LOVE THAT KINK!

Loraine Hutchins
(a short excerpt from the piece in BI ANY OTHER NAME)

My Roots
Call me kinky, I don't mind. I AM kinky -- if you mean different from the lie we're sold as the norm. At 42, I'm celebrating a quarter century of making love with many different people, many different ways. I don't want children or marriage. I have fur on my upper lip and legs. When not forced to wear secretarial drag, I don fishnet shirts with bike tights, lace glitter shoe-strings through my tennis shoes. Even growing up as a fat girl with glasses, saddle shoes, plaid skirts, and vests, I knew I was different. I traveled, as a white teenager during the Civil Rights movement, between my black, inner-city church friends in Washington, D.C. and my white, mostly Jewish, friends in the suburbs. From my black friends I learned that I could choose whether or not I dealt with racism, while they faced it every day. Many of my white friends were Red Diaper babies, children whose parents' lives were ruined by the McCarthy era. Downplay differences, I was taught, avoid discussions of religion, politics or sex. But I learned it more interesting to explore differences than to run from them. As I watched laws being challenged and people fighting to be free, I felt a new sense of hope and identification with everybody different from the mainstream. I began to push back the limits around me.
I was excited whenever I saw people's eyes spark, eyebrows raise and the murmurs of conflict start. These surface clashes, I found, often signal deeper issues underneath, points of difference that make us each unique. Later I learned to calm myself and observe for a beat, rather than to spontaneously react. Because when I followed my instincts, and only later sorted out the feelings intellectually, my passion would often draw me too fast into something I barely understood.
I mention all this as background. What I want to discuss is AIDS, its impact upon me, and how all this relates to what society labels kinky, or not, normal or different, right or wrong. AIDS has illumined connections between race, sexual orientation, gender differences, and class which I never saw before, and caused me to identify even more with those our society ostracizes. AIDS and sex are connected in our imagination now, but society's fear and distrust of sex stems from much farther back. But because people with AIDS often get accused of having kinky sex, (whether or not it's true) I decided to investigate kinky as a term.

Origins of "Kinky"
Most dictionaries define kinky two ways. The first is, "full of kinks, tightly curled hair." The second definition is "weird, eccentric; specifically sexually abnormal or perverse." But what's kinky to me may not be abnormal to you. And when many people get excited, they'll joke about "getting kinky," indicating, not something negative, but something especially pleasurable and arousing that they relish. Why is kinky something we claim only in an altered, heightened, state?
Twenty years ago I first experienced the kinky label from straight people, when I openly expressed my attraction to women. Then lesbians also rejected me, for not denying my attraction to gay and straight men. I began to identify as bi, someone the world displaces their sexual fantasies - both positive and negative upon, and someone belonging to neither group, an outlaw. I looked for others like me whenever I could. I made love in groups, often with co-workers and friends. After much trial and error, I learned how to tell when the circumstances for group sex were right, and when they weren't. The exhileration of creating a group creature that begins with cuddling like kittens and intensifies as the pulse and rapture coursing through the group builds, is an exhilerating experience of camerarderie that leaves me touched and honored each flight.
Inter-racial sex also blessed me. I love black men! This does not mean I don't love others. I do. And, I really love black men. It's scarey to admit that, though. I feel like I get hit from all sides - by people who think I'm racist even admitting this attraction, to people who think I'm not racist enough.
Acting on all these desires expands my self-confidence and pleasure immensely. I've learned I can live communally or alone, and that, even with all my wonderful friends and lovers, I am still best lover to myself.
But how did kinky hair get associated with abnormal sexuality? Is straight hair more normal? ("Oh, Loraine," some of my friends said, "now you're going too far, there isn't political meaning in everything." But I don't believe in linguistic coincidence. Root origins and evolving word meanings often reveal important history. (Just look at all the derogatory terms used for woman and what their original meanings were. It's an education in itself.
There is a link between the "unusualness" of the sex act and the "differentness" of the people labeled kinky. Difference itself is seen as bad, and feared -- the dreaded Other. What is feared also is eroticized. And, NOT coincidentally, it's the minorities, the people with the least power, who get labeled as Other, labeled as kinky, more often than not.
The late 1800s was when "kinky" began to be used as a synonym for "weird," sometimes being associated with male or female homosexuals, and non-heterosexual intercourse, sadomasochism, and group sex. Starting around the turn of the century in the U.S. and Great Britain, "kinky-head" and "kinky-nob" also became derogatory terms for African-Americans in white colloquial speech. ...

(for the rest of this piece .... read the book!)

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