introducing: deviant february.

radical love notes | a weekly bonus for radical love letter subscribers <3

Greetings! If you’re a free subscriber you’re getting a longer version of the paid note today because I want you to have the chance to read about the theme of the February letters. The TLDR: this month will be about sex and gender politics, with some occasional NSFW content, but mostly analysis and some really exciting interviews. If this is a topic of interest to you, I invite you to consider becoming a paid subscriber, even if just for the month—there will be some wonderful treats in the Friday note. On the other hand, if sex stuff is not up your alley (or if you are my family member ;)), I invite you to sit some of these out. Either way, thank you so much for being here!!!

the sky says, Trans Rights.

Dear ones, 

This week a new bill called the Sexually Oriented Business Regulation Act was introduced in the House. The goals of the bill are to outlaw “sexually oriented businesses” such as adult book stores, video stores, cabarets, clubs, and “sexual encounter centers,” which is vague, probably intentionally, and implicates gay bars. This is simultaneous to the Right’s (and some on the Left’s) attempts to classify drag shows as “sexually oriented”; combined, these bills have the potential to formally criminalize queerness, transness, and even the above-ground sex industry. Outside of proposed legislation, there is growing cultural panic around sex and gender. Importantly, as many who study the Right will note, those in power are not “panicked” as much as they are finding ways to exert control, but the propaganda serves multiple functions, including fomenting a growing fear of people who fall outside of gender and sexual norms. 

This is not necessarily new or surprising, but I’ve been paying closer and sadder attention to the calls coming from inside the house. I am more and more distraught by the various iterations of “feminism” and others on the “Left” whose political raison d’etre has become attacking sex workers, kinky queers, and trans people. They will tell you that they are not attacking anyone, but rather trying to protect women and children from a variety of evils: predators, groomers, men in general, drag queens, and so on. But all their talking points echo the Right’s; these strange bedfellows mirror those alliances of the 80s, during the Sex Wars, when radical feminists shook hands with the Christian Moral Majority in their war against, primarily, pornography and BDSM. 

There are high stakes to this history repeating itself. “To some, sexuality may seem to be an unimportant topic, a frivolous diversion from the more critical problems of poverty, war, disease, racism, famine, or nuclear annihilation,” writes Gayle Rubin in her canonical 1984 essay. But, she goes on:  

it is precisely at times such as these, when we live with the possibility of unthinkable destruction, that people are likely to become dangerously crazy about sexuality ....Disputes over sexual behavior often become the vehicles for displacing social anxieties, and discharging their attendant emotional intensity. Consequently, sexuality should be treated with special respect in times of great social stress. 

Understanding sex as a worthwhile site of interrogation seems more and more urgent as apocalyptic happenings escalate all around us. We are already living through an ecological crisis, police violence is getting worse, war and unrest persist, and the wealth gap is holding stubbornly strong. Yet, we see some of the strongest political and social ire directed towards trans kids, ‘deviant’ queers, reproductive justice, and various forms of what we could summarize as sort of a #MeToo backlash. 

What I love about Rubin and other radical queer responses to reactionary sex politics is that it often comes in the form of a pleasure-centered rebuttal. Certainly there is a place for work that names statistics of abuse, the horror stories of sexual harm, the rates of violence against sex workers, and so on. But there also needs to be a place to combat sex problems with sex pleasures; there needs to be a place to prefigure the sexual liberation of our wildest, harm-reduced, consensual dreams. This is not an argument for hollow, liberal sex positivity; we do not, as our adversaries like to accuse us, ignore the ways that patriarchy and other systems of oppression have influence over us. Nor do we argue that kink or cruising or any other sex in and of itself is inherently liberatory. As Cosima Bee Concordia recently tweeted: “The funniest thing about these anti-sex radfems is that they act as if leatherqueers don’t interrogate kink––like I promise we have thought about all of these topics critically way more than you have, it’s like our whole thing.” 

Sex won’t set us free, but there is freedom to be found in sex. That’s why we (I’ll shorthand us to “sex radicals,” in homage to this side of the Sex Wars) are so on about it. Anyone who's been profoundly transformed by something will likely go through a phase (that may last their whole life) of some proselytizing: sober people, yoga people, Jesus people, and yes, kinky queers too. We are eager and fervent to defend deviant sexual and gendered ways of being because we have found belonging there; we have found refuge. The good news is, the vast majority of radical queers and kinksters know that this is not for everyone; I have seen god in subspace, but I know there are many paths to god. 

The newsletter this month is offered to you in this spirit: confronting and combating the growing conservative backlash against trans people and others deemed outside gender and sexual mores, and celebrating deviant sex and gender cultures in all their imperfect glory. Get ready for: an interview with a spiritual teacher who sees kink as holy, sex work dispatches, radical queer history, a brief lit review of recent books on the state of sex, and more. The majority of these will be analysis-focused and Safe for Work, but there may be a couple that are not, in which case I will make a note at the top. 

My goal is to send you love two times a week via the Monday essay (or interview) and the Friday note (for paid subscribers). Oh, and yes, I did choose February because it’s Valentine’s Day month. :) I’m also open to suggestions, questions, or requests on this theme if you want to send them! 

Thank you for being here, I love you. <3

love & solidarity, 

raechel

Updates

• Relevant to the theme of the month, the self-published radical queer punk pervert book Make the Golf Course a Public Sex Forest came out last week; I have an essay in it! The collection is absolutely Not Safe for Work but it is HOT AND DELIGHTFUL! Get a copy if you’re into smut and theory. <3 

• If yr local: I will be giving a (very safe for work) reading on February 4th at B-Side. This gang of writers and musicians are celebrating Danny Caine’s latest poetry collection: me, Danny, Phillip Metres, Aumaine Rose Smith, Dollar Country, Taylor Lamborn, and Jake Briggs! 6:30 doors, come hang! 

• If yr in Kentucky on February 15th: I’ll be giving a talk at Western Kentucky University on memoir and place-based writing. 

Reading

As someone who was both an academic and fitness instructor at the same time, I loved this interview with Natalia Mehlman Petrzela (also an academic/fitness instructor) about exercise culture.  Please read this beautiful interview with indigenous scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer. This excerpt from Stacy Jane Grover’s new memoir, Tar Hollow Trans. 

Watching