Kinky and "Proud at Pride"?

The shop is called KinkShirt.com and features, among other things, LGBTQ+, Christopher Street Day, and queerness. Is that appropriate? The discussion about whether kink belongs at Pride flares up repeatedly. My answer is short and clear: Yes, it is!

Before the 2026 season - a few thoughts, keyword tolerance

As always: "Anything goes, nothing is a must!" Anyone who is queer can be kinky, but doesn't have to be. And vice versa, of course: Anyone who lives and loves kinky doesn't necessarily have to be queer. Not necessarily anyway. And besides - who could possibly check who ticks how?

Pride makes tolerance visible.

Even with a puppy like the one pictured here, nobody can tell just by looking whether there is actually a person under the mask who likes to be treated like a dog. Maybe it's "just" creative protest against the heteronormative, which tries to dictate that something shouldn't exist, when it clearly does?

That is Pride!

I'm assuming the pet genuinely wants to be visible at the parade, otherwise it wouldn't be there. Perhaps it's part of a self-assigned task to march along to feel free, to learn self-acceptance, and to feel acceptance from others?

That is also Pride!

At its core, CSD is always about the demand for equality in all areas of life – it's a celebration of tolerance! To tolerate something doesn't automatically mean to like it. But it means to see and accept what and how something is, without devaluing it.

That is Pride!

Anthropologist Gayle Rubin writes that the stigmatization of kinks often paralleled the stigmatization of homosexuality. In her essay "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality" (1984), she illuminates how society creates sexual hierarchies that brand certain sexual expressions – including many kink practices – as bad or abnormal.

Homosexual people, drag queens, transgender individuals, cross-dressers, fetishists, and other minorities therefore had the same motivation to revolt, which eventually led to the "Stonewall Riots" of 1969, long before the terms "Pride" or "LGBTQ+" became popular.

A common struggle

The liberation struggle of "society outcasts" was always also the struggle for the freedom to live out sexual inclinations and practices beyond what is considered "normal". Many bars and clubs were also places where kinks were openly displayed and celebrated. The leather and BDSM scene in New York and San Francisco was closely linked to the gay emancipation movement. "The Tool Box," one of the first organized gay bars in San Francisco, was already an explicit leather meeting point from around 1962.

At the Stonewall uprising, kinsters – as we would say today – were there from the beginning: Dick Leitsch's eyewitness account ("Mattachine Society New York") explicitly describes a strong "leather contingent among the activists." At the first Pride demo in New York in 1970, a gay leather motorcycle club marched. The BDSM community was not the first to advocate for queer rights. But it was a visible and militant part of the movement from the start.

"We've always been here, we've always been queer, we've always been kinky."

This sentence sums it up perfectly. We all fight against discrimination and for the right to live our sexuality and identity, our inclinations and preferences freely and autonomously. The visibility of kinsters at Pride is not only historically legitimate. It is also imperative for reasons of tolerance and thus from the self-conception of the queer community, and it gives more weight to our shared concerns.

Therefore, it was clear to us, as KinkShirt.com, to first launch a Pride collection.

Be proud to be different!

Kinky greetings!

Thymos Emm 

*

(* "We don't try to shock anyone – that only creates distance. We want intimacy." Journalist, author 'The Dominus Effect', kinkster, scene-goer. Committed to the kinky world of Munich and beyond. Loving sadist: 'Come on, give me a smile!')