Made My Day

rhodanum:

I’ve blacklisted a ridiculous amount of things, because I couldn’t bear to have the bigoted words of gatekeepers flashing across my screen anymore and I’ve bowed out of the discourse for the sake of my health. However, I do feel I need to add something here, because this is a vitally important topic for me, one that shapes my entire future in the community.

wetwareproblem:

There’s a couple of major reasons, and probably quite a few minor ones.

First and foremost, a lot of them are still hurting. We go through a lot of shit as a community, and the wounds are more raw, angry, and fresh for some people than others. They’re hurt and angry and that tends to make people lash out. My theory is that this is why you see so many young people among the hatekeepers - kids tend to be exposed to more of this hurt than adults, because they can’t control their environments, and they haven’t developed the coping mechanisms that long veterans of the community have.

The other major issue is respectability politics. Basically, the idea is that they can buy their way into acceptance by society by being “respectable” enough. Historically speaking, this requires two things: Visibly conforming to the dominant social model, and finding a group of less-respectable people on the same axis to visibly attack. You need to show the oppressors that you won’t make waves, and that you’ll buy into their oppression. In the case of the MOGAI community, this is where we get the image you see everywhere of two smiling, well-dressed, affluent, monogamous white men or women, in their comfy suburban home, lately with a couple of kids. This imagery is all over the place, and its message is simple: “We’re just like you. We won’t make waves.”

Unfortunately, for it to work, respectability politicians need to distance themselves as much as possible from people who do not and cannot fit this image. This is where you get things like “Bisexuals don’t belong,” “Trans people don’t belong,” “Ace people don’t belong,” and the recent distancing of the community from kink and polyamory. This is where I think a lot of the older hatekeepers come in.

There’s also the unfortunate fact that a lot of people just plain don’t give a damn about liberation - what they care about is grabbing as much as they can for themselves, and to hell with everyone else. This overlaps with respectability politics - it takes a certain degree of this mindset to engage in respectability politics in the first place - but can be its own distinct thing too. Frequently, this is where you’ll find outright abusers, pulling explicitly abusive tactics. This is where you got “Lesbians don’t belong,” “Bi women are gross and not as good as real lesbians,” and “Trans women are invading men.” Pretty much anyone of any age can turn up in this category.

and the recent distancing of the community from kink and polyamory. 

I’ve slammed head-first into both of these in recent years – the first is far more present on Tumblr, but the second was very much a hallmark of the arguments leading to marriage equality in various Western countries, with LGBTQIAP+ proponents almost trampling each other in their haste to repudiate polyamory and any putative legal recognition of a polyamorous relationships in the future. A large part of this came in order to combat the conservative ‘slippery-slope’ argument, but it was still a very hurtful thing for me and others to keep hearing…. and in the end, I don’t think that ‘same-sex marriage will lead to multi-partner marriage one day’ is even an argument that needed repudiating. The cultural tide was in favor of marriage equality regardless, it would have passed even if its proponents hadn’t been so assiduous in presenting their case as the ‘all-American dream of a white-picket fence, a suburban home and 2.5 kids, anything that strays from this we condemn.’

I’m queer. I’m kinky as all hell. I’m also polyamorous. The first I’ve known and accepted and acted upon for nearly a decade now. The second I’ve wrestled with and kept denying, even though I’ve been involved in more or less poly relationships for the past seven years. The stigma associated with the term was so great that I’d keep lying to myself, saying ‘these are just open relationships, I’m keeping my options open, keeping it drama-free’. I’ve come to fully accept and take up the sexual and political identity only recently, now that I’m in a stable, loving triad with a bisexual cis man and a bisexual trans man and we’re all intimate with each other. It shouldn’t have taken this long for me to accept this and I’m laying part of the blame squarely at the LGBTQIAP+ community’s feet.

The virulent anti a-spec backlash kept making me think that this isn’t the first time the community has devoured and spat out its own and it won’t be the last either. I kept thinking back to biphobic and transphobic rhetoric, but also to how unsafe and nasty the community can become, by turns, to kinky and polyamorous people under the umbrella, regardless of however else we identify and how much good we do. Particularly here on Tumblr, where radfem-typical anti-BDSM talking-points are frequently making the rounds. I remember laughing so bitterly and going ‘of fucking COURSE they are’ when it came out that the people behind a certain very active anti-kink blog are TWERFs. At this point, the Venn diagrams between ferociously anti-kink radical feminists, SWERFs and TWERFs are basically a circle. And a good deal of these ideas are also floating around in aphobe / gatekeeper circles, particularly the ‘kink as normalizing various forms of abuse’ bits.

Whenever I hear the ‘oh, you want to let straight kinksters or poly people in’ accusation, said with a sneer, I feel as if I’m being slapped right over the face. It just makes me want to holler and ask them how the hell they think that sort of talk makes kinky, polyamorous LGBTQIAP+ people feel. I suspect it would involve a lot of shrugging and ‘nah, we weren’t talking about you’, all while making certain to show that their ‘respect’ for me and people like me is paper-thin. At best. All while getting ready to deploy both polyamory and kink as weapons against me, if we’re ever on different sides of a political issue – ‘don’t listen to what she has to say, she’d disgusting, she normalizes abuse with her selfish sexual habits.’

This is respectability politics at its absolute worst – and heaven help you if you point out that many, many poly people are anything but Straight and that there was a very strong historical tie between the queer and BDSM communities, with many people belonging to both.   

I have been trying to say this stuff for so long and the rhetoric against it actually broke me earlier this year. For the first time in 20 years of being queer, I felt like a freak everywhere because my queerness no longer mattered to people when they found out I was poly and kinky as well, and I fucking LOST FRIENDS trying to defend myself and my right to exist. I lost space. I lost community. I was alone and unsafe and had nowhere to be. All despite having been definitively queer and having literally grown up in a queer family and community.

I have ~never~ been so cut off from support, and it wasn’t just because I didn’t want to talk to people who actively distanced themselves from the combined history of queer/kink/poly, but because those people were actively deriding me in queer spaces so often that I COULDN’T stay.

And they never bothered to care about my being queer in other ways. As far as they were concerned, my poly and kink were choices and I could stop making those choices any time I wanted so I was clearly disgusting for willingly choosing abusive and bigoted lifestyles over and over again. I was a predator and an invader.

And you don’t even want to fucking now how they acted about my partner who is way less secure in their own queerness and way less ready to name themselves as anything. My partner who has no name for their gender and maybe never will because of the complete unwillingness people have to see them as anything other than male and man. My partner who cannot bare men and masculinity in himself or others and rarely dates anyone but women and nb folks and even then only the femme ones because they feel so unsafe around masculinity as a culture. My partner who has never, before being with me, even been allowed the space to ask themselves how they want to expand. My partner gets so much more disdain as “basically a straight man who just hates commitment and wants to use women” even when I don’t even bring them with me.

I’ve since become convinced that queer spaces that understand and respect (if not include) polyamory and kink still exist, because I have to if I want to not lose my mind and the last piece of my family. But I still struggle and I’m still far more damaged and susceptible to Straight people’s bullshit than I used to be when I had my aunties and uncles around to be my family and ticket to the queer community. This kind of stuff is unsafe and unbelievably alienating to new people who don’t have a solid sense of themselves yet.