Do kink and fetish really have a place at Pride? Do people in vinyl and leather, in horse and dog masks, in rubber, latex or harness really have to walk along at CSD? After all, children see it too. At least that’s the concern that comes up again and again every year. Jeff Mannes thinks so: Yes, kink and fetish are part of Pride!

When I moved to Berlin around ten years ago, I attended the gay and lesbian city festival there. The event, which takes place every year in July on the weekend before the Berlin CSD, is an integral part of the German capital’s Pride month events. I had just moved from rural Luxembourg to the big metropolis. I was looking at the display at an information stand when something to my left caught my attention.

A mother was talking to a man who was dressed from top to bottom in leather. Standing next to the woman was her child, I guess around five years old. And next to the man sat a dog, which he was holding on a lead, barking at the child.

However, the dog wasn’t a real dog. It was a human, a Puppy Player, wearing a dog mask, sitting on all fours in front of the child and barking at him. The child couldn’t stop laughing, while the mother continued talking to the man in leather as if it was the most normal thing in the world. The dog man barked, the child had a heart-warming fit of laughter, and mother and handler chatted amiably as the hustle and bustle of the street party continued around them. 

It was the first time I was exposed to puppy play and it laid the foundation for my interest in the fetish, which would later lead to my sociological essay on the origins of pet and puppy play. Over the next few years, the fetish rapidly gained visibility – including at Prides in many European cities. This increased visibility was accompanied by a partly anti-queer and anti-sex discussion, which was heavily tainted with false prejudices, about whether fetish had a place at Pride.

And (‘surprise, surprise’) the best interests of the children are invoked time and again – preferably by people who have little to do with education or child development. And these comments almost always reveal more about the fantasy of the people making them than about what fetish and kink actually are.

Let’s take the example of the Puppy Player: when a child sees a person wearing a dog mask, they don’t see sex. They see exactly that: a person wearing a dog mask, in disguise. And they enjoy it – just like the laughing child at the Berlin street festival. Incidentally, just like children have fun with people wearing dog or other masks at carnivals. Except that nobody seems to mind. “But that’s something completely different”, I can already hear the objections. “It’s got nothing to do with sex!” And that brings us to the prejudices. 

Pet and puppy play, i.e. people who dress up as non-human animals, are not sexual per se. Yes, it is true that pet and puppy play originated in BDSM contexts. However, they have since taken on a partly independent life of their own. There are now many people who practise pet play completely detached from sexuality. A 2019 study by Darren Langdridge and Jamie Lawson found that there are very different motives for pet play, which can also occur completely detached from sexuality. These include, for example, relaxation, escape from everyday life, therapeutic benefits, play and socializing, relationship building or strengthening a sense of community. And for some, it is also linked to their sexuality. And that doesn’t mean they can’t wear it in public either. Sexual acts are forbidden in public. But kinksters at Pride do not perform sexual acts – and we must not confuse their self-expression with sexual obscenity.

At the same time, as a sex educator, I can say that it is certainly not impossible that there are people for whom their carnival costume also has a sexual component. So what we perceive as sexual has less to do with the actual people in disguise and much more to do with our own fantasies and prejudices about these people.

Regardless of whether clothing and masks with roots in the fetish community also have a sexual component for the individual or not. They are always political. And are therefore part of Pride. Pride means fighting the shame imposed from the outside, accepting yourself as you are and demanding this acceptance from society. Pride is therefore political. Sexuality is political. Queer life is political. And kink is also political.

People from the fetish community have been fighting for the rights of LGBTQIA+ people since the beginning of CSDs in the early 70s. While drag is no longer considered kink in 2024 (but is still fought against – for example by right-wing populist and ADR MP Tom Weidig), it was considered sexually deviant in the mid-20th century. In 1969, when the riots against anti-queer police violence started around the Stonewall bar in New York, which laid the foundation for CSDs, there were still laws in place that prohibited cross-dressing. Many of the leaders of the queer liberation movement, including trans sex workers Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, had cross-dressing allegations on their records and were considered “kinky” by the definition of the time. 

The leather community also has deep historical roots in the queer movement, dating back to the 1940s. Leather bars became safe spaces for queer people in the 1950s and 1960s and created a surrogate family for queer youth who were rejected by their parents. And when the Stonewall riots happened in 1969, the leather community was part of it. Among those who fought hand in hand against police violence during the Stonewall riots – and among those who later fought against the HIV/Aids epidemic worldwide and here in Europe, and still do today – were many leather daddies, BDSM practitioners, drag queens and kings. 

They have always been part of the movement. The attempt by people within queer communities to exclude them from Pride now shows one thing above all: a dispute about who is allowed to call themselves queer and how queer we are allowed to appear. It is part of what is known as “respectability politics”, an approach that tries to conform as closely as possible to the cis-hetero norm in order to be accepted by the cis-hetero world. But this does not lead to true acceptance. It only leads to conditional acceptance, which can be taken away again at any time if we dare to appear “too conspicuous”. “I have nothing against gays, but can’t they behave normally at their parades?” “I have nothing against queer people, but do they always have to behave so conspicuously?”

I have nothing against queer people, but… It’s giving in to and perpetuating the queer trauma of conditional love that many of us have already experienced at home: Love and acceptance are conditional on conforming to a preconceived way of life. Many of us have internalized these norms. We judge ourselves by them and criticize and exclude others if they don’t conform to them. This is the same message that made us afraid of coming out when we were young. But that is not real acceptance, not real love. And I feel sorry for people who really believe that. 

The sad thing is that while we ourselves are sometimes busy arguing about whether kink and fetish are part of Pride, the cis-heteronormative world is appropriating the codes and clothing styles from the fetish community and slowly making them fashionable for everyone. Tom of Finland has significantly shaped and empowered the gay fetish community with his hyper-masculine drawings. Robert Mapplethorpe took up this symbolism for his groundbreaking photographs. This in turn inspired the fashion world, from where codes and symbols from the fetish community spread into mainstream culture. Likewise through the Village People and their songs “Macho Man” or “YMCA”. The same people who shout “no kink at Pride” today will be wearing outfits with integrated harnesses that they bought at H&M or C&A tomorrow.

So I ask: how much of ourselves are we willing to dilute in order to be accepted by society – a society that shames and stigmatizes us while simultaneously profiting from our culture?

Illustration: Liou