If you haven't been able to tell from reading my blog, I love the kinky people I work with. I think kink can be liberating, life-affirming, hot, transcendent, and a hell of a lot of fun. The people I know are generally good people. Of course there are some people I don't get along with, but it happens in every group. In my time in the community, however, I didn't meet any psychopaths or fundamentally disturbed people. When talking about BDSM to straight folks, the overwhelming urge is to talk about how similar most aspects of most social interactions are to mainstream America. This can do a disservice to the queer potential of kink.
Before I open this can of worms, let me state unequivically that I support the right of people to marry whomever they please and to have that union recognized by the state. I benefit from that privilege and it would be hyprocritical to take any other stance. However, queerness offers a unique perspective from which to critique the institution of marriage as the perpetuation of heteronormativity and, in most cases, patriarchy. I am not suggesting that every marriage supports these qualities, but on the whole, the Human Rights Campaign has focused all its energy in proving that gay folks are just like everyone else in every way except who their romantic partner is and deserve to be married. For this reason, they are willing to throw "bigamists and drug addicts" under the bus in their effort to prove that they pass some moral muster. (I'd link to the fundraising email I had from them disavowing their association with those types but I cannot lay my hands on it at this second). In my experience in the queer community, in Texas, where there were no civil unions, much less marriages, people were creatively negotiating relationships. It sucked that they are denied human rights and penalized through taxes and other ridiculousness. But, their status as outsiders allowed them to evaluate whether they wanted all the baggage that comes along with the "institution of marriage," including unequal gender roles and expectations of monogamy. They formed families, raised children, supported households, and made meaningful lives in ways that sometimes reflected heteronormative partnerships and sometimes could be the furthest thing from it. In my ideal world, the state would recognize all of these partnerships, whether they are two people, forever and ever, or a collection of polyamorists that transition in and out of each others' lives.
In some circles, the kinky community is eager to prove it is mostly like the mainstream for a number of reasons, including reducing stigma and lowering the risks that come along with being a stigmatized group, including social ostracism, loss of child custody, or arrest if a person is outed. There seems to be the belief that if the community reaches a critical mass, mainstream society will have to accept them. The cynic in me would like to point out that racism would serve as an example that this strategy doesn't work. In my experience, it is predominantly het groups that aim for popularization (while maintaining that sexy, exotic, edginess). The queer group I worked with was more willing to take lessons learned from radical erotic experiences as a platform to question hegemony.
I waffle on the question when my work comes up in the course of normal conversation. If I perceive a person to be conservative, I try the "just like normal folks" route in order to avoid confirming their worst suspicions and shutting down productive conversation about the power of sexuality and community and ritual. In more "liberal" settings, I find myself making the case for kink as anything but normative. This is complicated, since there is no one singular kinky community. Like any people grouped together by certain traits, these are all individuals with their own histories and social positions to take into account. Despite the relatively small size of the population in Texas, there were several different groups with diverging perspectives on the role of kink. People filtered between groups freely, but generally strongly identified with a single group as their home base. So in some cases, it was true that traditional gender roles were not only accepted but reified, racism was left unquestioned, and just about everyone voted Republican. It is easy to make the case that they are the mainstream, except for the beating and public sex. At the same time, there existed spaces where gender was unmoored from the physical body and power was constructed and deconstructed in ways that challenged hegemonic ideals.
If my bias isn't apparent already, I preferred the latter. I enjoy the disruptive potential of radical sex. So if you find me telling you that BDSM clubs really are just like church (and I believe this is true), you should check with me about how I feel about church. For some groups, I mean Presbyterians. For others, I mean Voudonists.
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