I promise I’m not trying to be rude with this very brisk response. I haven’t eaten yet, and I’m quite tired as a result, and then I just spent basically all my energy for the morning being delighted by the existence of flags.
Here’s a wikipedia article to get you started. Here’s an article written by a leather dyke discussing lesbians in leather. Historically, kink and LGTBQ+ stuff was seen as “the same” by straights, leading to most gay districts also being kink districts, very few of which have survived gentrification and assimilation.
Kink and queer identities were so well intertwined that art depicting kink was generally accepted to be “gay art” more than anything.
Kink in its modern form was more or less entirely created by queer people, especially gay men post WWII.
For queer people living in rural areas with limited internet access or social options, leather parties and meets are a major way to communicate with the greater queer world*.
In terms of sociological research, the overlap between queer and kinky identities is well known, and both are considered variations from the heteronormative ideal of relationships, leading to both being attacked in similar ways: being called perversions, equated with rape and abuse, referred to as predatory, etc etc.
For further research, the keyword you’ll want to look for is “leather culture.” Generally, research tagged with BDSM will be about the psychological impacts of BDSM, the difficulties it can present to relationship therapists, etc. Leather culture will tend to be specifically about the historic interrelation of queer and kinky identities.
* Sorry about this one, it’s a pay-to-access article that I read in college years ago, and I haven’t the slightest idea where to get it for free today. But if you have a student email, you might be able to log into your databases and find it there.
I did some digging. The Journal of Rural Studies (https://www.journals.elsevier.com/journal-of-rural-studies) supports open access. I found the article you’re discussing. Sorry for the long URL but : https://ac.els-cdn.com/074301679500013D/1-s2.0-074301679500013D-main.pdf?_tid=6cd5030e-3bdf-45a3-8522-2fa2ed990776&acdnat=1527608886_9381a8d6dd1555e1421f0644aedbbd31
A couple of quick things to add to this, if I might?
First: transgressive. It’s something I’m finding myself coming back to more and more when I have to give talks that deal with anything historical. It often has slipped people’s minds that at one point holding the hand of your boyfriend (as a guy) in public was transgressive. It was often akin, and I mean this sincerely, and in fact I recall people treating it as if we were – having full on sex in the street. It’s often important to remind myself that there was no differentiation. We had sex with people of our own gender and that was kinky. So we were fair game to speculate. A looot of people did the whole thing of “but… how do you… you know.” And from that came a lot of “well, I bet they screw sheep, too!” and kids and we had whips and everyone was into watersports and…
Anything outside the missionary and we probably were all doing it, and like rabbits. And my, Betty, wasn’t that just horrid?
Part of the power move a lot of people I know used (and still do) is to use the thing people don’t dare talk about and secretly spend all their time thinking about against them. We showed up in leather. We made out in public. We were raunchy as hell at protests because it set people off.
We weren’t ashamed of liking sex. If y’all were, well then… watch this.
There were always people who have felt that who they are in bed with makes them no different than anyone else. We were not loved by our own community during the heavy protest days because we were different. And some felt, feel, that kink, leather, drag and so on was too in your face, too visible. That it did too much away from assimilation into society.
Kink is a sliding spot on a spectrum that is changed by where you stand. When I first came out kink was This Thing that was ritual and dark corners and not talked about and a club I wanted to join without knowing what it was. After some time I still thought… well, I’m not that kinky. But then I realized to some straight people screwing around with a guy was kinky. And then to some gay guys my leather made me kinky. And then to some guys my D/s relationship made me kinky. But to others it was just barely kinky.
It often seems less that there is a specific group in our community that came forward as much as the label slowly wore off the bulk of it as assimilation / acceptance (rough though it may be) progressed.
But that’s mainly personal opinion and should not be seen as “This is historical fact”.
This is what my experiences with the kink scene were like as well.
I remain troubled by the weird idea on here that transgression is bad, that shocking or startling other people sometimes is evil, etc.
I think it’s also very important to talk about the MASSIVE cultural shift that took place when kink changed from mainly a queer thing united around the word ‘leather’ to a predominantly cisgender heterosexual culture united around the term ‘BDSM’.
Because the young LGBT people that don’t feel safe around BDSM? They’re not all just conservative sex-negative people. That discomfort is there with some pretty good reasons. Young people that go to a BDSM event these days get into a completely different culture from what existed in leather culture.
The leather culture was a very broad sex-positive space that embraced things like anal sex, watersports, anonymous hookups in darkrooms, bondage, pet play, masochism, diapers, rubber, etc, etc, etc. But none of these sex acts defined leather culture. You could do none of the things that currently make up the BDSM acronym, and still be a part of leather culture.
And more importantly, leather culture was shaped by queer people, often the most marganilized queer people, and as such it was about subversive living. Redefining beauty standards, fucking over gender roles, queering everything. Leather culture was a big ‘fuck you’ to everything ‘respectable’ and as such it went hand in hand with all the movements that wanted to bring down the oppressive systems of our society. .
BDSM only became a popular term in the mid-1990s and it is defined specifically by the sex acts of the BDSM acronym. So here you have a subculture that is all about power and control and full of mostly cisgender heterosexual dominant white men forming the most important leaders and culture definers. When I look around an average BDSM space now, I see shit like:
- a blatantly sexist overlap between what is considered masculine and feminine and what is considered dominant and submissive
- a false ‘BDSM vs. vanilla’ binary as if all the other kinks no longer matter
- a pretty strong ‘more intense BDSM is better because vanilla is boring’ culture that encourages people to ‘push their boundaries’ (jikes)
- a lot of unquestioning reproductions of rape culture and an obvious assumption that everyone gets off on these same images
-
a complete denial that maybe some of this attracts people who really aren’t into this whole consent thing
(the old ‘no true scotsman’ thing: “Yes, Danny over there is creepy and pushy but he’s a Dom so we let him and all the subs just warn each other about him behind his back)
- a tendency to hide rapists and silence victims because talking openly about rape in BDSM communities might damage the reputation of BDSM
- a looooot of racism (white folks having slave auctions for fun? hello…)
- a lot of commercialisation (owning all the right toys, going to all the right clubs, getting that premium membership on that dating site)
- Homophobia, transphobia, classism, you name it
So, ya know, BDSM culture right now feels extremely unsafe to many and the important part is that is not because it’s kinky, it’s because it’s a culture build by and still mostly run by cisgender heterosexual white men who get off on dominating women. Which is, ya know, not the most subversive demographic out there. Bringing down the oppressive systems of our society? Not on the agenda.
BDSM culture is either apolitical or focussed on assimilation and absolutely celebrates the dominant paradigism in society.
Leather culture
wasn’t perfect by far, but it was about breaking down
standards of what beauty and sexuality looked like,
rejecting dominant paradigism in society and that united it with all the struggles against oppression.
Which is why I’d loooooove for queer spaces to become more sex-positive and kink-positive again but I’d haaaaate for them to ‘ally with the BDSM movement’ or reproduce the shitty culture that BDSM has cooked up in the last 20+ years.
QueerAnarchism 