why did my gayass wonder in this thread.
Anyway....
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Let me start of by saying I'm like 99% sure the "kink at Pride" discourse (as in, what the OP is responding to) is brought up in bad faith; tl;dr, kink very much has a place at Pride. LGBTQIA+ folks, but especially young LGBTQIA+ folks, are honestly very vulnerable to misinformation in this day and age. We learn about ourselves by networking with other LGBTQIA+ folks, but as those networks move digitally, there's little stopping bad faith actors from inserting themselves. Propaganda campaigns like
Operation Pridefall (cw: NSFW/kink, but also, this is probably *the* image that spurred this discussion) *will* happen; that stuff doesn't happen at Pride (Folsom Street Fair maybe? l thought Folsom is strictly 18+? idk). Btw, bad faith actors causing intra-communal conflict was something I saw secondhand as far back as Tumblr (think classics like "is 'queer' a slur?'"); it ain't new.
And there's so many complications to above: the pandemic made all of us more online this past year; youth cannot access bar/clubs that form most of the LGBTQIA+ venues; LGBTQIA+ folks often lack a parent or relatiive to form an inter-generational link and an entire generation of elders who could communicate history are
gone because of AIDS crisis; schools don't teach LGBTQIA+ history, let alone have an open dialogue about sex/sexuality. I do feel social media-driven attempts at causing intra-communal conflict will become a more pressing issue we'd need to address as a community, but the solutions to that are more than my gay little peanut brain can handle.
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With all that said, I don't feel like discussing much about "kink at pride"
per se at face value, because as said, I'm 90% sure it's done in bad faith, but I will anyway because gayass can't shutup. Adult sexuality is everywhere; like, I doubt what you find at Pride is any different from what you'd see walking down Fremont St in Las Vegas or even typical beer commercials (besides the obvious difference that one is gay). Stonewall started because police officers cited public indecency laws; literally "kink at a bar" was the crime law enforcement used is *still* used to persecute LGBTQIA+ folks (
read; also, this is a reason to get cops out of Pride). Additionally, sexual communities, e.g. BDSM, leather, and furry scenes, are very important for a lot of LGBTQIA+ folks to figure themselves out; unless your sexuality is a very specific flavor of cishet, you'd need to see very non-mainstream sexual interests for stuff to click. At the grassroots level, sexual communities and venues like bars/clubs (many of which may lean into a specific fetish) is where most LGBTQIA+ folks network; those kinks are often a very important part of your sexuality, just easier to compartmentalize in non-sexual settings. But in a place like Pride that's meant to be showing who are, shamelessly, why compartmentalize at all? Especially when, historically, all what compartmentalization has done is just hurt the LGBTQIA+ community.
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anyway, Nintendo's E3 conference is about to start, so I'll stop there.
Edit: just some basic proofreading changes