It’s easy to talk about what we don’t want in the world—hate, discrimination, and violence against our community—but what kind of future DO we want to see? In this episode Gabe and Chris ask past guests from this season what kind of queer utopia they’d like to see materialize by the year 2069, on the 100th anniversary of the Stonewall riots. You’ll hear from kinksters, artists, and sex workers about their hopes for the future, and the possible innovations, societal shifts, and sexual possibilities that await us later this century.
A Note From the Director, Adam Baran
At the end of every interview on Sniffies’ Cruising Confessions, our hosts asked each guest a question that you never got to see until now: What does queer utopia mean to you? And what kind of queer utopia would you like to see in 2069, on the 100th Anniversary of the Stonewall Riots?
In this week’s episode, Gabe and Chris review their answers and talk about their own feelings around queer utopia. They touch on the problems of the present, and how we can draw from the work of visionary thinkers like José Esteban Muñoz and Samuel Delany to envision a future where everything is better for queers everywhere.
It’s striking that a number of our guests’ hope for the future is just for queers to be left alone. They described a utopia in which our sex lives don’t freak other people out, and where we’re not judging each other. Some guests dream of a broader future—more utopic—with the many evils of governments and institutions of power quashed, while other guests reject the concept of queer utopia outright.
I felt like I encountered my own queer utopia when I attended San Francisco’s Up Your Alley street fair in late July. At Up Your Alley, or Dore Alley as it’s more commonly known, street signs bear giant hankeys to indicate that this is a kink and fetish friendly zone, and there are booths and stations for every fetish imaginable; A piss pool where people can relax and splash around; a whipping station where you can get flogged. Everyone is naked or in fetish gear, fucking, sucking, bating, and orgying right out in public.
It was exactly what Samuel Delany writes about in his fictional novels: the idea that there’s a section of every city and town, where horny radical sluts can go and have wild, kinky sex, and it’s just allowed, and accepted and valued by society. For me, that’s queer utopia.
Didn’t expect to hear a political discussion on a Sniffies podcast, did you? Well don’t worry, there’s still plenty of silliness, jokes, raunchy sex talk, and a surprising and hilarious moment of flirtation that comes at the end. Enjoy the penultimate episode of Sniffies’ Cruising Confessions.
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Gabe Gonzalez
Chris Patterson-Rosso