Back in February Sally Kern, Oklahoma’s infamously bigoted state representative, spoke at a John Birch Society conference. (Who knew they were still meeting?) Kern called for a second “Great Awakening” to confront the growing homosexual menace. The gays, according to Sally, had a secret plan (“The Protocols of the Elders of West Hollywood”) to convince the world that homosexuality is a “superior lifestyle.” Sally warned the Birchers—who we came this close to flipping—not to be fooled by our nefarious themes:
“You know, I’ve done a lot of reading on this. I wish I could describe to you their behavior. I will not because I would be redder than this suit…. The theme of equality and freedom is the approach that the homosexuals are using today—totally perverting the true intention of what our Constitution meant. The homosexuals get it—it’s a struggle between our religious freedoms and their right to do what they want to do.”
The masses, Sally went on, would be “shocked and repelled” if prematurely exposed (?) to the depraved behaviors we gays get up to—behaviors that everyone will apparently be obligated to engage in once we’ve convinced the world of the superiority of the homosexual lifestyle.
My first impulse upon reading Sally’s comments—way back in February—was to take a picture of this plate of cookies on my kitchen counter when I got home from work:
I had hoped to get a picture of a plate full of cookies, and this plate was full when I left for work. But the boyfriend and the kid and the kid’s friends had been at the cookies all day and there were just two left—two the boyfriend saved for me—when I got home. I baked those cookies myself and from scratch. Baking is something I enjoy doing for my family and I guess you could call it a depraved behavior, carb-wise. (I’d go so far as to describe my baking as a depraved cycle of self-abuse: bake delicious cookies, eat delicious cookies, feel fat, hit the gym… bake delicious cookies, eat delicious cookies, feel fat, go to the gym…) But I took the picture tp refute Kern’s charges of depravity. I was going to post this picture and say, “Is this the kind of depraved behavior that you meant, Sally? Baking cookies for your family?”
It’s the same reaction most of us ‘mos have when a right-wing bigot drops dark hints about our depraved lifestyles and all the top-secret sex stuff we get down to when no one is watching. (You can see video and photos of all this top-secret sex stuff at XTube and on various Christian websites.) It’s a knee-jerk, defensive response, and when it doesn’t take the form of a photo of plate of cookies it’s usually expressed like this: “Hey, we’re not so different! We go to work, we pay our taxes, we take care of our families, we even bake cookies—what’s so depraved about all of that?”
But you know what? We are different, we gay people. If I may generalize: gay people tend to have more interesting sex lives than straight people—the kinds of sex lives that scare dumb bigots who’re afraid of their own genitalia. We bake cookies (see above), we go to work, we take care of our families, we pay our taxes. We do all of that. But we go in for a little “depravity” at slightly greater rates than straight people and with a lot less angst. We have this ability to let ourselves live a little. Once you’ve told your momma that you wanna kiss boys giving yourself or your partner permission to indulge in this, that, or the other kink isn’t anywhere near as scary. Not remotely. So long as you’re safe and sane about it, and indulge in moderation, where’s the harm?
When Mrs. Kern fumes about depraved sex acts I can’t help but thinking that Mr. Kern is jealous. He probably doesn’t want to get it on with depraved gays—probably (you never know with the ‘phobes)—but odds are high that Mr. Kern, like so many straight men out there, has “depraved” sexual interests and fantasies that he absolutely, positively can’t share with his wife. Because according to her, kinks that turn your face (and other things red) are for homosexuals, not heterosexuals. Kinks define homosexuality, according to Mrs. Kern.
And isn’t that too bad for those heterosexuals who buy into it? Gawd, it must suck to be married to someone who views anything and everything that isn’t vaginal intercourse as sinful and depraved. Don’t get me wrong: I am not knocking vaginal intercourse. I’d dig it if I had a vagina or was attracted to people who do. But just one particular kind of sex with one not-very-indulgent person for ever and ever and ever? How depressing, how tedious. I’d hang myself.
Kern’s comments came back to me late Saturday night while I was drinking a vodka & Red Bull in the lobby of a hotel in Chicago. The kid was spending the weekend with friends so the boyfriend and I headed to Chicago for International Mr. Leather, an annual contest/beauty pageant/dance party for the gay BDSM crowd. We’re not interested in the pageant—we didn’t know who won until we got home and looked at the website this morning (but congrats to Jeffrey Payne, Mr. Texas Leather and International Mr. Leather 2009)—and always assumed the event would bore us. But we have friends who go every year and they told us what a great scene it was—IML completely takes over a big downtown hotel every year and for three days turning it into the World’s Biggest Leather Bar—so we went last year for the first time and such a blast that we were back again this year. This year’s IML was at the Chicago Hilton and Towers on Michigan Avenue, which has a Belle Époque grandeur that provided the perfect backdrop for the decadent goings on. Forgive my bad cell phone picture of all the stunning men in the massive, ornate lobby…
My boyfriend’s in that picture somewhere. And the dance party in the hotel ballroom—where Queen Elizabeth II dined on her first visit to the states as Queen—was amazing…
…but too darkly lit to make out much besides the chandeliers. To see the face of the person you were dancing with you needed to retire to the foyer…
The leather market, where vendors were selling the sex toys and bondage gear and videos that so excite religious conservatives (but please, IML, just say NO to the lone pathetic vendor peddling revolting bestiality porn), was too brightly lit…
And here’s what made me think of Sally Kern: Everywhere we went at IML—an event held up by the Kerns of the world as evidence that gay people are too depraved for marriage and family life—we met gay couples, guys who had been together for five, ten years, and twenty years. Some couples were there to look, some were there to play, and some, like us, had left kids at home with sitters or friends or grandmas. Because there’s nothing mutually exclusive about conspicuous displays of wholesome family values—like baking peanut butter cookies for your kids—and attending IML and indulging in the kinds of (preferably safe) sex acts that so shock and repel and redden the likes of Sally Kern.
Instead of pointing to our homemade cookies to refute Kern’s charges of sexual “depravity”—my first impulse, so many months ago, when reading her comments—we ‘mos should point to our cookies and our occasional wild weekends. Because we can do it all, Sally. We can have our homemade peanut butter cookies and our commitments and our family values and our sexual adventures too.
Eat your heart out, bitch.
@50 your impartiality to the plights of the altsex community is overwhelming. What leatherboy peed in your coffee this morning?
In fact, I didn’t claim the BDSM sect was a consensual utopia. Rather they are, like you or I, or Castro street bears or SBC parishioners, just folks. The ones I’ve known, however, were fairly adept at negotiating a scene or a relationship. Some are assholes; most aren’t. Maybe the scenesters in your corner of the Earth are less civilized and upfront, especially if due to a prevalence of intolerance, they have to keep to the closet about their kinks. You think?
I’m not saying leatherfolk are all perfect sex-positive nymphs any more than Dan is suggesting all gays are rainbow-winged angels, but statistically neither are we the monsters that the Procrustean right such as Congressperson Kern enjoy imagining us to be. I’m saying our kink shouldn’t be the reason to throw us into prison or take away our kids. When some of us force our kink on others without consent, then law enforcement intervention may be appropriate.
It’s not that neglected kids are pulled away from kinky parents that sucks like a singularity. What sucks its kids can be pulled from their families without history or incident of neglect or dysfunction on the sole reason that their parents are kinky, or are simply alleged to be. A legal defense fund still operates for wrongfully persecuted fetishists (the same way that one exists for wrongfully persecuted Neopagans). News Flash: There’s still need for it.
Regarding Mr. Joins Scenes @ The Wet Spot, the social safeword in the groups I’ve attended (here in San Francisco) was “Go away and leave me [us] alone.” Has anyone bothered to say something to this effect to Mr. JS@TWS when his participation is not welcome? If so, your problem may be with neglectful moderators, but if not, you’ve only yourself to blame for not making your desires clear.
Concerning the (inappropriate) persecution of age players in this enlightened era, your attitude (regarding my use of terminology, and my gripe) argues my case for me.
The legal funds of which I was aware were in place prior to the 1997 founding of the NCSF, which is not to say they aren’t related. You clearly are more aware than I am of the goings on within the politicized scene. Before you mentioned Ms. Fleming or Mr. Ridgeway, I hadn’t heard of them.
And neither my lack of knowledge of them nor that they are allegedly jerks (the source of which I don’t have any reason to trust) doesn’t change my point one bit:
Sexual minorities are oppressed, and they deserve the right to engage in whatever turns them on (so long as its safe and involves only consenting adults, of course). And they deserve to be able to so engage without scorn, stigma or reprisal.
And there are folks out there that can’t stand the idea that we’re having fun without some sort of dire consequence, there are some folks who can’t stand that things turn us on that don’t turn them on, and there are some folks who can’t stand that we’re not just like them, nor do we want to be. And these guys hate us for this.
@53: It sounds to me that you’re overly absorbed in the insular leather world if you haven’t heard of Gary Ridgeway. Not surprising, as a lot of people in the “scene” consider themselves so astute because of their sexual practices, yet know little or nothing about current events. Most people, however, would consider a serial killer something a little stronger than a jerk.
Honestly, with the lead-in from the first part of your post, as soon as I saw the cookie picture my first thought was “that cookie is mounting that other cookie”
Agreed, that was inept of me, not because I should have known Ridgway from the leather scene, but through my studies in criminology. But memory slips, and I was too lazy at the time to Wiki him.
Still, I’m just plain not in the leather world enough to be overly absorbed in it, insular or otherwise. If I’m absorbed in anything, it would be in securing the right for those in the leather world to be so, unmolested. Only civil rights come in baby steps; getting gays married and transgenders regarded would bridge our way to fetishists being left alone for their kinks.
In the meantime, your own grudges within the community seem to be pretty personal. I had first suspected you in Sally Kern’s boat, but I wager she’s never heard of the Wet Spot, so my original proverbial (if not rhetorical) question has risen to some pertinence: what leatherboy peed in your coffee this morning?
Unsavory characters season all walks of humanity, not just fringe minorities. Were we to judge subcultures by the serial killers that walked among them, the nation’s intelligentsia, and many conservative Christian denominations would be forced to receive sentence as well.
“In the meantime, your own grudges within the community seem to be pretty personal.”
In all fairness, Uriel, you would have derided Daily if he(?) hadn’t had any experience at all with the BDSM community, and told him he had no basis for his opinions. Since he obviously does have some knowledge of the BDSM community, you accuse him of a personal grudge.
“Were we to judge subcultures by the serial killers that walked among them, the nation’s intelligentsia, and many conservative Christian denominations would be forced to receive sentence as well. “
Intelligence and religion are often discussed in stories about serial killers, so why should an interest in S&M be off-limits?
Analog @57, I didn’t think pointing out (what appears to be) a personal grudge was necessarily derision, nor do I regard it as illegitimate, since I’m completely unaware of the circumstances.
So far my point, as I reiterated @53 is not countered due to any of his arguments namely:
~ That I was whining (which doesn’t illegitimize my grievance, if I was.)
~ That folks in the scene aren’t unjustly persecuted by intolerant communities (Statistically, they are.)
~ That I was idealizing the scene (I wasn’t.)
~ That an intellectualized name for a given fetish doesn’t legitimize it (nor does it make it illegitimate).
~ That people of questionable character are in the scene (so it goes with any subculture, or the mainstream–that doesn’t change the validity of the ideas and activities central to the scene.)
I haven’t been disagreeing with him because he has a personal grudge or because he has no experience within the scene. My disagreement is to the belief that any of the opinions he’s expressed has any relevance to my point.
Daily does, however, seem to disagree with me strongly on an emotional level, even if his points don’t logically follow through. If I knew the circumstances behind the emotion, I’d better understand why this is.
And…
That John Wayne Gacy was a clown doesn’t make all clowns evil. (That they wear creepy makeup, inadvertently scare small children and compress themselves en mass into tiny cars is what makes them evil.)
@58: For what it’s worth – your arguments have been sound and well-argued.
And your statements about clowns = spot on.
Best to you, from another ‘only child’ (who also wound up having a bit of an activist bent).
I find clowns scary, too. My parents thought it would be great to bring us to Circus Circus casino when I was little, that place scared the daylights out of me. Poor clowns, they try to bring us joy, and yet I’ve met many who are/were scared of them as a child.
I dunno Dan,
I think Red Bull plus vodka sounds pretty depraved to me.
Anyway, Kern probably gave them statistics to back up her claims about the gay lifestyle, you know, “90% of all homasexules engage in depraved activities such as oral sex, anal sex, fisting, bestiality, or stealing kidneys from orphans.”
kim in portland @60 I, too was frightened silly at Circus Circus as a child. Maybe it’s from there that scary clowns are spawned.
Hyzenthlayk9 @58, you think there’s a correlation between only children and human rights activism?
Kim @60: Chalk me up as another person who visited Circus Circus as a child – but I think my wariness around clowns probably pre-dates that, but it’s hard to say.
Uriel @58: I’m not drawing a correlation between sibling status and rights activism (though it would be interesting to see how many of us come out of our ‘only child’ backgrounds with a willingness to help others verses those who go down the more ‘self-centered’ route) – but based on statements in other threads I do think that only children are more open to the idea of ‘adding’ family (in the form of someone who isn’t a blood relative, obviously, and considering or elevating them to ‘sibling’ status), thus making us a bit more open to the fluidity of how “family” is defined and structured.
Guilty as charged.
Hi- I didn’t read all the comments.
Just wanted to say…I’m a heterosexual, kinky, chicago mom who bakes my own bread and loves romping good sex with my husband.
Your essay was well put! Thanks for pointing out that it is okay to enjoy sex and be a good mom. I tend to be ashamed of my kinky side because people like Sally Kern have helped form my world view.
Thanks for reminding me that it’s great to have all these characteristics!
(BTW: I was just looking for a recipe for extra large peanut butter cookies.)
I, personally, never thought that gays are quite ordinary people. I can’t predict the future, but today they are people belonging to a special subculture. And I really envy your various sex life!
-Look at those f*cking happy gays! (C) Wanda Sykes.
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