I Kissed a Tory (And I Liked it)

August 22, 2014

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They seem like a very teenage expression of rebellion, but I’ve seen a pin badge around London that nonetheless shocks me every time: “I’ve never kissed a Tory”. I’ve tried to pick apart its meaning. No doubt it’s intended as a cipher of just how deeply one’s political commitment goes. It’s also a tacit nod and wink (as these discussions too often are) to an underlying acknowledgement that the person is indeed political.

But I always look at the badge and think “well how do you know?” I try to reimagine my sexual history by placing bodies I’ve touched (or that have touched me) on a political compass, and realise that for every comrade-in-arms there are ten points where data is insufficient. Perhaps never fucking Tories is a declaration of sex-strike, or an implication that there’s a correlation between conservatism and an ungenerous sexual attitude. That’s never been my experience.

I don’t say this to shame those pin-wearers; a partisan sexuality is an idea pregnant with possibilities. I just wonder whether the pin demonstrates the limits of a communist politics of sex today, where the little plastic badge stands in for a discussion about sex that is almost wholly focused on controlling and shaping the political and cultural representations of sexual identity, but where discussions of the material concerns of sex are strangely absent.

Whether you fuck Tories or not comes down to a number of different factors: how do you meet sexual partners, and where? Do you enjoy access to social difference in a romantic or erotic setting or using BDSM accessories? What are established protocols for negotiating sex? How long do you know your partner(s) for? Where do you fuck them? Where could you fuck them?

These are all political questions, and furthermore, they’re often more troubled and contested, more influential on the development of our sexual lives, than the question of whose box you tick. These are questions of infrastructure and infrastructure is marking itself out as a key battleground for political contestation in the 21st Century. As well as understanding sexual politics as a fight over representations and over rights, how can we build a sexual politics based around an explicit concern for the material; the sexual infrastructure?

Let’s discuss an example. In popular retellings of the sexual revolution of the 1960s, numerous factors are used to explain the huge upsurge in contestation of sexual, gender and domestic norms. These are often philosophical and cultural; a turn by a younger generation against the greyscale certainties of austerity Britain, a new spirit of freedom. They are also infrastructural concerns, however – not least in Britain. Perhaps most well known amongst these is the combination of a new public form of health provision, the NHS, and the development of the contraceptive pill. I’d add to these a third, important but overlooked: the implementation of a widespread social housing project.

If you’d walked through Victoria Park, Hackney, at dusk between the wars, you’d find a public urban space filled with bodies coupling — heterosexual coupling. For young, working-class couples, still courting and unmarried, finding space for sexual contact was virtually impossible in any domestic setting. A housing shortage, and low wages, meant families living in shared accommodation up to, and even after, marriage. Siblings shared rooms and even beds. Like today, social taboos and awkwardness around sex were strong and formal sex education nonexistent. As a result, outdoor sex became, if not the norm, then part of the sexual subculture of young inter-war London. In his book ‘Queer London’ historian Matt Houlbrook recounts that ‘Between February 1918 and August 1919, for example, sixty-nine “heterosexual” couples were prosecuted for indecency offences on Hampstead Heath, while there were only two instances involving same-sex couples.’

The gradual introduction of new housing stock, alongside the slum clearances of the old East End, helped move sex back into the private sphere. Today outdoor sex is an unusual enough activity to be virtually classified as a paraphilia; “dogging” has socially written outdoor sex as a specific kink, a fetishistic perversion in its own right.

Homosexual public sex remained more commonplace, queer citizens long having a different relationship towards public and private space. With the shift towards a more rights-based gay politics, however, even cottaging and cruising Hampstead Heath have become rare fetishes, set apart from the more heteronormative forms increasingly pushed as appropriate sexual models.

This small example of the effects of infrastructure on our sexual behaviours could take its place amongst a thousand similar examples, from the introduction of downlighters in cinema aisles (an anti-sex measure) to the inbuilt sexual biases within the coding of sex and dating apps, especially geosocial networking apps such as Grindr or Tinder. Each one highlights how poor our vocabulary and conversations regarding the material politics of sex can become: whilst we obsess over the representation of sexuality, the everyday means of getting laid are shaped by forces further and further out of our control. Perhaps one way to establish that dialogue is through the lens of #stacktivism, a hashtag-turned-public-conversation, where we can start to collate these disparate infrastructural effects into a comprehensible public discussion on their effects on our lives — and maybe take back that control.

In his book “Times Square Red, Times Square Blue” sci-fi novelist Samuel R. Delany looks back over a 30-something year period where part of his sex life inhabited a very particular sexual infrastructure in New York, an infrastructure created to provide an environment for men who, due to their domestic circumstances, often need a “third place” to initiate and conduct sexual relations. In the (straight) sex cinemas of Times Square, men could cruise and fuck in open sight; Delany’s tender prose mourns the loss of a sexual community literally destroyed as its infrastructure was destroyed, forced out when the Square was “cleaned-up” — a telling phrase — under Rudolph Giuliani’s ‘regeneration’ scheme in the mid-90s. One of the strengths of an open, public sex culture, Delany argues, is the ability to mix widely with groups that precisely don’t share your background, wealth or political allegiances. What he calls “cross-class contact” was a mark of a rich urban environment alive with sexual possibility, pitted against the monocultural, class-locked ideology of “family values”. The loss of these contacts through an explicit policy of changing the infrastructure of Times Square through sexual cleansing should be regretted.

Sex continues to become a more private affair, with narrower implications for human experience. It becomes a commodifiable asset as the infrastructure is effectively privatised; a spectrum of behaviours and expressions become compartmentalised into specific, discrete (and discreet) kinks or tribes. It feels to me that a politics that reclaims the possibilities of urban space by understanding and making-democratic infrastructure space is more vital and exciting in its potential than limiting ourselves to a sexual politics of restriction and prohibition.

What is exciting about not kissing Tories?

By Huw Lemmey | @spitzenprodukte