In the intersection of my kink and queerness, I find myself repeatedly having to explain why my kink deserves as much representation, because it’s not the “spice of my life,” it’s inextricable from how I love and I cannot repackage it to serve your representational agenda when writing my identity either.
Deep inside the accidental archives of my life, I chanced upon a photograph of myself from when I was eighteen. I don’t recall who took the picture but I remember that period of time quite well. Earlier that week, I had gotten my lip pierced by a man who then fucked me, bent over the tattoo chair in his studio, and the stuck me with needles and pulled my hair until I cried with relief and joy. Two days before the picture was taken, I had played with a 36-year-old dominatrix who cut me behind my thigh, fucked my asshole with her heel and then took me to dinner where we talked about our love for bloodshed. She didn’t ask me once whether there was something traumatic that caused this desire in me nor did she allude to anything like that about herself.
In the picture, I am wearing a sleeveless jumper than looks black but is very dark-green, I have a handcuff-necklace around my neck and I am smiling, because I had just returned from a date with a person with whom I was interested in having a power-exchange relationship, and it had been a great meeting (that actually led to an amazing relationship). I was smiling because one year before that picture was taken none of that seemed like it would have been possible.
That period, from the ages of sixteen to eighteen, was extremely rough for me in terms of sexuality, orientation and interpersonal relationships. I was absolutely rampant and raging with desire for what my body demanded as sex. My girlfriend tried to take her own life and, in that process, her parents discovered that she was dating me and outted and attacked me for *gaying* their daughter, *and* turning her into a pervert who did weird sex-things like stuff underwear in my mouth. Twice, my parents had forced me into therapy and psychiatry in order to cure me of the disease that had me desiring pain, hoarding whips in my drawers and writing lucid ideas about my desire in journals they kept snooping to find. My boyfriend was happy to beat me, abuse me, humiliate me and even cut me, but he missed absolutely no opportunity to remind me that this desire I had was an illness, and use that determination of my *damaged* status as the reason I deserved to be abused even more. I was in a deeply conservative town where I fucked everyone, and by that point, they had all told everyone else about the *weird* things I did in bed, which led to a social boycott of me for being deranged, slutty, disloyal (ie: poly and happy to say it) and disgusting (unless, they wanted to fuck, of course). Truly, I couldn’t wait to get the hell out of the place where I was stuck and when I did, and within a year, found inside my life so much space and freedom to express exactly who I am, I could not believe it.
The reason I am telling that story now is a because of a few experiences I have had with kink-representation and its intersection with queer-representation recently. A few weeks ago, I found myself on a panel about kink (and its politics) at a queer fest alongside a psychiatrist who was asked a question about internalised stigma in his patients. He said that kink was just a “spice up your life” thing and so stigma was actually only there for queer-people and kink-people are not *really* stigmatized. In the last two years, with a steady increase, there have also been a lot of queer (and sometimes just quirky) organisations (news, writing or content) who want more kink-related pieces on their platforms, especially if they are also *queer*.
I have been in discussions like these, or pitch meetings, about a dozen times in the last year, and I have never made it to the point of publishing for any of them either because my kink is not queer enough or my queer is not kink enough, but more like, neither of them are *correctly* kinky or queer because there is an agenda in mind here and I am not meeting it.
Feedback: You are not centring your identity. When you mention being uncomfortable with dirty fingers in your food because of your saliva-phobia and germaphobia, it sounds like discrimination, even when it’s clearly a story about someone repeatedly violating stated boundaries. This story about a queer, kinky, woman from a minority religion is not intersectional enough because it does not use the word intersectional twenty-five times in 800-words. Can you focus more heavily on the trauma of being outted instead of finding the space to live freely? We’re just not seeing how the kink-here is part of any stigma or marginalisation, it’s not like kink is as vital to identity or visible as queerness. Can you tell the story in a way where the social and political violence is a response to your queerness and not your kink? I just feel like your queerness is not sufficiently visible in this story where you have relationships with eight-people of different genders but don’t make it a plot-point. Can you talk about kink more from a consent and aftercare standpoint? Can you make it more clear that this is a queer issue?
The market is demanding a very specific centring of identity (or just saying tone-deaf bullshit) and in it, I have to make a very clear, determined and terminology-heavily case for my identity, which I cannot do, because I am writer (and it will *always* come down to show, don’t tell). First of all, for me, it is not possible to separate my kink from my queerness and from my polyamory in a way that I centre just *one* of those because they are all inextricably linked to one another since they constitute vital elements of *how I love*. I love many people, I love many genders and I love with pain as the central tool of pleasure. I cannot tell you which one is my identity *first* and I cannot tell you how one has been more stigmatized than the other.
That story about my teenage years, that is the story of all of these identities. I didn’t want pain to *spice up my life*, I felt absolutely no desire, sexual or otherwise, without the pain. If you’ve been a young person who is realising they are attracted to other genders outside the cis-het paradigm, you may remember the compulsive nature of that desire, the way it weighs on you when you are out in the world and unsure about whether you are allowed to feel it, and for me, that was the desire for pain. I cannot love without it, I cannot feel aroused without it, I cannot express desire without it. It consumed me for much of my young life.
For me, being told (and abused) by family, society, partners, mental health professionals and doctors that something as fundamental as how I viewed love/desire was wrong, diseased and to be persecuted came for the kink *first*. To me, kink is sex. It is love. It is the relationship. So, this was the framing of the persecution:
It is wrong to get beaten up by (read: have sex with) people.
It is wrong for a woman to get beaten up by people.
It is wrong for a woman to get beaten up by many different people.
It is wrong from a woman to get beaten up by many different people some of whom aren’t cis-het men.
So, when a mental-health professional, invited to a queer-fest sits beside me on a kink panel and says it is about “spicing life” and it doesn’t carry stigma, my ears burn to hear it. When *publishers* tell me how I need to package my identity in order for it to make sense to them, it makes me feel insane. When someone tells me how I need to frame kink in order for it to seem like it *intersects* with my queer identity, I feel like I have gone crazy or they have, for not seeing it. In my early years, I couldn’t frame the political issues with battling for *how I love* but as I got older, I was repeatedly told to exclude kink from them because that is a sex-thing or a perversion thing, or a non-optional thing, and it is not as important as queerness (and sometimes polyamory too is more *important* than that) but for me kink is the conduit—the very language—by which I am queer or poly.
When, in my teenage years, I envisioned freedom, it didn’t just look like the right to love whomever and how many ever, it looked like the right to love them, fuck them and do it with a hefty dose of pain involved. Which is why, the picture I saw of myself, that period of my life, is the true depiction of queer-joy and it cannot come without kink-joy, woman-joy or poly-joy for me. It’s not just that I fucked my tattooist and he didn’t call me a slut, it’s that he understood how the pain of the needles was part of the sex and participated in that without making me feel weird. It’s not just that the dominatrix I dated was a woman, it’s that she was searching for someone to bleed and I wanted that, and we could do it, together, in a space that wasn’t shrouded by the idea of pleasure as something straightforward and genital. No one called us mental ill for how we expressed our desire *and* to whom. It’s not just that I could negotiate a relationship with someone on clear terms, it was that we could fetishize power and allow each other, lovingly, to have the space to love as many others as well.
Freedom—a deeply political concept—for me includes all of these things and they are stuck together. Honestly, that is what intersectional fucking means but it all falls apart when you want to curate me to be a symbol for you.This desire to *represent* kink and queerness, it comes with an unfortunate preconceived notion and agenda in mind, and once again, and perhaps as always, it fails to centre what is most important to centre: The Individual. My life is one life, my story is one story, and if you let me, I can tell that story well enough to make you laugh, cry, reflect on society and think, but I cannot tell it the way you have decided it should be told. I cannot tell it if you assess it for enough queerness or kinkness or polyness. It will never capture the essence of that photograph I found in my drawer. That girl was living something revolutionary, after experiencing something deeply oppressive, and her discovery of her freedom cannot be explained by a psychiatrist with no clue nor a bunch of bright-eyed professionals who are trying to curate representation.
When storytelling has an agenda, it’s no longer that and I cannot live this life where I turn myself—my truest self—into terms you splash onto headlines so everyone thinks you are so cool for hosting this panel or telling these tales. No thanks. Keep your platforms, I will not cower to prove to you why my *intersectionality* deserves your space. I am a kinky, hypersexual, queer, poly woman with some genital dysmorphia and a tonne of joy, but my story will always be found in crumpled photographs at the bottom of drawers because I refuse to package myself.
Ancillary Kink Support 
Leave a comment