i got an email from greg today saying something along the lines of ‘how are you? you haven’t posted for a while’. yes. no, i haven’t. i’m all in a whirl and i caught a cold. i’ve just gotten back from dallas tx., where the 22d annual creating change conference took place. for those of you who don’t know, creating change is a national conference sponsored by the national gay and lesbian task force on lgbt policy. and other stuff.
the conference was amazing. there were so many hot beautiful amazing queers there, it nearly broke my head. i’ve never been around that many queers at once before. it was really powerful. and the workshops were very interesting as well — i attended some focused on trans issues, which are near and dear to my heart, and others focused on youth programming. but the most mind-expanding were the workshops that were part of the sexual liberation track, which was new this year.
for me, the point of the sexual liberation track (besides sexual liberation of course) was that our movement is less and less strong as we separate and sublimate the sexual aspect of our revolution. pretending that we as a queer community care about marriage instead of sex is deeply damaging for us. we try not to talk about it because it is one of the key criticisms that conservative opponents level at us when explaining why it is okay to ban books from school libraries. but the root of being gay is that we want to sleep with people who are not the people who society has deemed acceptable. from the get-go, we are having non-normative sex, and that is what sets us apart. you can contort yourself to say that ‘not all couples have sex at the center of their relationship’ and you’re right (poor souls) but that’s not the point. the point is that sex is the center, or the supposed center, of ALL couple relationships, gay or straight.
and if sex is the center of relationships, the fact that no one is comfortable talking about it is kind of a big deal.
i remember reading in older books about the gay rights movement that back in the 70s, people talked about sexual liberation as something that was for straight people too. it was something that was going to be achieved someday, with the end result of being able to fuck who you want.
within reason of course. between consenting adults.
but the subtext, or one of the many subtexts, is that repression leads to pathology. pathology leads to non-consensual encounters, whether between older and younger people (such as the terrible pedophilia cases in the catholic church and elsewhere), sexual abuse within families, or rape between people of any gender/sexual orientation. sexual liberation was supposed to set us free from that by bringing sex back into our culture as something to be owned and talked about instead of hidden in plain view where we can all see what’s going on but to talk about it is social suicide.
i’ve noticed — as my politics got more sexual, and i began claiming my desire openly, a certain subset of erstwhile friends fell away. they were replaced (thank goodness) by radical kinky poly queer people. hm, surprising? not really. i think that’s where the real groundbreaking work is being done right now. it’s in that community that people are being empowered to name their desire, to negotiate consensual, explicit sex with people for whom honesty and mutual respect are a priority.
think about how fucked up sexual dynamics are. dwell for a moment on the trope of the man buying a girl dinner and expecting sex as payment. how much better would it be if they could negotiate a scene where the man buys dinner for the girl and she goes home with him, or maybe he even pays her — but they started out by talking about that fantasy and she was into it and enthusiastic about playing her part.
isn’t that healthier? in the negotiated scene, they can both participate fully. they each have safewords to use if they feel uncomfortable with how things are going.
i don’t mean to go on and on about this, but my larger point is that i think our movement is stuck, and will continue to fail to make real progress toward substantive change, if we don’t incorporate the principle of sexual liberation back into our politics and our activism. we might even be able to bridge gaps between different communities more easily if we were comprehensively addressing things like government control of bodies, which affects trans and queer people as well as people with disabilities as well as ‘welfare moms’ and people of colour.
and so to bed.
