A month or so ago, I wrote an article, aptly titled, “Cishet Kinksters Don’t Need Space in the LGBT+ Community” after stumbling across a transphobic, and wildly misinformed article by a person named Jillian Keenan, that you can read here, if you feel like being sick. This topic has been brought up again, because @huffpostqueer (Huffington Post Queer) decided to share the same article to their page, and then proceeded to argue with queer people, that cishet kinksters are indeed queer because they have fetishes.
The definition of sexual orientation is “An inherent or immutable enduring emotional, romantic or sexual attraction to other people.” Sexual orientation does not include how you like to have sex.
The article is also transphobic as it insists that penis in anus sex is how all homosexual men have sex, which is untrue, as genitalia does not define gender, and they go so far as to compare gay sex to fetishes.
Kink is not an orientation. Kink is just how you like to have sex. Not all queer people have sex. Queerness and how you have sex are not the same thing. Insisting that queerness and kink are one in the same, sexualizes gay people, and makes the community inaccessible to vulnerable children, who need a community.
Fetishes are not queer. Fetishes do not give you access to a community based on your gender identity or who you love. You can be a queer person with fetishes, and your queerness is what lets you have space in the LGBT+ community, not the fact you have fetishes.
Two heterosexual people having sex with dog masks on doesn’t make them queer, or give them any knowledge or understanding of struggles that members of the LGBT+ community face. It makes a mockery of the LGBT+ community, to even insinuate the fetish community is “oppressed” and therefore deserves space in the LGBT+ community.
People that are into bondage aren’t harassed for liking bondage, because it’s a practice in their sex life. They’re not discriminated for it at work or school. There is nothing oppressive about fetishes, and people that participate in fetishes have their own fetish community.
Tying the fetish community in with the queer community, needlessly sexualizes being queer. It alienates youth, and children, and it erases the experience of asexual people that are already left out of too many things. It’s ragingly harmful, and it needs to stop, right now. Kink has it’s own community. People in the LGBT+ community are not going to be forced to accept cis heterosexual people simply because they read Fifty Shades of Grey and now think that they’re oppressed because they like spankings.
