We Don't Have the Luxury of Divisiveness
We need to minimize the skirmishes within the LGBTQ, leather, and kink communities because there are forces ready to deny us our rights.
I started writing this post right after getting home from a large meeting of local San Francisco Bay Area leather, kink, and LGBTQ community members. It was a town hall style of meeting seeking community input. The specifics are irrelevant for this post, but something someone said during meeting sparked my desire to write this post.
Among the feedback being given to the meeting facilitator someone pointed out that with the incoming administration and the rise of extremist right-wing sentiment in parts of the country, our community doesn’t have the luxury of being divided.
Silly turf wars and power struggle battles within leather, kink, or queer subsets of the community need to be avoided or resolved quickly if they pop up. Why?
If you are LGBTQ, your civil rights and perhaps even your right to exist openly are at risk.
If you’re into leather or kink of any kind, your sexuality and identities are at risk.
Frankly, if you’re anyone other than a white heterosexual non-kinky Christian man, you’re at risk due to the incoming administration and their extremist minions who are doing whatever they can to use minority communities as distractions.
It’s a classic fascist tactic. Find a visible enemy but small enough to easily attack, point at them and say, “They’re the problem,” and it can rally low information constituents to accept their twisted and inaccurate reality.
Right now, trans people (and immigrants) are the main political targets of those wishing to use the marginalized to distract from their power grab and greed. But trust me, if they’re successful at using the destruction of trans people’s lives as a talking point, the rest of LGBTQ people are next. Then anyone aligned with a sexuality that doesn’t fit their narrative will be a target. Women are already a target as are people of color and so many others.
The point is, we’re all in this together. If your leather, kink, or LGBTQ community has factions fighting with each other, now is the time to stop that. We don’t have that luxury. We band together or the forces wanting to hurt us will succeed.
Let me also say this is the time to stop deciding who’s part of the LGBTQ community. If anyone sees themselves somewhere on what I’ll call the “queer spectrum,” we need to bring them into our fold along with any allies we can muster because, as Dan Savage succinctly put it in a recent post, “The next four years are gonna suck.”
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