While there’s plenty of historical documentation about queer kink practices and their healing potential, there remains sadly little academic literature on the mental health needs of queer kinksters. A study published earlier this month in the peer-reviewed Journal of LGBT Issues in Counseling seeks to fill that void.
Authors Megan Speciale, a professor at Palo Alto University, and Dean Khambatt, a marriage and family therapist, sought to answer the question: How do LGBTQ+ individuals understand and make meaning of their kink experiences? They found that queer kinksters, especially those who are marginalized in multiple ways, are often underserved and/or pathologized by mental health professionals, and recommended better practices for treating this population.
The researchers, both of whom identify as queer and kinky, interviewed a panel of 12 “intersectional LGBTQ+ individuals who practice kink/BDSM” twice over the course of three months. The majority of participants were transgender, queer, and indicated “some amount of current financial insecurity,” while some also identified as people of color, disabled, and/or sex workers.
The study identified five major themes in their responses — Community Connectedness, Healing and Self-Exploration, Accessing Safe Spaces, Intersectional Experiences, and Barriers to Affirming Healthcare — and noted that participants “foremost” described the kink community as a “safe haven from heteronormativity.”
“I think that’s why so many queer and trans people are drawn to BDSM, open
relationships, and alternative sexualities,” said study participant Dolphin, a queer trans man. “We’re already in such unscripted territory; we’re all writing the roles as we go along. It’s definitely something I find really beautiful about being a queer trans kinky person, being able to create a reality for yourself through fantasy, through scenes, and through language.”
All participants also shared that kink participation “had long-lasting, positive impacts to their emotional wellbeing,” citing the emphasis on consent and communication in many kink practices.
“I think in a lot of ways [kink] was really healing for me because I have a fair amount of
sexual trauma,” said study participant Wolfgang. “Getting to be in spaces where my word over my body was law — that went a really long way in… reminding me how good and fun and wonderful sex can be.”
Participants also described negative experiences associated with primarily cisgender, heterosexual-centered kink spaces and greater feelings of safety in explicitly queer kink spaces, although they also emphasized that the latter was not a utopia, either. To the contrary, participants noted that queer kink practioners “sometimes felt compelled to stay quiet about consent violations” due to the insular nature of the community.
Many also noted their experiences with racism and ableism in the kink community, stating that queer and/or kink spaces tended to be predominately white and able-bodied. Participant Janyce described feeling both hypervisible and fetishized as a Black femme, but also observed that “race can become invisibilized when people ignore identity-based power dynamics in a scene.”
Disabled participants described various experiences of inaccessibility within queer kink communities, stating that able-bodied partners often required more education on “disability-related issues like chronic fatigue, pain, and anxiety” and that many kink events are not fully accessible, geographically or functionally, to people with “certain types of disabilities.” Despite these additional barriers, disabled participants and participants of color both described their experiences with kink as personally empowering and a form of healing from ableism and/or racism.
Interviewees lastly discussed barriers to affirming healthcare, with several stating that they feared being stigmatized or judged or that their sexual practices had been pathologized by mental health professionals. They also described “limited accessibility of kink-aware and queer-affirming counselors,” which was difficult even for participants in larger cities, since self-identified kink aware professionals often have long waiting lists or are costly.
