LEATHERbound: A Book Club for LGBTQ+ Leatherfolx
Join your fellow kinksters for this collaborative discussion group on topics covering developing a kink skillset, navigating consent, risk awareness and safety practices, and the history/present state of the Leather subculture. Our group is open to folks of all genders, backgrounds, and levels of ability and experience. While Queer topics will be centered, people of all sexualities are welcome to respectfully participate.
Group meetings will be held in-person at the Capitol Hill branch of the Seattle Public Library. Remote participation via Zoom will also be available. Future book selections will be suggested and voted upon collaboratively; we seek to hear from a diversity of voices.
Our inaugural March meeting will discuss the book Unsafe Words: Queering Consent in the #MeToo Era.
Queer people may not have invented sex, but queers have long been pioneers in imagining new ways to have it. Yet their voices have been largely absent from the #MeToo conversation. What can queer people learn from the #MeToo conversation? And what can queer communities teach the rest of the world about ethical sex? This provocative book brings together academics, activists, artists, and sex workers to tackle challenging questions about sex, power, consent, and harm. While responding to the need for sex to be consensual and mutually pleasurable, these chapter authors resist the heteronormative assumptions, class norms, and racial privilege underlying much #MeToo discourse. The essays reveal the tools that queer communities themselves have developed to practice ethical sex—from the sex worker negotiating with her client to the gay man having anonymous sex in the back room. At the same time, they explore how queer communities might better prevent and respond to sexual violence without recourse to a police force that is frequently racist, homophobic, and transphobic.
This event is NOT sponsored by the Seattle Public Library.