GLR January-February 2026

against the very systems that make such spaces necessary. In an era in which “religious freedom” is weaponized as a license to discriminate, in which states enact laws denying healthcare and services to LGBT people, the embodied theology of queer kink ceases to be a subcultural practice and becomes a vital frame work for public survival and resistance. The consent literacy, the reverence for bodily autonomy, and the reclamation of ec stasy are direct counter-liturgies to the theocratic impulses seek ing to legislate our bodies into silence and shame. Consider a present-day vignette: a trans woman is turned away from an emergency room, the rope-marks from a consen sual shibari scene misread by staff as signs of abuse, their “moral conscience” clause invoked to deny her care. Her body, marked by sacred trust, is criminalized by a system that sancti fies only the violence it authorizes. This is the frontier of our struggle. The same governments that invoke scripture to justify such erasures are performing a perverse liturgy of their own, one of control and ontological violence. They preach a gospel of “natural order” that pathologizes our desires and polices our genders. In stark opposition, the queer kink community offers a lived theology in which power is negotiated, identity is self-de termined, and the body is revered as the ultimate site of truth. Our “religious freedom” is not a right to exclude but a right to consecrate, to name our bonds as holy, our chosen families as

kin, and our desires as divine. This is why this praxis matters now, with a fierceness that is both practical and spiritual. The skills honed in the dungeon are the very skills required to navigate and resist an increasingly hostile public sphere. These include: 1. The rigorous consent we practice is the same clarity we must demand from legislators and medical professionals. 2. The sovereignty over our bodies we enact in a scene is the same autonomy we must defend in courtrooms and at the bal lot box. 3. The communal care that ensures every participant’s safety is the same mutual aid that we must extend to our most vulnera ble in the face of state abandonment. To gather in a dungeon and practice this sacred trust is to engage in a form of direct action. It is to build in the shell of the old world the foundation of the new. It is to assert with our whole bodies that we will not be shamed back into the closet or the confessional. We have written our own scripture on one an other’s skin, and we are building our own altars in the shadows they cast. This is the blueprint for a world where all bodies are sacred. The dungeon door is open. The liturgy of liberation has been written. The challenge now is to breathe it into being, be yond the candlelight, for all the world to feel its resonant, defi ant beat.

sult of prolonged discussions with other au thorities,” he wrote. He noted the date, time, and channel of each film he watched but omitted plot summaries, aware that this is not why we watch these movies. He de scribed butts and bulges, the kind of images the censors of the Production Code couldn’t quite erase. Occasionally McDonald was taken by a leading performance, but more often he was struck by some bit player. He admired greatness more than “mere talent” and waxed rhapsodic about tight pants and what he called “unnerving groins.” He was not a fan of gym bod ies, only of private parts and their po tential for igniting sexual fantasies. “A man’s hand resting on his bulge,” he wrote, “is eloquent body language which says that he enjoys his meat and lets others enjoy it too.” McDonald tracked down photos at the Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archive to run with the articles. Often, he enlarged a choice piece of anatomy to make his point clear. He wasn’t interested in a fe male star’s glamour unless it was laced with irony or toughness. Jane Russell won his admiration for her “leering and sneering” in Macao (1952), all the more so because it seemed wholly in appropriate for the character she was playing, a nightclub singer badly in need of a job. McDonald’s writing was direct, crabby, bitingly funny, and fiercely political. He

continually called out straight people’s hypocrisy, noting the casual way that homo phobic remarks flew from the mouths of stars like Frank Sinatra, bringing “the word ‘faggot’ right into the lovely homes of our

butch lez from the Women’s Army Corps,” he wrote of his bare-legged appearance in John Loves Mary (1949), noting with dis gust: “Only heterosexuals could have cast this picture.”) A provocateur for the ages, Mc Donald delighted in spreading open homosexuality’s ass cheeks for all to see in. Reading his work is like zoom ing in on the lo-fi, off-center eroticism that would later be spotlighted in the pink pages of BUTT magazine, which celebrates different strokes for differ ent folks. Through sharing what turns us on as individuals, we find commu nity with others. Specificity is always interesting. And maybe that’s the real legacy of his work: to confront us as gay men and force us to reckon with the physi cality of our individual desires—the sights, tastes, and smells that turn us on. Whereas Pink Narcissus shows us a stylized ideal, Cruising the Movies keeps it raw and real. And yet, at the time McDonald died (from emphy sema), no one in his family even knew he was gay. Overwhelmed by the evi dence of his obsessions when they were cleaning out his room afterward, they threw everything away. Michael Quinn writes about books in a monthly column for the Brooklyn newspaper The Red Hook Star-Revue and on his website, criticalinfluences.com .

lovely families” and making it “a part of our lovely traditional family values.” McDonald especially hated Ronald Reagan—his poli tics and his body. (Reagan “could pass for a

January–February 2026

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