“I feel the most empowered when I say no,” says Venus Cuffs, an alternative lifestyle expert based in New York City. Cuffs, who once worked as a dominatrix, is part of a lineage of Black femmes who have used their positions to reclaim power — a strategy we’ll unspool post haste.
Mistress Velvet, the late Black femme domme who famously made her white clients read bell hooks, understood the same thing: the queer art of sabotage isn’t about tearing things down. It’s about survival in the form of refusal, boundary and redirection.
“Me saying ‘no’ has been met with like, ‘How dare you?’ My refusal to participate is offensive to people,” Cuffs says, recalling the backlash she faced for refusing race play in predominantly white kink communities. Her words point to a familiar script: the demand that Black femmes be endlessly available, compliant or grateful. Her refusal interrupts that script.
For Cuffs, refusal is the point. Rejecting race play meant rejecting the broader cultural script insisting Black women perform whatever role is demanded of them. “Race is nothing to play about,” she says. That refusal was sabotage. But walking away from the scene allowed Cuffs to stay aligned with her integrity.
Cuffs’ “no” became the foundation for something new. Leaving the scene didn’t just protect her; it opened the door to a creative and personal realignment that became political resistance.
“I broke off from the main scene and started my own dungeon,” she recalls. “I decided I don’t need to deal with this, and neither does my community.”
She founded Spread, a 4,000-square-foot Brooklyn dungeon where queer BDSM practitioners could host sessions and hold power dynamics safely. Spread quickly gained traction. The choice to open it was a declaration as much as a business move: fuck you to exclusionary spaces, fuck yes to something better.
“Refusal means refusing to follow the path we have been told to walk when our instincts tell us otherwise,” Madison Young, a filmmaker and sex educator in the Bay Area, tells me. Queer refusal, they say, looks like “refusing to be someone more palatable in an effort to not cause a disruption. Refusing to be risk-averse.”
Where Cuffs and Velvet confront the racialized demands placed on Black femmes, Young’s dissent takes another form. As a white queer filmmaker, their refusals reject industry scripts demanding palatability and compliance. For Young, refusal has meant creating films and performances that defy neat labels — queer family-making, kink, submission — all centered on authenticity. “I think this is the inherent nature of queerness,” they say. “To exist outside of the lines and boxes drawn for us and to instead follow the path our heart, gut, soul are guiding us toward.”
If refusal is saying “no,” sabotage is building “yes.” Queer sabotage refuses harmful systems not simply for resistance, but to open space for something authentically queer and joyful to emerge.
Young does this through filmmaking. On their sets, they hire predominantly women, nonbinary, and trans crew. “It shifts the dynamic on set when it is a room full of women and queers,” they say. “I can choose whose stories I’m elevating, who I’m collaborating with.” These choices build queer community and disrupt industry norms.
For Tracy Quan, a former escort and author of “Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl,” sabotage operates more subtly. “I viewed my novels more as a kind of entryism,” she says. Quan smuggles radical ideas into mainstream publishing by infiltrating oppressive spaces from within.
She points to Nancy Mitford, the British novelist who wove antifascist politics into frothy social comedies. “She was a serious antifascist who made the British government pay attention to her fascist sister,” Quan says. “She wrote witty novels that looked fluffy but carried sharp politics.” For Quan, writing sexy books that secrete away radical ideas felt like inserting feminist critique into commercial publishing.
If refusal protects integrity, sabotage extends it. Refusal shuts the door on the status quo. Sabotage opens a new one and creates conditions for a new yes, a yes rooted in creativity rather than compliance.
While Cuffs and Velvet resist the racialized demands placed on Black femmes, Young’s yes shows up in the work itself. “My heart tells me to make a feature film or a TV series or start a queer art gallery, and I just can’t do anything else,” they say. “The calling is strong and defies all logic.”
Early in Young’s career, the call sounded like chaos. “Any time I would even attempt to plug into the matrix, I would sabotage the situation. I just couldn’t do it,” Young explains. What looked like self-destruction was queer self-preservation: an inability to do “normal” — not for money, not for fame.
For Quan, sabotage also meant restraint. For decades, she withheld certain details of her personal life as a deliberate constraint. Instead of confession, she leaned into omission. That discipline, she explains, sharpened her craft. “When you have limits, when you have this denial kind of situation, it can really force you to be more creative,” she told me. What others see as a restriction, she frames as power.
Creating our own boundaries is one of the ways we carve out space for queer joy in a world determined to tell us which boundaries we are allowed to have. “When we state a boundary and work with refusal, we are making room for what we want more of,” Young says.
A no to the wrong collaborator opens a yes to the right one. Setting limits is a prophylactic. “We can protect our collective joy, our queer joy, our relationships, and our connections by being clear about our expectations and needs,” Young says.
Quan echoes that sentiment, describing constraints as creative pleasure rather than deprivation. “To me, creativity is a kind of power, like that’s the kind of power that I enjoy,” she says. For her, withholding shapes a more authentic vision.
Cuffs locates joy in boundaries even more explicitly — in reclaiming time, body, and power. Saying no, walking away from money, setting terms that feel good — each is a reclamation. “I don’t have to show up for anyone when I can’t show up for myself,” she says.
In a political moment defined by rampant transphobia, book bans targeting queer literature, legislative attacks on bodily autonomy, and the ongoing criminalization of sex work, boundaries and refusals are not just private choices. They are collective, political strategies. Our joy is political.
Mistress Velvet knew this when she turned her domme sessions into lesson plans, insisting white submissives grapple with Black feminist thought to earn her attention. Cuffs, Young and Quan know it when they walk away from exploitation, infiltrate hostile industries, or reshape the spaces they inhabit. Sabotage isn’t nihilism. It’s survival. It’s creativity. It’s care.
Cuffs leaves us with a reminder: “Do what feels right for you. Don’t be influenced by the amount of money, the amount of power, what other people tell you it should look like. Slavery is over.”