Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Coming out of the kink closet, pt. 2

So Jack is thinking about coming out to his mom.

I totally understand this, as I think we're feeling a lot of the same things in respect to people who know/people who don't know.

I know I feel kind of cut off from people I'm close to but don't talk to about this sort of thing. My best friend from college, someone I used to talk about every single thing with, doesn't know. And I feel like I'm isolating myself from her, even though I know I can trust her and she's seen me crying over dumb stuff and falling down drunk. I know I need to talk to her about this, but I'm having a hard time finding the way.

What makes me even more upset than the few close friends I haven't gotten around to telling yet is that I believe in kink. I know that sounds really silly when I say it like that, but I believe in being sex-positive and talking about sex and that talking about kink is part of that. Whenever I see a movie that portrays BDSM in a negative light, or read infuriating, biased blog posts on the subject, it makes me want to tell everyone that I'm kinky. Because I feel like the best way to counter all the misconceptions and stereotypes and shaming is to actually talk about things.

The problem, of course, is that I'm terrified of my parents finding out. My parents are generally pretty liberal, and don't generally get upset over sex-related stuff...unless it also involves me. Their take on sex seems to be that everybody does it, except their little girl. And beyond that, they seem to think that a lot of kinky stuff is, well, kind of silly. And the thought of my parents knowing and judging me and possibly disapproving makes my skin crawl. I love my parents, I think they're really cool most of the time, and while I don't think they would disown me I can't help but think of the people I know who haven't spoken to their families in years because they came out or were outed as kinky.

So that leaves me feeling stuck. Because you can argue that while BDSM is something between you and your partner and, like your favorite sexual positions, not necessarily something to share with anybody and everybody, that argument doesn't work as well when...well...it's not something you do in your bedroom with your partner. What if it's something you do in a bar twice a month with your friends? What if it's actually how you know most of your friends? I may have gone to a sports bar for beer and wings, eaten at an Ethiopian restaurant for the first time, and gone to a Korean bakery in the past week (as well as going to a play party) but I did all these things with friends I made in the scene.

So yeah...I pretty much don't know what to do. I'm lucky in that I'm not at risk of losing my job or my nonexistant kids or anything like that if I did decide to come all the way out of the leather-lined closet, but I still cringe at the thought of my parents finding out. I just...I want us to be in a world where this wouldn't be a big deal. But if it weren't a big deal, I wouldn't feel as much of a need to talk about it, to try to counter the misconceptions.

I don't know what to do.

1 comment:

  1. I totally know how you feel... ugh, it's a pain. =/

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