In December, I published Kink For Dummies for the iconic Dummies series of how-to books. When my agent first approached me about writing for the series, I thought, Isn’t this largely a computer how-to series? And: isn’t it kind of cringe?
Turns out the answer is no on both counts. The Dummies series teaches about everything, from Emotional Intelligence to Bollywood. One of its best sellers is Musical Theater for Dummies. And as I talked to people about the possibility of writing a Dummies book on kink, invariably, they would tell me about a Dummies book that helped them.
And who could imagine that I’d be sending Kink For Dummies into a world where Heated Rivalry and Pillion are literally taking over pop culture? Where gay hockey smut and gay biker BDSM dynamics are on everyone’s lips and fandoms are exploding around them? As a queer woman who has lost big jobs due to being upfront about my sex activism, the Heated Rivalry plus Pillion moment feels both unfathomable and vindicating.
I came of age as a staffer at the National LGBTQ+ Task Force at the height of the AIDS crisis, when the movement was sexy as hell and focused on health care for all. Government indifference to the deaths of our comrades and hostility to us on the streets made us more insistent about being visibly sexual, not less. Kiss-ins were everywhere. I distinctly remember making out with a lover in front of a cop to agitate him at an anti-violence rally in front of Remington’s, a popular kink bar on Capitol Hill in D.C.
The marriage movement sucked the life out of our sexy resistance, as peers in power in gay organizations pushed everyone to “tone it down” for the sake of some unknowable, undecided voter in the Midwest. And you can see where that got us. The Democratic Party’s slide to the right over the past 25 years, and the gay movement’s concurrent pursuit of “belonging” (corporate Pride anyone?), set the stage for the apocalypse we are currently surviving. By sidelining the needs of working people, and going to White House Pride events even as Democratic presidents amped up policing and tripled ICE budgets, mainstream LGBTQ+ movement organizations abandoned the queers who have always been the most vulnerable among us – and those of us most often on the front lines.
But back to my very sexy book. In Kink For Dummies, I’ve gathered up stories by 24 of my kinkiest co-conspirators, all refuseniks in the project of de-sexualizing our movement. My lovers, besties, and s/heroes tell all! Some of the stories make me cackle with delight. Others are hot as hell. There’s great how-to stuff in here, from laying out a zillion possible kinky avenues, to identifying your internal resistance (spoiler alert: it’s almost always shame), to finding fun ways to try out kinks or tell a crush what you really want.
Our enemies have always been trying to suppress our joy and our lusts. They well understand their power. As long as we are connected to each other, as long as we refuse to fit into the boxes that anyone has designed for us – whether our parents, church, employers, or even our lovers – we preserve ourselves and our power to deeply connect and take pleasure in each other and in our lives. This is the spark of all revolutions.
Kink For Dummies was a joy to write. As we survive an era in which a lesbian mom can be murdered on camera while the president frames her as a terrorist, we will certainly be drawing on the work queer leaders in BLM and Jewish Voices for Peace have laid for us in combating state terrorism. More than ever, the lessons of the resistance movement that grew up around the AIDS crisis are essential to our survival. And one of those lessons is to lean into our lusts, to cherish every moment we have together, and fight for our right to be our uncontainable, irrepressible – and possibly kinky -- selves.
Dr. Jaime M. Grant is a queer feminist writer/activist who does sex and relationship coaching and workshops. Be sure to check out her book, Kink For Dummies.
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