[quote GromblesofGrimbledon]@NoWireHangersEver
I think it's inappropriate and also pretty sad to conflate your sexual preferences with your identity.
Sexual orientation? Fine. Are you straight, gay, lesbian? If that matters to you and is a big part of your identity in the way that your race or ethnicity or religion might be, then yes I get that.
But I fail to see what various kinks have to do with identity. If you have parade to the world that you like a particular fetish in the bedroom as though it has anything to do with who you are as a person, I think it might be time to invest in a hobby. And "cat boy" isn't a hobby.
Christ, the years of work from gays and lesbians to show the world that their identity was not tied to what they get up to in the bedroom, that their sexual orientation wasn't deviant, all to be undone by a new wave of activists who are absolutely obsessed with all manner of kink and fetish. [/quote]
You know though, I don't know if everyone is old enough to remember it, but there were really two directions that the gay rights movement was being pulled in, back in the day.
One was toward sexual orientation as identity, which brings it into the territory of critical theory, and you can see that stream quite prominently still in a lot of LGB politics.
The other was much less about identity and in some sense even opposed to it, because it was more about sexuality becoming mundane and unremarkable. There was a surge of this approach during and in the immediate aftermath of the AIDS crisis, and it was quite successful at bringing the general public on board. It was also probably partly fuelled by the gay communities own response to what was going on with AIDS - some common elements of 1970s gay culture didn't look so great at that point and it affected how many gay men thought about it themselves.
For whatever reasons, the sexuality as identity approach seems to have won out, at least at the activist level.