“The way in which we get brought up to think about our own desires is that they are sort of mysterious and beyond our control,” Denton Callander, a sex and sexual health researcher at the University of New South Wales, tells me. The phrase pushes back on the notion that we are born with innate sexual preferences and also the idea that racism and sex can separated. In the past decade, academics have come up with the term “sexual racism” to describe this. Every non-white race is confined to a specific sexual position: Asian men are bottoms, Black men are tops and clip titles such as “Latino man breaks into apartment to release big load” still fly. If straight porn is racist (which it is), then gay porn deserves its own word. Growing up, it was common for people to write “ No fats, femmes or Asians” on their Grindr profiles and just two years ago the app got rid of an ethnicity filter that allowed users to choose who they wanted to interact with based on their race. There’s an entire body of work around how problematic sexual discourse in the LGBTQ+ community can be. I don’t do this solely because I love seeing the same actor in different roles: It’s mostly because mainstream gay porn is incredibly racist. Twitter has allowed people like me to ditch mainstream porn sites to follow individual porn stars instead. Not so on Twitter, where on any given day I can scroll past news of the latest clusterfuck in politics followed by a 30-second clip of an actual clusterfuck. Because most social media platforms’ rules against porn and nudity, sex workers’ accounts are often blocked, heavily censored, or altogether deleted. Twitter has done many good things for sex workers in general. On the one hand, the promise of a less censored platform could guarantee that porn on the site continues to go unregulated on the other, it could very likely expose LGBTQIA+ sex workers to more trolls. Since then, some queer sex workers on Twitter have been scrambling to figure out what Elon Musk’s latest impulse purchase will mean for them.
When Grimes’s ex decided to buy Twitter last week, he promised to make that platform a haven for free speech, which always sounds like code for letting white supremacists say whatever they want.