Queer

Our system doesn't consider ourselves in a position to answer the question "is kink inherently queer?", as, due to being gay, our attraction would be queer even if it weren't kinky. We experience the kink element of our queer attraction to be both distinct and connected to the underlying romantic or sexual attraction that WOULD be considered queer outside of kink.

What this means is that, for us, kink is a part of being queer the same way that romance is a part of being queer for us. It is very difficult to remove the kink component from the general queer component of our identity, just like how it's difficult to impossible to extricate sex or romance from the identities of most vanilla queer people.

However, the kink component of our queer attraction is an additional dimension of the attraction, like how sex and romance are different dimensions of attraction, even when experienced towards the same person.

In many ways, kink is necessary in our relationships in order for them to feel romantic, as we were raised with a concept of romance that is mostly only accessible to gay couples via BDSM.

Dynamics

One way that kink affects our system's queer identity is in what D/s dynamics mean to us in the context of our actual experiences with romance and sex.

Growing up, we did not know any queer people at all (that we were aware of), and we had nothing in the way of actual representation of queer relationships until we were nearly an adult. Most parts of the system didn't even consume fanworks depicting gay relationships, due to the hypersexualization of such relationships in fandom.

Therefore, the main representation we have ever had of any kind of romantic relationship is traditional heterosexual marriage, where the man takes on a dominant and protective role and the woman takes on a submissive and caretaking role.

While our system doesn't view this as a very good standards for relationships and doesn't actively seek to copy it, it's unfortunately all we know. Too many representations we can find of queer relationships are too based around sex for us, an ace-spec system, to find them applicable or relatable to us.

Meanwhile, sex is a component of most heterosexual marriages, but it is usually not front and center the way a lot of discussions of queer relationships treat sex. Most of what we learned about romantic love, we learned in childhood from our adoptive parents (a married straight couple) and the parents around us (who were also married straight couples).

Most gay couples eschew the idea that one partner is "the man" and one partner is "the woman", where the point of the relationship is that BOTH of them are men or women. The very basis for heterosexual relationships having this dynamic is due to patriarchal oppression of women in the first place.

The thing is, my system doesn't have any cultural concept of a gay relationship that resembles romance as we understand it. When we see or hear about gay relationships that aren't CENTERED around sex, it still feels a lot like the other person is talking about a platonic relationship that involves sex and not romance as we understand it.

This may make it sound that we are incapable of conceiving of romance that does not resemble oppression and therefore violence. This isn't always the case - for example, when we have romantic feelings for someone (which we often experience as distinct from platonic feelings), we want to label our relationship with that person as romantic, because it doesn't feel platonic.

However, it is also true that, in most of our romantic relationships that do NOT involve kink, we DO actually feel like it's more like a close friendship with someone we happen to have romantic feelings for. We don't know how to make relationships feel romantic unless one partner is taking on a dominant role towards another.

D/s

While D/s resembles traditional marriages under patriarchy to some extent - especially when following older rules that believe that submissives can never have any will of their own - this is not the reason that kink exists.

Kink exists because people have always had attractions that involve power - either having it, or giving it over to someone else - and as a result, kink that involves power exchange will always have the potential to resemble other systems of power, including systems of oppression or abuse.

Heterosexual relationships are likely the most common example of oppression in an intimate relationship, and abuse frequently occurs in them, as abuse involves the presence of power. Therefore, an intimate relationship that involves a power exchange will inherently have things in common with traditional patriarchal marriages, as well as abuse.

We are not of the opinion that this makes kink inherently oppressive or abusive, even if it makes some kinks or some aspects of kink worth questioning and examining. Rather, we are of the opinion that kink is harm reduction for wanting to participate in romance in a society that has the systems of oppression that lead to things like marriage in the first place, or for wanting to be abused because every romantic relationship you have grown up seeing has had abuse in it.

Our system considers our D/s relationships to be a queering of traditional heterosexual relationship roles. Doms and subs are not chosen by their biology, or even their genders. They choose to be these things because they want to be these things, and playing these roles gives satisfaction to the people who identify with them.

Unlike how gender is treated traditionally, someone being a Dom or a sub in our system affects nothing about how people in the system treat them outside of kink, romance, or sex. It is not like how women are treated as subordinate to men even outside of their individual intimate relationships with them.

While some older beliefs about kink see it that submissives should do whatever their Dominants tell them to do, no matter what, our system sees the dynamics of kink as being more flexible than that. Submissives have much more agency in their relationships in our system than they have been encouraged to have in previous times, and more than women are usually considered to have in their relationships with men, especially in bygone eras that our upbringing resembled.

It would probably be better if our system didn't have to emulate heterosexual marriages in order for relationships to feel romantic, but unfortunately, that's the consequence of being raised in the environment we were raised in and not knowing how to meet functional and open gay couples who feel that they are something other than friends having sex with each other. It's nice to have a friend you can have sex with, but for someone who wants romance, it's also nice to have relationships feel romantic.

The concept of romance we were raised with is inaccessible to gay couples, but it's also all we know, and if a relationship isn't like romance as we know it, it doesn't feel romantic. Therefore, kink is the best - and to an extent only - way for our system to make a relationship feel romantic.