Pleasure activism and queerness

[flexibeast]

The main focus of my activist work at the moment involves my attempt to build a community of pleasure activists, mainly through the group Pleasure Activism Australia. One of the motivations behind my founding of the group was to try to start building alliances between sexual communities; i'm pretty much fed up with sexual minorities 'othering' other sexual minorities, so to speak¹: by dissing them, by consciously avoiding associating with them, by implying that they are the real sexual deviants; by representing them as somehow 'inferior'. In a society increasingly run by a small-number of well-organised reactionaries, i feel we don't really have the luxury to engage in such small-minded and divisive behaviour. So it's been encouraging to see a wide variety of people joining PAA: people who identify as lesbian, as queer, as monogamous, as swingers, as heterosexual. One notable absence, however, is the lack of people who identify as gay. What's up with that? Don't gay men have sex anymore? Have beats ceased to exist? Has sex between men become an accepted part of our society? What's going on?

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1. An example of which can be found on the PAA site.