South Florida Gay News
by Christiana Lilly
Is BDSM a sexual orientation? Jillian Keenan thinks so.
Two years ago, the New York City freelance journalist wrote a piece for Slate arguing just that. The fetish and paraphilia community cheered, while others were confused or even angered that she would suggest such a thing.
“When I try to tell [my] friends that I was a fetishist by the time I was age 5, that my sexuality was so deeply rooted in my paraphilia, then they start to get uncomfortable, they say, ‘Wait, hold on,’” she said. “I think we need to talk about this because children do have emerging sexual identities, including non-normative sexual identities. I certainly did.”
Since the article, she has written more pieces on kink and BDSM, including the book “Sex and Shakespeare,” which delves into how the Bard helped her understand her sexuality.
What was your motivation to write the piece?
There is a lot of misunderstanding about kink and, in my case especially fetishism or paraphilias. I wrote that article for the same reason that I write a lot of the articles that I do about fetishism or paraphilia, which is to open up conversations that we’re not really having and to help people like me who struggle with the same questions about minority sexuality that I did throughout my life to feel less alone.
Explain your argument.
Certainly there are some people for whom kinky sexual practices are just that, a practice. It’s something they do, it’s not something they are. But I think this is one of the misunderstandings. People do often in the mainstream tend to think of kink as a practice, not an identity, but the fact is for a lot us it is an identity and it is absolutely as deeply rooted as any sexual orientation.
I didn’t have the vocabulary to describe it, I just thought I was really fucked up. The good news is that when I write articles like this, I get emails from other fetishists, people who grew up with the same paraphilia that I have or others, and say thank god someone finally said it. I got an email with the subject line, “You just saved my life.”
Not talking about the diversity of human sexuality is not only an omission, it’s a threat. When we don’t have these conversations, we put lives in danger and that’s why I like to have them.
What response did you get?
Certainly a lot of my friends in the fetish community were glad someone said it in the mainstream. However, that’s a conversation that we’ve been having in the fetish community for decades. Within the community people are excited to see these discussion getting more mainstream. Outside the community … there’s certainly a lot of confusion, and I understand why. We’ve settled into a place in national dialogue where we’ve really put the diversity of sexuality into some very small boxes. If you think about the vast range of options and identities and experiences and questions and practices, it really is rather remarkable that we have chosen to define seuxal orientation exclusively by our genitalia when there is so much more to sexuality and sexual identity than just our junk.
I understand the confusion and I was excited to have those conversations. I really value it when people push back at my ideas because it helps me with recognizing the weakness in my own ideas or it helps train to have the conversations necessary to defend my ideas. …