Mark Green's Atheopaganism Blog

They make it all about sex.

The sneerers and spitters, the blithe dismissers, the judging castigators who allege that being queer is just about who you rub your body parts against. Who you create orgasms with.

The hatred is bound up with the sex. They simply hate and fear sex. The power of it, the vulnerability of it, the lack of control. And as they conflate queerness with sex, they hate, and fear queerness.

Once upon a time, I dated a stripper. She was brilliant, graduate of a prestigious Eastern university, after which she had ridden a bicycle to California. She was an activist, a thinker. And a stripper, very sexy. She was utterly amazing and I’m sorry we have lost touch.

I have loved ones who have had sex for money. Who have posed for pictures. Or done sex video.

In essence, they have done as they chose, given their lives at the moment. What seemed like the best thing given the options.

Like we all do.

My friends were not coerced, thankfully. They made free choices. I in no way claim here that some people are not coerced, are not trafficked. That happens, and it is appallingly wrong.

But to lump victims of coercion in with people who make a free choice about what to do with their bodies is also wrong. It is the Christian Overculture’s sex-phobia, weaponized.

I am so angry at how our society views and treats sex workers.

People exposing their bodies to danger, people generously offering themselves for services that others desperately hope for. Not just for orgasms (although those are a perfectly good reason): for comfort, for companionship, for solace, to stave off the terrible loneliness that so many suffer.

Like the sheroe of my nation right now, Stormy Daniels. Stripper, porn star, comedian, writer, director, mother, and brass-balled hero. I could not be prouder and more admiring of this now-historical figure. Stormy is as worthy of honor and respect as any public figure, and much more so than many.

All of this is to say: the smearing of people because of the sex is absurd, lazy, and so, so cruel.

Queer sex is great. Queer sex is fine. There’s nothing wrong with queer sex, however strange it might seem to me or anyone else, so long as it is consenting.

But the LOVE. Oh, the love.

How can I say what people have tried to say for centuries?

Surely the most glorious and beautiful of love connections are those which come despite all the obstacles, despite and notwithstanding the hell of other people?

Queer love is so, so beautiful because it persists. Because it INsists. Because love will be love, however cruel and mean and misunderstanding the world may be.

I’m a straight cis guy. I’m not narrow; I’ve experimented enough to know that that’s what I am.

I can’t speak to the queer experience at all.

But what I can do is say this: the desire isn’t dirty. The love is beautiful.

The love you feel, the desire you feel is beautiful and I completely adore you for feeling it.

Happy Pride, my dear, beloved friends.