This is totally babies

The kids are alright, just uncomfortable, but they will live

So you’re young and queer and everything you know about sex has come from porn because nobody’s teaching it to you at school and frankly some of what you’ve witnessed is terrifying. You’re intrigued by sex and your hormones are raging and you want to have sex but you don’t want to get fisted while someone beats you with a cheese grater. You’re young and your baseline state of being is *uncomfortable* and *powerless* and you just want some semblance of control and something resembling comfort and you want to find people who don’t make you feel so weird all the time. You see queer people reveling in being weird, and you’re panicking that people think you’re like that because the last thing you want is to be seen as weird. You’re gay but you’re not gay-gay, you’re normal if you can just ignore this one small difference.

And then here comes a group of people who commiserate with you, but only on the surface. They, too, hate how weird Pride is, how weird queer culture is, how terrifying queer sexuality is, how awful kink is. They tell you that your discomfort is actually a form of harm, that nobody should ever make you think about the things you don’t want to think about, that you should be protected from it. They use the language of social justice and it feels like social justice to you. People are doing things to you! Without your consent! It’s psychic rape! How dare they?

But then you get older and you scratch beneath the surface and remove the masks and find that underneath, those people who told you that you were being harmed were intense homophobes, who found queer sexuality terrifying because they found queer people terrifying. They don’t “consent” to queers being sexy or kinky because they don’t “consent” to queers existing. They consider all sex bad, and queer people as inherently sexual, so queer people are inherently bad unless they go out of their way to desexualize themselves as much as possible. And you find that they’re transphobes and terfs and they consider trans identities to be fetishes and this is why they want to hide fetish. As soon as they’re done driving all the sexy, kinky, trans queers into hiding with your help, they can move onto the less outrageous queers. They’re moving onto you, even though you’d never call yourself queer because you’re young and uncomfortable and afraid of being weird. They’re uncomfortable and they learned that their discomfort was harm and they never sat down to examine those feelings. They’re the Karens of the world calling the cops on black folks for just existing in their vicinity. They think children should be completely sheltered from all that liberal nonsense.

And the queer elders try to speak up, try to tell the young ones about our history, but it’s so hard when we keep getting entire generations wiped out in the holocaust and the AIDS crisis. Our books burned and our people left for dead. Half of those left only survived through assimilation and internalizing that they needed to shed all of their queerness and become plastic Barbies and Kens, perfect and sexless, and this worked for them, in a way, in that they survived, so they think that this is a reasonable solution. Just cover up and get married and live quietly. Disown the loud queers, the ones still demanding more, the ones still pushing boundaries, the ones who don’t want to hide, who question the rules. They rewrite history to say gay rights were won when marriage was won and now the fight is over and anyone who is still complaining should shut up, lest our overlords hear and take away what little we were allowed to have.

The truth of the matter is that people are more naked at the beach than at Pride. Kink harnesses are normalized in fashion everywhere. Overt displays of heterosexual sexuality are everywhere. Children are not harmed by this. They will not be harmed by all of this in a queer context. No one will be harmed by this because discomfort is not harm and it was never about that. It was about hijacking discomfort for an anti-queer agenda. It’s being driven largely by sheltered teens and homophobes taking advantage of them. But the internet is a big stew where those people have the same platform and reach as queer historians and activists and hot takes spread faster than research and knowledge. We don’t have to engage. It’s settled. It’s done. Wear your gimp mask to Pride. The kids are alright.

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The kids are alright, just uncomfortable, but they will live