Show us your dignity (updated)

This happened at a pride parade in public view where kids could see it. What you do in your bedroom with consenting adults is your business but when you bring your bedroom to the bed of a pickup truck and do THIS in public, then we must pass laws to ban it.pic.twitter.com/2C3k7aTrV6

— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) June 5, 2023

Selectwoman Janet Stone McGuigan: “This is what it means to make love visible.”

Perhaps she meant “make love visibly.”

UPDATE: Here’s a gay man who’s as disgusted by this display as most (?) straight people: This Pride Month, fellow gays, keep your kinks at home and away from kids”.

A disturbing incident at a California Pride parade has prompted a familiar discussion: Do public kink and fetish displays really belong at “family friendly” LGBT Pride events?

Onlookers at West Hollywood Pride celebrations Sunday were treated to a public sex display during the event’s parade.

Riding in the back of a parade truck, a man clad in “dominatrix” gear choked and whipped another man, scantily clad, to a cheering audience.

This startling act occurred despite the city describing its parade as “a colorful and entertaining event for the whole family.”

Belissa Cohen, a journalist who filmed the incident and posted it to Twitter, reported, “Tons of kids were present — thousands of people, including families, lined both sides of the public boulevard, yelling & cheering. Sunny Sunday afternoon. No gatekeeping possible.”

It should go without saying that performing or even simulating kink-related sex acts in front of children is wildly wrong.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t some one-off incident.

…. But as a member of the gay community, I think we ought to have a reckoning over why kink is conflated with LGBT pride at all.

The two things really have nothing to do with each other.

After all, heterosexual and homosexual people alike have various kinks and fetishes.

I have libertarian sensibilities, so I frankly don’t really care what happens behind closed doors, as long as it’s between consenting adults.

But it has absolutely nothing to do with being same-sex attracted.

…. The successful effort to sell the public on gay marriage, the single biggest accomplishment of the gay-rights movement, was fundamentally rooted in bourgeois norms, family values and, frankly, normalcy. Not outlandish hypersexualism.

So, too, this unfortunate trend plays into old homophobic prejudices and unfair stereotypes some people still subscribe to.

There’s a long and dark history of bigots suggesting gay people are out to get kids or more likely to sexually abuse minors, despite many studies and expert consensus showing such a correlation does not exist.

But when a select few gay people do openly engage in simulated sex acts in front of children — something all normal, everyday gay people would denounce — and it goes viral, it plays into these unfair stereotypes and sets back the progress we’ve made, even though it’s not representative.

It’s time for the LGBT community to step up and reassert some basic standards over Pride events.

Kink and fetish displays shouldn’t be welcome at Pride — and if they’re going to occur, we absolutely must demand they be limited to 18+ environments.

And to the broader public understandably outraged by these viral incidents, please don’t hold the actions of a small minority against our entire community when many of us want nothing to do with such indecency.

I’ll try.