Sam Brinton and the dorkification of kink

Remember when gay people were cool? Libertines and romantics, reviled, spat-upon, defiant and irreverent? Gay life could be sexy and thrilling, tragic and shameful. If the homosexual offered nothing else, he carried an arsenal of bawdy tales that left any housewife glued and dithering at a cocktail party. Judge his life as you may, but never call it ordinary.

The mystique is gone. That dusky boundary between the dark and dirty and the workaday has evaporated. Assimilation has meant the faces of gay are either vapid, Instagram-famous semen receptacles, complete goobers or repulsive shrills. And they’ve dragged the rest of us, by association, into their orbit of cringe.

The Forces of Biden particularly love the latter two. Poor Mayor Pete still can’t figure out how to be gay, evident by the twee and self-conscious couple photos he posts to social media. This is a man who’s still not very comfortable in his own skin, which is why he must constantly talk about how normal he is. When his hausfrau Chasten asked Twitter the other day, “When did you realize you were straight?” my first thought was, “I seriously considered it after seeing that pic of you and your husband holding babies.” Chasten’s question — so edgy! — was an old battle cry of the gay rights movement. It might have been provocative forty years ago, but for Chasten it only reminded us how these president-adjacent daft gay losers are completely pathetic and out of touch.

Then along came Sam Brinton, Biden’s new deputy assistant secretary of Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition at the Department of Nuclear Energy. Unlike Mayor Pete, Brinton’s not just a diversity hire. He’s an MIT graduate who also advised President Trump’s administration on nuclear policy. But no one on the left cares about qualifications. He’s getting yaassss kween’d because he’s a they/them and proud kinkster. He goes out in public dressed in half-man booger drag — gowns and heels with makeup, a bald head and facial hair — a look that doesn’t say I’m an entertainer, but aggressively asks the world are you shocked? We aren’t.

According to one blog, he’s also into diaper play and consensually choking his partners. He also likes animal fantasy sex and having his tricks dress up like puppies. He posed for a magazine photo shoot in fetish wear alongside a collared sex slave and gave at least two live demonstrations on bondage fetish play to college classrooms.

Here’s the first thing that comes to mind — absolutely no one in the world wants to be dominated by a they/them. It’s antithetical to the entire sub/dom relationship. Sure, you can walk into any S&M gay fetish bar, slide your sweaty torso through a forest of scruffy, muscled, cigar-smoking daddies — fully aware that half the crowd are hairdressers, and the other half are florists — but there’s still the illusion of something else going on.

Brinton and his ilk could never quite pull off that illusion, so they ran in the other direction and dragged the press and the academy with them. They’ve not only cheapened kink, they’ve made it dorky and cringe. One should never be under fluorescent lighting in a leather harness — or drag, for that matter. It’s not morally wrong; it’s aesthetically criminal. It’s also rude. You’re making banal and corporate what someone else once found thrilling and subversive. Some poor master might never be able to see his whips and ball gags the same way again after you’ve stood in front of a classroom dissecting everything into oblivion. It’s an act of violence like the New York Times Style section discovering your favorite hangout. Suddenly, you can’t go there anymore. They’ve taken it away from you. Not only are you about to encounter a new, rubbernecking crowd, but just being there now associates you with the world’s preeminent Smug Liberal brand.

Now we’ve reached the epitome of gay, and kink, sterilization — a clueless, seventy-nine-year-old doddering old president has embraced a pup slave fetish master in his administration. I’m not grossed out by Brinton’s sex life, I’m depressed by how cliché and nauseating such things have become at the whim of a bunch of desperate, unsexy, attention-hungry nerds. Hey, Brinton, wanna try something really kinky during your next erotic slave session? Try throwing on a MAGA hat and see how your pup reacts.