The news cycle has quickly moved on to Donald Trump’s first press conference in over five months, but social media has remained gleefully fixated on rumors of the President-elects alleged behavior in Moscow. As jokes and memes begin to pour in despite the objections of the incoming administration, it has become clear that we, as queer people, have a new imperative for the next four years. We have to take piss back.
It’s unclear (perhaps dehydrated) whether these allegations about the Donald have any truth in them, especially considering the gossipy style of the supposedly official memo on the matter that has been circulating since last night. But if there’s one thing I learned in 2016, it’s that alleging something is enough to make it as consequential as if it were true. Yellow journalism helped get this man elected, so I’m comfortable indulging in some of it at his expense. If the alt-right can buy Pizzagate, then I can believe in Pissgate. The key difference being that I don’t plan on terrorizing a pizza shop armed with an all-yellow Super Soaker. And I don’t even want to shame Trump for his behavior! Unlike Congress or the rest of his administration, at least he publicly supports the wellbeing of sex workers. No, I don’t kinkshame or John-shame. My issue here is appropriation, cooptation― mainstreaming might be the best word for it.
My people have enjoyed a monopoly on sexual deviance for quite some time now, and it is unacceptable that on the cusp of a regime that exalts traditional values, we can’t even piss on each other without bolstering Trump’s brand. We didn’t invent water sports, but we definitely helped make it cool. We queers made being a pervert cool, along with most of the things you can get called a pervert for. We freaks have busted and balmed our asses to create communities around sexy, safer kink play. And every last drop we’ve pissed on each other has been a small, golden act of resistance against people like Donald Trump.
Now anybody can do it. Any xenophobic vanilla heterosexual who doesn’t care in the slightest about sexual liberties can turn to his wife in the middle of the night and cite the urethra-grabbing Commander-in-Chief to justify his wettest dreams. As if we didn’t have enough pissing matches with them, we can now anticipate an alt-right coalition freshly emboldened to normalize the golden shower. Economic arguments aside, this is terrible for queer culture. We had barely saved puppy play from the same fate as rimjobs, and now we must devote our precious resources to the protection of piss play. This is on top of the attention we already have to devote to preventing the return of gay conversion therapy or mitigating daily public harassment against visibly queer and trans people. Or ensuring trans people and people living with HIV have access to the health care they need to sustain functional, fulfilling lives. Or securing federal funding for initiatives to provide shelter and housing for LGBTQ youth. Or seeing to it that sex workers, queer or not, have avenues to sustain their livelihoods that are as safe and self-determining as possible, against violent cops and violent clientele alike.
Look, it’s not that I don’t want straight people to get into watersports, it’s that I don’t want Trump voters to know the perverse pleasure of it, to openly incorporate it into their sexual norms while simultaneously supporting the demonization and criminalization of other people’s sex lives. I want to keep piss political, specifically on my side of the aisle, the side that goes high and goes low. I want to mobilize the erotic against fascism, to make kink subversive again. It’s unclear whether we should rub the Trump administration’s noses in it or not, but the small scandal is nonetheless a reminder to our entire community that even our pleasure is under siege, and that it is up to us to piss on and piss off more than ever.
