Leather, Lube, and Liberation: When Pleasure Becomes Resistance

June is here, and so are the rainbows, the corporate ally tweets, and the endless debates about what’s “appropriate.” But let’s get one thing straight (pun absolutely not intended): Pride was never about respectability. It was, and still is, about resistance. And nothing resists puritanical, right-wing, body-controlling nonsense like queer pleasure—especially the filthy, leather-slicked, safe-worded kind.

If that makes you uncomfortable, good. That means we’re getting somewhere. I invite you to sit with those feelings and examine where they come from.

In a time when lawmakers are frothing at the mouth to ban gender-affirming care, control reproductive rights, and demonize anything that smells like sex ed, kink is survival. Because when they come for our joy, our play becomes protest.

Kink as a Toolkit for Resistance

The BDSM community has been doing mutual aid, consent culture, and trauma-informed care since before most politicians could spell “nonbinary.”

Negotiation? Check. Safewords? Sacred .Aftercare? Always. These are the skills we need to survive a world obsessed with controlling our bodies, legislating our identities, and erasing our desires. And in a world where power is so often used to dominate, kink shows us what it looks like to wield power with ethics, intimacy, and trust.

Kink is what happens when you take shame, tie it up, and spank it until it learns some respect. It teaches us that power can be consensual, that submission can be liberating, and that pleasure doesn’t have to be hidden to be valid.

Check out our previous blog 👉🏽 Safer Sex as Harm Reduction in Kink

Yes, Kink Belongs at Pride

Every June, someone asks, “But should kink really be at Pride?” And every June, queer elders look up from their leather harnesses and ask, “Are you a cop?”

Let’s be clear: kink has always been part of Pride. Leather daddies, dominatrices, and queer perverts of all genders didn’t crash the party—they threw it. The first Pride wasn’t a sanitized, corporate-friendly parade. It was a riot led by Black and Brown trans folk, drag queens, sex workers, and folks who knew how to hold both a protest sign and a riding crop.

Trying to boot kink from Pride is like trying is like trying to do drag without wigs. It’s erasure. It’s boring, and it misses the whole damn point. Pride isn’t about being respectable enough to be tolerated. It’s about being too fierce to be erased. Sanitizing Pride for suburban comfort denies the gritty, gorgeous, leather-clad roots of our resistance.

Kink at Pride isn’t about making people uncomfortable. It’s about making sure no one forgets who built the movement—and how. It’s about honoring those who showed us that our bodies, our pleasure, and our play are worth defending.

Kink doesn’t make Pride unsafe. Policing queerness into respectability does.

Pleasure as a Political Act

Let’s say it loud for the people in the back: pleasure is political. When abortion is outlawed, when gender care is criminalized, when sex ed is censored—we’re not just losing services. We’re losing the right to own our bodies.

And it’s strategic. These assaults aren’t random. They’re carefully coordinated attacks on autonomy, on community, and on anything that threatens the state’s rigid control over whose lives are worthy, whose bodies are sacred, and whose pleasure is permitted.

That’s why reclaiming pleasure—especially queer, fat, trans, disabled, racialized pleasure—is an act of defiance.

Pleasure is political because it refuses to be useful to capitalism. It won’t be productive, efficient, or neat. It takes its time. It makes messes. And in those messes, we find each other—and something worth fighting for.

Get messy. Get loud. Get off—with purpose.

Pride Was Always a Protest

If you think Pride is just a Target T-shirt and a bank float, it’s time to log off. Pride was born out of a riot. Stonewall, Compton’s Cafeteria, the White Night riots—all led by people who were criminalized for their gender, their race, their work, and yes, their sex lives.

More recently, queer and trans folks have resisted ICE detention and police brutality with the same spirit: we refuse to be sanitized, deported, or caged. Our pleasure, our protests, and our kink are all part of the same fight.

We see the genocidal violence, the punishment of Palestinian bodies, the same logic that says some people are too unruly, too queer, too “other” to deserve life. Our solidarity isn’t optional. Liberation isn’t piecemeal.

We see the same colonial logics of control, the same dehumanization of bodies deemed “too much” to live. This is not a distraction from queer liberation—it’s the same fight. If your politics can’t make space for global resistance, they’re not radical.

If leather offends you more than genocide, you need to rethink your outrage.

Toward a Politics of Kinky Care

Imagine if governments treated pleasure the way kink communities do. What if public health meant everyone had access to what they needed to feel good—safely, consensually, joyfully? What if aftercare was also for our movements?

The truth is: kink teaches us how to care better. It teaches us to listen, to respect boundaries, to hold pain with tenderness and joy with reverence. It shows us what freedom feels like—not just as a theory, but as a physical, sweaty, raw truth.

This Pride, Pro-Choice YQL isn’t just saying “love is love.” We’re saying: kink is care. Play is protest. Pleasure is a right. That leather can be both armor and art. That we are not—and never have been—just one kind of queer.

When pleasure becomes resistance, we are not only unstoppable—we are unfuckwithable.

And baby, we’re just getting started.

There’s nothing more radical than choosing joy in a system built on control.

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