"No Kink At Pride" Exposed As Anti Gay Right Wing Agenda

[RAMROD 117,994]

Happy Pride Month everyone! Extremist rightwing Telegram channels are using the ‘no kink at pride’ discourse to push a number of antigay, transphobic, and even antisemitic narratives. 

“No kink at pride” is a discourse that recurs every June, and has done so for decades. Although “kink” is a simply a kind of fun sex, in the context of this discourse it usually refers to leather gear or fetish wear. The question is whether LGBT people should tone down the visible sexuality at Pride celebrations, in order to make the event more family-friendly. Children can’t consent to seeing sexy things, and plenty of people simply don’t want to. On the other hand, queer sexuality is often seen as inherently transgressive, and pride is a time of year when those relationships can be celebrated after many years of social and legal repression. And since our glorious leaders haven’t made participation in pride parades mandatory yet, if you’re truly offended, you could just stay home. Thus goes the debate. 

The discourse has a few pitfalls for the unfamiliar. It conflates queer sexuality with BDSM, which is inaccurate. Straight people enthusiastically participate in kink, and there are plenty of LGBTQ people who find kink uninteresting. The discourse is also not split evenly by sexuality – there are gay kinksters who think that kink should stay in the bedroom, not in the streets. 

There had been some speculation on Twitter that the ‘no kink at pride’ discourse could easily be used as a wedge issue. We are extremely unhappy to confirm these suspicions. 

Our investigation focused on three pieces of content shared between six loosely connected Telegram channels. The smallest had 5k followers, the largest 100k, with the average being somewhere around 30k. It is likely that they drew users from the same pool of users, as posts were often forwarded from one channel to another. Four of the channels were UK-based, and two were US-based. 

A long post from the admin of the largest channel had this explanation, which lays out pretty clearly the thrust of the argument. In this channel, “kink at pride” is child abuse. It broadcasts the lie that pride celebrations are full of pedophiles, thus inculcating in its audience a prejudice against visibly queer people. 

The message from the channel’s admin clearly equates a visible display of kinky queer sexuality with child abuse. (Notably, and somewhat ironically, he opens this screed by saying that he “doesn’t care” about any of this.)

 It ends with a call to action -- “it’s time to make a stand in the most public way possible.” 

Many of these channels have the stated purpose of being anti-mask, anti-lockdown or anti-vaccine. These channels are also filled with forwarded messages from other, more extremist channels, making it easy for a casual user to be exposed to and drawn into QAnon narratives or outright nazi propaganda. These channels are only a single click away.

“No kink at pride” is an extremely online™ way of phrasing this point. There’s no evidence to suggest that the same people who push the “no kink at pride” discourse on platforms like Twitter, Youtube and Facebook are at all the same people who lurk in these Telegram chats, nor does it seem likely that they overlap. But the narrative is the same, and it conceals rightwing cultural goals, i.e. erasing queer people from public discourse and visibility.

Although not all kinksters are queer, and not all queer people are kinksters, there is a longstanding connection between kink and queer communities., and that’s due to their transgressive nature. Jamie Lawson in her ethnology Rainbow Revolutions, explains:

“The BDSM or kinky communities recentre sex around pleasure, not reproduction. It’s no coincidence that the leather scene is so closely associated with radical, transgressive queerness – the gay leather aesthetic emerges post-World War II in America and it’s been part of queer culture ever since. That kinky, leather aesthetic has been part of queer politics and queer protest since the 1960s – you see it in pictures of early Prides and in the radical protests of the ACT UP movement.”

In a recent VICE article, Daisy Jones argues that the “kink at pride” discourse needs to be retired, because intentionally or not, it serves as a covert attack on gay rights, and gay rights are already under assault nearly everywhere. In the UK, there are no trans MPs and few trans judges, and the legal rights of trans people are in question. Just recently, plans to reform the GRA to include self-ID were scrapped. The Times publishes nearly one article a day about trans people, but has no trans contributors. In the US, a wave of transphobic legislation is sweeping across the country, including some total bans on trans healthcare for children. 

The gay rights organization GLAAD, in a May report, found that social media platforms were “categorically unsafe, across the board” for LGBTQ people. Although all of the platforms brand themselves as celebrating gay rights, LGBTQ people faced extraordinary harassment and abuse on all of these platforms. President and CEO Sarah Kate Ellis made it clear that it wasn’t just harassment though -- those narratives were used to organize opposition to gay rights online. 

 

Full article and screen caps at Source:

https://www.logically.ai/articles/no-kink-at-pride-on-telegram-pushes-antigay-agenda?hs_amp=true&__twitter_impression=true

 

anyone with two braincells would already notice this, that something is amiss, but hey

[Nano 3,744]

me showing up to pride this year: 

 see ya leather babes at pride 

[weed 79,284]

Children found dead in a ditch 

[gypsy101 5,453]

not surprising

but does it recur every june? i honestly don't remember it ever being a hot topic before this year

[reallydima 383]

I think that equating Kink and fun is correct. There is no question to me that people of all sexualities benefit from having fun in bed. Being queer has become anti-culture, so it doesn't surprise me that those jaded against gays are having to walk this fine line between normal and fun. 

[Ouranos 1,011]

Kink isn’t just for the queer community kink is universal pride is for sexuality kink doesn’t make your sexuality 

[HuffsAhoy 7,433]

Who could have ever predicted that this anti-gay, anti-sex, and anti-kink propaganda came from the alt right freaks?! I mean, it's not like people on here tried to expose this fake issue for what it was yesterday when all the Puritans where crying, only to be told we were pedophiles. I mean who could have every guessed?! 

 

[Phlop 4,773]

I mean I find it off putting when I see men with tail butt plugs and dog masks next to children

[HuffsAhoy 7,433]

21 minutes ago, gypsy101 said:

not surprising

but does it recur every june? i honestly don't remember it ever being a hot topic before this year

Yes this is an annual discourse. But, it seems more amplified this year due to the attacks on trans people across the world. 

[Kimmo 82,457]

Fine I’ll go back to my hiding...

[HuffsAhoy 7,433]

22 minutes ago, Phlop said:

I mean I find it off putting when I see men with tail butt plugs and dog masks next to children

But I'm sure you think it's okay when kids play video games or watch tv shows where people are murdered left and right, or when sex is sanitized, or where sex is just pushed to the peripherals amirite? Oh my GOD please tell the press that a poor innocent child sees someone with a pup hood!! The poor darlings will be mentally scared for life

[Phlop 4,773]

6 minutes ago, HuffsAhoy said:

But I'm sure you think it's okay when kids play video games or watch tv shows where people are murdered left and right, or when sex is sanitized, or where sex is just pushed to the peripherals amirite? Oh my GOD please tell the press that a poor innocent child sees someone with a pup hood!! The poor darlings will be mentally scared for life

You’re right, wave dildos in front of the children and shove stuff up our holes. Who cares right?

[CautiousLurker 19,951]

1 hour ago, Nano said:

me showing up to pride this year: 

 see ya leather babes at pride 

Honestly for someone who looks like you that outfit covers up a tad too much 

Me on the other hand, hmmmm, I wonder if leather ponchos are a thing 

Edit: THEY ARE... looks like there's gonna be a poncho pup at pride this year 

Spoiler

Just kidding, I don't leave my house 

 

[HuffsAhoy 7,433]

12 minutes ago, Phlop said:

You’re right, wave dildos in front of the children and shove stuff up our holes. Who cares right?

You realize you've become a victim of Republican brainwashing, right? This type of behavior literally does not happen, EVER, at any Pride event  I mean, how out of touch with reality do you have to be to believe this bull crap  I really feel sad for the future of the gay rights movement with opinions like yours being validated  

[CautiousLurker 19,951]

I hate the 'think of the children' rhetoric so much - as if people who push it actually care about kids, I'm yet to see those people do anything useful - do they push for competent sex ed? How about rampant bullying that nobody ever seems to do anything about - do they have solutions for that? Cuz when I was a kid, those were the things that f*cked me up, not seeing a shirtless guy in a doggy mask...

I get it, resolving something as complex as bullying is hard... it's much easier to get on your high horse and bully people on forums so you can feel good about yourself