This is a start to my efforts to bring regular writings to your inbox on Thursdays. I’ll cover outdoors industry topics and topics pertinent to the minority communities we feature. I hope you enjoy! - A.
I am a romance novel nut. The blame tracing directly back to my mom, who night after night would put on rom-coms for us to watch while eating dinner. A girl can only watch When Harry Met Sally so many times before it permanently alters her brain chemistry.
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Luckily I’m not alone in my consumption as I’ve drug my dear friend and editor into the bodice ripper pit. We gush. We yell. We debate the logistical possibility of sex scenes. A fantastic time overall.
So imagine our joy when we found out one of our favorite reads, a queer romance titled Red, White, and Royal Blue, was getting made into a movie! The trailers all looked terrible. It immediately went on our watchlist for the next time we were in the same city.
Needless to say, our expectations going into this movie were low. But what did excite us was the movie’s ‘R’ rating. The book is pretty raunchy, so we figured with an ‘R’ rating, the movie was planning to commit to the d. Yeah, not so much.
To summarize a pretty bad movie (think 30 year olds playing 20 year olds using decade old slang), there was nothing that felt like it justified the Mature rating. None of the characters said ‘f*ck’, which would feel less jarring if they didn’t say ‘mofo’ instead. There were a few (disappointingly) tasteful sex scenes, and one bare ass. All in all, it felt like a PG-13 movie tops.
We were apparently not the only ones questioning the movie’s rating as director Matthew López told People Magazine:
"I think I was a little surprised at the R rating just because, while I never was encouraged to limit what we were showing or limit what I was depicting, the scene is what I intended to show. It plays exactly how I wanted it to play. But I do question whether or not if it had been a man and a woman, if we’d still gotten an R rating."
Now, I lured you in here with some clickbait-y titled about Leather Daddies, and while there is no leather in the Red, White, and Royal Blue movie (wink), I do think it is an excellent example of the reverberations of the sanitization of Pride.
Kink at Pride is not a new debate, and concerns around respectability politics are almost as old as the event itself. Take the infamous 1973 speech from trans activist Sylvia Rivera, who was booed from the stage for calling out the white-middle class attendees for ignoring sex workers, transgender people, and incarcerated queer people because they wanted Pride to look a certain way.
The fight for queer rights is one of equality, but a lot of people conflate equality with acceptance. And acceptance is wonderful! But also incredibly subjective. Too often it’s used as the bartering chip to pit the queer community against one another. It’s literally the plot of an afterschool special on PBS Kids. The cool kids tell the protagonist that they can join the clubhouse, but they have to ditch their BFF because they’re too weird. So the protagonist abandons their friend, and guess what? The cool kids either don’t let them in anyway or if they do let the protagonist in, they’re mean to the hero the entire time. Moral of the story? Standby your friends, they’re worth more than any raise in social status.
Unfortunately outside of children’s tv shows, the stakes of acceptance carry more weight than playground politics. It’s being able to get married, to buy a house, to enter a store without fear of being denied service. The temptation to appeal to the masses is understandable and drives the queer community to dissect itself to become more ‘palatable’ to the everyman.
This shift is further pushed by the participation of corporations at Pride events. The queer community has market value and really isn’t that what counts in the grand U.S. of A? So bring out the logo with a rainbow in the background, the gays have earned it!
It’s laughably disingenuous, but in a society where money talks, and corporations reign supreme, if companies determine that they can sell to a queer market, they’ll push whatever agenda they need to grab that cash.
However this magnanimous generosity does come with its caveats. What would the decent American public think if they saw a company’s logo side by side with a leather daddy dyke proudly marching shirtless? Reports of pearl clutching would sky rocket.
Often the argument against kink at Pride centers around the need for the event to be ‘Family Friendly’, so children can safely attend. Which, if a boob in public is all it takes to be considered inappropriate for children, I’ve got some bad news for families who want to visit Rome.
Kids seeing leather thongs and latex suits is not the issue. They’ve seen swimsuits and Michelle Pfeiffer’s catwoman. People want kink out of Pride because it’s not marketable to the general American public. We can’t let people know it’s possible to have fun and healthy communication around sex!
I kid, sort of. The implication of these arguments against kink at Pride is that participating in kink is a form of sexual deviancy and thus not appropriate. That is exactly why kink needs to be at Pride.
Mastrubation, hom*osexuality, transexuals – all have historically been categorized as forms of sexual deviancy. And while the DSM definition may have changed, as evident by the R rating on Red, White, and Royal Blue, people still hold a lot of known and unknown prejudices against queer sexuality. In other words, gay is okay in theory, just not where I can see it. To me, that’s neither acceptance, nor equality.
The strong reaction to kink culture is a bit funny, because it’s not an exclusively queer activity. According to this 2018 survey conducted among 775 university students, 50.1% of men and 41.5% of women reported at least one paraphilic behavior. In other words, humanity is filled with a lot of kinky motherf*ckers.
The way I see it, sex should be like a frozen yogurt bar. You start out with a nice bowl of plain vanilla. Some people will want their frozen yogurt as is, some folks love a pile of toppings, some don’t even like frozen yogurt, others like their frozen yogurt with a ball gag. The key is choice.
By bending to the wills and whims of corporations, we take away choice. All for a fickle friend who may wave a rainbow flag one day, and drop the queer community on their ass the next. I want teens to be able to watch a mid-steamy gay rom-com and not be blocked in theaters by a Mature rating. Which means sex, and its whole freaking frozen yogurt bar, needs to be normalized.
Kink at Pride is a statement: there’s no one right way to have sex. It doesn’t matter who you have sex with, or how you have sex with them. As long as everyone’s having a good time, go for it! It’s a celebration of a small, but infinitely variable facet of human existence. And what a lovely thing that is.
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