Also, y'all know that the “no kink at Pride” moral panic is absolutely going to turn towards drag queens and trans women next, right?
All of this “what about the children!?” crap is classic reactionary bullshit going back decades and the reason you see so many lgbtq people pushing back against it (particularly those of us 30+) is because we know exactly where it’s going.
Look at all the reactionaries and TERFs that have been leading this panic, you absolutely know that’s the next target. They’ve been laying the groundwork that trans women are predatory and unsafe for children and that drag is inherently sexual.
To me, this is the same level as the conservatives that freaked out when a library in the Austin suburbs had a drag queen do weekly story time and would bring guns to “protect” the children and threatened to pull the funds of the library until they cancelled it.
We’re all seen as inherently adult, as inherently unsafe for children. All of us. The L’s, G’s, B’s, T’s, Q’s, A’s, all of us. If we start this “but think of the children” then all of us are targets, soon Pride will be a bunch of cishet parents watching a bunch of rainbow colored Lockheed Martin, Bank of America, NYPD, and Absolut Vodka party floats.
Kink has been as much apart of our community and especially Pride from longer than all of us have been alive. That’s the point of Pride, to be ourselves in our own space without reactionaries and social regressives forces.
It is, at its core, a “fuck you” to those exact people.
Not to detract from Pride, and the discourse about it, but the second to last paragraph is not as crazy as it seems. Adjacent counties to New Orleans in the ‘90’s added so many laws about some things and removed so many regulations against commercialism, that some Mardi Gras parades wound up with no bands, marching groups, or dancers; and every single float was just a billboard for something [think Macy’s Day Parade but less music, more float ads]… not to mention all five branches of the armed service having recruitment floats literally handing out flyers. It was one of the most strange things I’ve ever seen at Carnival, so yea. Too much moral kotowing and too many business connections can destroy any party.