This post is about my experience of the 2012 Femme Conference.

First thing on the first day there’s a kinky femmes workshop. There’s no description in the program book, but I am looking forward to being around other kinky femmes. I want to say this thing I’ve been thinking about that no one ever seems to say: that being kinky doesn’t always mean getting to do kink. I am thirty years old, and kink is vital to me, but it’s something I’ve never really had in abundance.

The session turns out to be a panel: four kinky femmes talk about how they do kink; we ask the questions, and they have the answers. I’ve spent the better part of the past eight years hearing about how other people do kink, and I can’t really bear to do it here now. I write a note to the friend I’ve come in with and slip out the door.

Where I go instead turns out to be my favorite workshop of the weekend. Kim Crosby‘s analysis of the world is so keen and expansive and intersectional that for the duration of the session (presentation available here), I almost don’t notice that no one is talking about kink.

But there is sexual tension everywhere. We are, after all, a group of queers who have come together for a weekend. On the first day, there is a speed-dating session (scheduled, aggravatingly, against a workshop on trans-misogyny). On the second day, there is a play party, but it’s far away, physically inaccessible, and costs $15 on top of the conference registration fees – besides which, the kind of erotic community I’m looking for is something I rarely find at a party). At one of the keynotes, someone shouts, “I want to get fucked at this conference,” and people cheer. I hear it in private conversations: hooking up, making out, who’s cute. I’ve thought it myself vaguely and privately: It would be nice. I don’t know if I’m ready to touch or be touched this weekend, but it’d be nice if I were and I could.

I run into people I used to know from the kink scene. “Where have you been?” one asks. “It’s been ages.”

I tell them I haven’t been to a kink event in years. “I’m kind of mad at the kink scene,” I say, honest but trying to keep it light. I talk about how it takes me time to want to connect with someone, how kink spaces always seem to be urgently about doing play right away, right now.

“That’s a good thing to know about yourself,” my old acquaintance answers. It’s the kind of answer I’m used to hearing from players in the public scene: the problem isn’t the scene, it’s you. At the kink panel, my friend who stayed tells me, someone said that if you don’t act like you belong, you never will.

If those are the rules, then I don’t belong. But outside of kink space, I miss the way that desire is understood as important, specific, variable, worth exploring, negotiating, making time for. I miss trusting that the community around me understands that we don’t all fuck the same way, that we don’t all fuck, period. When I walk into a space–yes, even a queer space–I assume that I’m not sexually compatible with most people in the room. And in a space like the Femme Conference, where the story we’re telling ourselves is that everyone wants to hook up (and we all basically know what hooking up means), I feel alienated, left out, afraid.

I want kink spaces that care about access: physical, financial, emotional. I want queer spaces that care about kink, and I want social justice spaces that value desire. At the end of the weekend, another person I know from the kink scene tells me they wish the conference had been more kink-informed. I roll the word around in my head. What would it mean for an understanding of kink to be integrated into the conference? How does kink fit into an intersectional analysis? What—as a friend wisely asked me—do I even mean when I use the word kink?

One week later, I’m still thinking it through. What about you? What do you think?