexuality displays itself in holding a leash. We must abolish the cultural shame that says only vanilla monogamous relationships are acceptable to imply with kisses and hands. We must take pride in our collars and cum kinks. We have to set fire to the doors the cops make us hide behind.

We have to take back the public spaces from Puritan moralizers. Send the modesty standards to the guillotine. Kick out the cops that police how we dress, how we fuck and how we love. Take back the streets for ourselves, where we can freely be who we are and not be ashamed or afraid to live how we love. No more runways for modesty toting heteronormativity. I am going to walk my daughter on a leash. I am going to show off the tits I have suffered to grow. I will not be ashamed. I will love with a radical and revolutionary spirit. Will you?

A leaflet printable version of this essay