The "K" and "P" Words

Warning: This post could make other UUs uncomfortable. Strong medicine has a tendency to do that …

This post is about invisible people. I don't mean some science-fiction scenario where human beings become transparent. I don't mean people who deliberately hide. I'm talking about how a community of people renders some particular group or category within it as unseen and unseeable, thus continuing to marginalize them – or, in this case, us

Before writing this post, I had to do some digging, combing through email archives, articles and web pages. To be exact, the larger community I'm talking about doesn’t render us completely invisible. We pop up here and there in a couple little corners. But that's about it. And in the places where it really matters, we remain virtually nonexistent.

The community I'm speaking of is Unitarian Universalism. And the groups that they continue to marginalize are called kinksters or kinky, and polyamorous or poly. There are kinky and poly UUs across the continent, even a group for UU kinksters and an older group for poly UUs.

But if you looked at the "official" web media and literature of the Unitarian Universalist Association, you'd hardly know. The UUPA is listed as a Related Organization, but Leather & Grace can't even get its foot in the door because there doesn't seem to be a consistent understanding of what it takes to become a Related Organization. We've asked the UUA multicultural office how the UU polys got that status without even applying for it, and we've never gotten any clear answer. And when we've explained in detail the difficulties around one of the requirements spelled out to us, and asked that this be clarified once and for all … nothing in response.

Perhaps you can tell that I'm rather miffed by all this. But it's nothing compared to the core issue around this post. I find it hard to recall a single instance of anyone in UUA leadership, and even more painfully the UUA’s multicultural staff, say or write the "K" or "P" words. I've heard lots of euphemisms and dancing around these terms, but somehow none of these people who keep telling me I can trust them can even bring themselves to call us what we call ourselves.

I never thought I'd be comparing the leaders of my faith with fundamentalist Christians in regard to sexuality, but they're doing a very similar dance to different tunes. The fundies still can't say gay or lesbian without putting them in scare quotes; the most evolved they've become is referring to "same-sex attraction." Similarly, UUA leaders will talk in terms of us as "alternative," and in one email we were referred to as "new understandings" of sexual orientation that "may emerge in the future."

I won't go into graphic detail about the reactions that produced. Suffice it to say, we are people, not "understandings," and we live and work and pray and hurt right here and now. And, to be perfectly blunt, we deserve better than to be reduced to a bloodless hypothetical.

The rest of the world is now talking about polyamory and kink. Planned Parenthood has even helped produce an educational video on BDSM. But the UUA can't even call us what we call ourselves. We've been talking and talking, waiting and hoping. But if the best we can get is being told behind closed doors that, sorry, our once forward-looking faith can't catch up with Harvard University and The New York Times, but that we should still trust our faith leaders to be with us when they think we "may emerge in the future" … well, that’s just not good enough.

Moral progress doesn't happen by waiting for others to do what's right. It happens by doing what's right. Calling a group of people what they call themselves, and not some seemingly comfortable euphemism, is the least moral thing our faith leaders can do. And it's high time they did.