Are Kink Parties Anti-Fascist?

Stop making me ask stupid questions

It’s Monday night, an off night for the usually straight dive bar i’m walking up to. Crowded outside is a motley crew of leather-clad queers smoking cigarettes and joints, eyeing each other’s hankies with knowing looks. I recognize some, introduce myself to the others, and walk inside. The bar, otherwise empty on Mondays, is teeming with leatherdykes. I make the rounds and say hi to my friends, watch a trans woman in a latex getup get spanked by the biggest daddy dyke i’ve ever seen, and finally i belly up to the bar. A thought has been growing in my head, quiet at first but louder and louder until i can barely remember what i’m trying to order: “what the fuck are we doing?”

I tried to have fun that night, just like i tried to have fun two nights later at a different event for kinky dykes in the same city. I was distracted though, distant, unable to shake the thought that we were like those exuberant cabaret performers and gay bar dancers in old Weimar Germany, dancing and partying while the brown shirts build their firebombs. I texted a lover of mine a few days later, “i just have this nagging voice in the back of my head that keeps saying ‘herstory is pounding down our door yelling FIRE and the best we can do is throw kink parties.’” I hate to feel like a wet blanket, especially when so much is uncertain and getting worse, but if this is the best we can do then fascism is about to hit us like an amateur impact dom. Clumsy but devastating.

There’s a Dan Savage quote that started floating around after the second Trump election, about how the gay bars and parties and dancing sustained the activists of the AIDS generation through the devastation of genocide by neglect. Calls to hold onto joy in the face of the crushing defeat of the last ten years are all over social media. In the face of this new reactionary wave, of institutionalized v-coding, of unabated zionist genocide in Gaza, of the further neo-colonizing of women, joy seems to be everyone’s priority. You would think everyone was the veteran of some long liberation war, tired and broken after fighting for years and years and ready to just relax and let the next generation give things a try, the way people talk about joy.

But they’re not. They’re largely white people in their 20’s (though not exclusively) who are deeply scared of what’s coming down from the whitest house. With no distress tolerance and no connection to previous generations of militants to learn anything from they panic, break down, and do their best to keep living nice happy petty-bourgeois lives like they did before. Kind of like that scene from Dead Poets Society when the parents find their kid dead by suicide, the mom panicking and repeating “he’s okay, he’s okay, he’s okay” until the truth becomes too evident to deny. Deep breaths, everything will be okay, joy is an act of resistance!

But it isn’t. Joy isn’t resistance, resistance is resistance. Sabotage and strikes and expropriations and assassinations and underground networks that funnel people out of the country, those things are resistance. Cut the fucking sentimentality and get real. Sentimentality (in this case holding onto outdated tactics because they comfort us) in revolutionary movements will get you killed. It’s high time to admit that here in the core of patriarchal civilization the things that make us happy have almost nothing to do with revolution.

Don’t misunderstand me, i’m not suggesting that we become single-minded automatons who only agitate for revolution. Nor am i suggesting that queer or lesbian events can’t serve political purposes while making us happy. After all, in this and perhaps only this, Dan Savage was right. We do need joyous community time to sustain us through the heavy shit. The problem is that we’re not doing the heavy shit yet. We’ve put the cart before the horse, found all the ways we can keep having fun while we keep trying to make yesterday’s rebellion fit today’s patriarchal fascism. Deportations continue unabated, trans women are transferred into men’s prisons with no resistance, the Palestine solidarity movement has completely fallen apart, and avowed neo-nazi groups march unchallenged through main street america.

Dykes gathering in a room together just to exist or play isn’t a threat to any of that. This isn’t the 1960’s, it’s not a victory just to get us together without the pigs raiding the bar. The fact that our parties aren’t targets for the state yet is just because they have bigger fish to fry right now. We occupy a tenuous bubble of acceptability. In this way we’re not actually resisting anything, just taking advantage of a blindspot in Dick’s field of vision.

If kink parties were raising money for resistance organizations then maybe i wouldn’t feel so out of step every time i go to one. Plenty of them raise money for mutual aid groups but really, at this point, if your group is still getting funding from grants or the state you are beyond saving. Just because the state hates that we gather like this (or gather at all) doesn’t make our doing so inherently an act of resistance. We have to be able to hinder the state’s ability to act on us and on other oppressed people. Meaningful resistance hinders male power, the hetero-settler state, and all the legal and extralegal mechanisms therein.

I understand why people are so freaked right now. Things are undeniably bad and when your existence is defined for you by state violence and increasing oppression it makes sense to focus solely on getting through the day. Nobody wants to go to war (and if you know someone who really really wants to go to war you should probably steer clear). Part of getting ourselves free is recognizing reality and making hard choices. Herstory is making demands of us, like it or not, and we thus far have not risen to them.

I have no interest in shaming anyone for their personal choices. I only singled out kink events because i myself spend much of my time attending them. The leatherdyke community is my community, like trans women are my people, and i feel a duty to speak to my context. I could be talking about any number of community events, really. So take shame and moral judgement off the table. Why are our people reacting so slowly?

Partly the reason is pretty simple. Most of the immediate attacks from the new government have been levied against immigrants. Settlers, even queer ones, will always feel safer at night if government attacks are mostly limited to immigrants and other people of color. Trump’s passport changes have effected all of us, true, and there’s indications that state violence could spread to us, but for now everyone snatched by ICE and shipped to secret detention facilities or concentration camps in El Salvador has been non-white.

It’s this fragile safety for settler dykes that has kept us from moving beyond reformist politics in really any way. At the end of the day, even with the most hardened radicals, settlers still feel like they’re home. Even if the place has been ransacked, and even if it was built on the corpses of entire nations, home can always be put back together. That’s why the New Afrikan uprisings against police brutality from 2009-2020 feel like a distant memory now. Settler radicals went home.

The other reason is what i’ve been harping on for the last year or so. That women have been used and abused and pushed out of radical organizing. Assuming you know that song and dance. As bad as things are they’re only going to get worse. Worsening conditions mean resistance, good or bad. Whether we finally develop a women’s science of revolution and warfare or not remains to be seen, but it will be necessary for us to win.

I know that there are other dykes at these events who feel the way i do. I know because i’ve talked to them, expressed my discontent, and found my feelings are shared. It’s surreal, really. Not five miles from the bar where i opened this essay is the spot where a young woman was snatched off the street by plainclothes ICE agents. While my friends and i were celebrating our otherness, doing all kinds of shit to each other in that dark bar, her and others like her are languishing in detention facilities across the country with no access to their lawyers or any kind of recourse. These are all socially conscious people, people who know and care about what’s happening, and still that disconnect remains.

Building ourselves into a new people means reacting harshly to every instance of genocidal oppression as if it were against us. It means splitting off from the hetero-settler state and building a new women’s society. There will assuredly be parties and dancing to get us through that long fight. Right now we dance on the graves of indigenous people, the New Afrikan nation, and all members of the fourth world being disappeared daily by the hetero-settler state. I don’t want to stop dancing, i just want to make sure the grave i’m dancing on is Father Dick’s instead.