SEXIS WRONG

circulating material that advocates queer sex and are being
harassed with federal audits. Why is a pamphlet about how
to put a condom on a hard cock more obscene than a teenage
girl with an unwanted pregnancy or an adolescent boy who
just learned he’s HIV-positive? A teacher who hands out lube
and condoms would lose his job, but a teacher who tells his
students that condoms don’t protect you against HIV will not
be prosecuted for murder.
Meanwhile, in the Gay Pride Mecca of San Francisco, 85%
of the gay men I know have to snort, smoke, or inject crystal
before they can get their freak on. We’re all very happy after
we’ve taken our party favors, but if we were happy in the first
place, would we really be making sure we didn’t leave home
without a bump and a straw? Is the music so loud because
we don’t really want to talk to each other or because we can’t
stand the voices in our own heads? All of us grew up being
spit on, hit, and kicked around for being sissies, but as adults,
the only guys we want are the ones who hold up the most
brittle façade of muscular virility. If the only thing that matters
is how good you look and how butch the people you’re having
sex with look, all you’ve got is a room full of pretty but very
depressed men. Trying to get rid of internalized homophobia
when there’s so much hostility all around us is like, shudder,
washing your hair in dirty water. But, hey, it’s our fault that
syphilis rates are rising, because fags are self-indulgent and
irresponsible. Go to it—it’s legal!
We have more codified gay rights than we did when I went
to my first gay bar in 1971 and saw cops take a
payoff right over the counter. But there are still
too many straight people who hate us. There
are still far too many deviants who can’t see
beyond the edges of their own oppression,
to see where all the freaks are connected in a
crazy quilt of sexual repression and misrepresentation. A few
examples follow that tirade.
The Human Rights Campaign still won’t advocate writing
transgendered people into the Employment Non-Discrimination
Act (ENDA), a proposed federal anti-discrimination law,
and when gay civil-rights laws are being debated at the local
level, more often than not the lesbian and gay activists who
are pushing for those laws actively resist extending that umbrella
of protection to transpeople. These are the same kind
of people who would have pushed other Jews out of line to
make sure they got one of Raoul Wallenberg’s fake German
passports out of the Third Reich. Let’s keep on making sure
there’s never enough to go around, shall we? The surest sign
of being a shit is the drive to make other people live in it.
Ah, the sweet smell of capitalism, the rim seat of economic
systems.
Sodomy is legal, but what if you want to wear a latex straitjacket
and whimper, “Oh, sir, please flood my pig pussy with
your dirty spunk,” while a hard dick is pressed against your
bruised and greedy butt? Leatherpeople have been deplored
and harassed in every single gay rights march we’ve had in
Washington, DC. And I’m not fingering Fred Phelps or the
Sons of Saint Patty here. (Eeew. Gotta wipe that off my
imaginary digit.) Mainstream lesbians and gay men apparently
think that those of us who are drag queens or wielders
of bullwhips enjoy being turned into the home-movie stars of
homophobic Christian propaganda. In fact, it’s a problem for
us, too. We don’t want to do anything to set gay liberation
back, but we also want a chance to publicly celebrate who
we are. We’ve already been shoved into the closet as far as
we can go without getting turned into pathologized mashed
potatoes. Unlike same-sexers, “sexual sadists” and “sexual
masochists” are still in the damned DSM-IV-TR, tagged along
with trannies as a mental disorder.
The cross-waving addicts of flaming holy writ are not after
just you, bubba, with your domestic partner and Jack Russell
terrier. The religious right has targeted leather conferences,
fetish parties, and S/M clubs all over the country in a wellorganized
campaign to prevent us from meeting or playing in
public. Just as bars were once threatened with losing their
liquor licenses if they allowed homosexuals to congregate
on their premises, hotels and other establishments are turning
us away because the vice squad has had a little talk with
The repression of sexuality in
this country goes far beyond the
homophobic stigma placed on butt
piracy, muffdiving, and cocksmoking.
them. Kinky people come to these events and clubs in part
because it’s often not safe for us to have the kind of sex we
want to have in our own homes or apartments. We don’t usually
meet compatible tricks at the laundromat, PTA, or down
the hall in our offices.
People in the leather-S/M-D/S-fetish community lose our
jobs, have our children taken away from us, get thrown out of
housing, are made to leave job training or school, get beaten
up or killed, and have to cope with the stress of being stereotyped
and hated. We are depressed and angry. We are
isolated and self-destructive. And that’s just the BDSM activists
I’m talking about. When will there be some kind of legal
protection for us? Can we join gay men and lesbians in doing
sensitivity training for the police so they’ll stop trying to close
down our bars and will listen to us when we get assaulted
or blackmailed? You honestly don’t have to worry about sa-
QUEER FREAKS 321