A couple of weeks ago, romance author Elizabeth Wheatley announced that she was removing all the sex scenes from her published books. Her reason for doing this boils down to, in her own words, the “vibes being off”; she cites a particular incident in a bookstore where she felt alienated by a display of penis-shaped bookmarks, and concluded her work didn’t belong among other “spicy” (i.e. explicitly sexual) romance books.

There’s been a bit of theorizing that Wheatley did this out of a sense of shame surrounding sex — either because she recently had a baby, recently converted to Catholicism, or some combination of the two. I don’t know Wheatley and I don’t think it’s productive to act like I do, so I’m going to take her stated reasoning at face value. And at face value, what we have is this: a writer of heterosexual romance, upon realizing her work was associated with an artistic movement widely considered pornographic and degenerate, took pains to distance herself from that movement as much as possible.

Wheatley’s decisions regarding her own art are hers to make and hers alone — but it’s worth noting that her escape from the ranks of the perverse was a surprisingly light effort. Her characters aren’t newly celibate; the sex they’re still definitely having is now implied by “pan to the fireplace”-style scene transitions. By Wheatley’s own admission, cutting the explicit sex altered less than 5% of any given book.

That it took so little to render her work respectable is a privilege not every author shares.

Even if I were to cut all the sex from my books, merely featuring queer and trans characters is enough to make them obscene by many definitions. If I were to take it a step further and rewrite all my characters to be straight and cis, the fact that I’m blatantly queer would still characterize my work as queer art in the eyes of, for example, the US government. Unless I become one of those ex-lesbian tradwives, I will never be considered “clean” in the way Wheatley can now claim to be.

But I’ll always be welcome among the perverts — and in a world where authoritarianism and censorship are ever-increasing threats, it’s the perverts who’ve chosen to stand and fight. Elizabeth Wheatley chose to cut and run.

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I have found no evidence that John Waters ever actually said the words “Remember, pornographers have always been on our side. Brave, ready to fight for our rights. Smut is our friend.” But I do enjoy it, as a general sentiment.

-K