Darklands Festival, a "gay" fetish event linked this year to monkeypox spread
Article by Rod Dreher in The American Conservative
Monkeypox & Gay Sex Freaks
Monkeypox cases in Spain have been linked to a superspreader event at an adult sauna in Madrid.
“Adult sauna” means gay bathhouse. More:
Enrique Ruiz Escudero, the region’s cabinet minister for health of the community, said on Friday that health officials had traced many of Spain’s 30 monkeypox cases to a single sauna in the capital.
Britain’s monkeypox tally now stands at 20 after 11 fresh cases were announced on Friday, and contact tracing and quarantine of close contacts is under way.
A “notable proportion” of the UK and European cases are in gay and bisexual men, health officials have said.
Three cases in Belgium have also been linked to a large-scale fetish festival in Antwerp, according to organisers. The Darklands Festival[warning: link takes you to festival promotional video, which is NSFW] warned people who attended four days of parties, starting on May 5, that authorities had linked the event to the country’s three confirmed cases.
“There’s reason to assume that the virus has been brought in by visitors from abroad to the festival after recent cases in other countries,” the festival said on its website.
Darklands is a ticketed event that describes itself as a place where “various tribes in the gay fetish community (leather, rubber, army, skinhead, puppies…) come together to create a unique spectacle of fetish brotherhood”.
Sources have told The Telegraph that an internationally advertised gay party in Spain is also being investigated as the root cause of the global monkeypox cases.
In the UK, a link was first drawn between gay men and monkeypox earlier in the week, with the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) urging men who have sex with men to be alert to any new rashes or lesions on their body, including their genitalia.
A unique spectacle of fetish brotherhood. Now nobody will be allowed to draw freaking obvious conclusions from this epidemiological event — that these wicked people are bringing serious disease into our societies, and ought to be stigmatized and suppressed — because it involves the deranged sexual behavior of a Sacred Minority.
“Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another.” (Romans 1:24). It’s not just the fetish brotherhood and the bathhouse whores. It’s this entire society we live in that valorizes people like that, and their behavior.
In 2013, Emily Witt wrote for n+1 a shocking (but celebratory) story about sexual culture in San Francisco. Be aware: it’s not for the squeamish. Excerpts:
In San Francisco, people thought differently. They sought to unlink the family from a sexual foundation of two people. They believed in intentional communities that could successfully disrupt the monogamous heterosexual norm. They gave their choices names and they conceived of their actions as social movements. I had come to San Francisco to observe this sexual vanguard, but I did not think their lessons applied to me. “But what is your personal journey?” they would ask, and I would joke about this later with my friends.
I can’t post any further details here without putting into your minds images that you may not want to. I can tell you that Witt attends the filming of a public pornography video in which a female porn actress willingly declares that “I am a worthless c*nt,” and undergoes various public sexual tortures, for her own pleasure and the pleasure of the mob. It is heterosexual, and it is evil. Interestingly, I talked the other day to a Christian friend who told me about a recent convert, a young woman who had a tattoo on her body that conveyed the same message. He asked her about it, and she said, “I used to think that’s what I was.”
OK, this part from the Emily Witt story I can post without feeling that I’ve assaulted you:
In San Francisco, the right to be a lawfully wedded couple was not taken for granted, but this question was still pursued with a cheerful, pragmatic determination. It came accompanied by Google spreadsheets, jargon, discussion groups, community centers, dietary changes, and hallucinogens. San Francisco’s sexual vanguard might overuse words like “consciousness” and “mindfulness,” but the success of their politicization of sex had repercussions that reached across the country. The mind-set could sometimes seem grim, or at least all that talking kind of dampened the feeling of spontaneity. But they meant it: “Polyamory is a decolonizing force,” one person explained to me. “If you want to transform society, it includes our intimate relations.”
I met with everyone I could. I met a group of Google employees in their early twenties, beneficiaries of the country’s most elite educational institutions, now applying their sharp minds to the investigation of multiple concurrent relationships. They all did yoga, were extremely attractive, and accompanied their sexual experimentation with controlled consumption of psilocybin mushrooms and MDMA. They spoke of primary and secondary relationships, and described a world in which jealousy and possessiveness were the sins to overcome. I attended the cult-like meetings of a group of people who have devoted themselves to the female orgasm. After a “game” at one meeting, where I stood directly in front of a male stranger who looked in my eyes and repeatedly demanded answers to the question “WHAT DO YOU DESIRE?” for several minutes, I went home, drank almost a full bottle of wine, and wept.
I took the train across the Bay to Oakland for a quiet dinner with several anarchists, to talk about anarchist ideas of sexuality. They all wore black and spoke of their decisions with a seriousness that my friends in New York might have had derided. The anarchists cooked kale and dressed their pasta with cashew pesto from a jar. Oakland’s soft summer warmth came as a welcome relief from San Francisco’s miserable microclimates. We dined with the windows open and the evening sun flooding into an apartment lined with books.
In another part of Oakland I met with a radical queer activist who had a platonic partner, a sexual partner, and a rotating cast of people with whom she “played.” (The really tough part, she admitted, was the scheduling.) I asked if her platonic partner was not just her roommate, or a friend, but she explained that it involved a deeper commitment: going to holidays at each other’s family homes, caring for each other when sick—everything expected of a husband or wife except for the sex. It wasn’t any easier than marriage, either: they were in couples’ therapy.
In the past twenty years, in San Francisco especially, the celebration of choice over systems has coincided with the advent of new technology and an influx of money and entrepreneurs. One result has been the healthy, humane workplaces presented by Google, Facebook, Twitter, and the other Bay Area companies and their acceptance of individual expression in the corporate workplace and of families in all their forms. These changes made for a better working experience, but they also made it easier to complacently watch the flourishing of unfamiliar digital monopolies, to partake in the consumer delights produced by unprecedented inequality with a mistaken sense of political agency, and to pay to watch a woman get gangbanged on the internet with a clean conscience, because the producers used the rhetoric of the fair and just. The ghosts of the formerly ostracized, including the untimely dead, haunted the city. The general consensus was that we honored the dead and the formerly oppressed by enacting the present utopia.
The wealth and the corporate culture that produced it defied the old models of good and bad. Google’s motto, “Don’t be evil,” had been adopted across a range of industries. Evil, unfortunately, remained loosely defined: we would know it when we saw it. But all we saw on our computers were our photographs, our friends, our broken hearts, our writing, our search terms, our sexual fetishes.
The friendly blandness of Google’s interface bestowed blessing on the words that passed through its sieve. On Google, all words were created equal, as all ways of choosing to live one’s life were equal. Google blurred the distinction between normal and abnormal. The answers its algorithms harvested assured each person of the presence of the like-minded: no one need be alone with her aberrant desires, and no desires were aberrant.
This is the dark side of this culture of “freedom” we have created. Monkeypox, anarchy, and the destruction of the human. If you don’t think the legitimization of the sexual exploitation of children isn’t coming next, you are living a fairy tale.
By the way, here is what the Diversity-Celebrators of the Spanish sauna and the fetish festival have introduced into our society. From a Deutsche Welle report about the monkeypox outbreak, this image of a sufferer:
According to Wikipedia, this is what happens when you contract it:
Symptoms begin with fever, headache, muscle pains and feeling tired. Unlike the more severe smallpox, there are also swollen glands. Within a few days or longer of the high temperature, lesions appear typically on the face first before spreading to other parts of the body. They begin as small flat spots, before becoming small bumps which then fill with at first clear fluid and then pus, which subsequently burst and scab over. It looks identical to the rash of smallpox. An affected person may remain unwell for two to four weeks.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/monkeypox-gay-sex-freaks-fetish/
