CAROL QUEEN, PhD, is an author and activist whose work as a sex-positive feminist began in the 1970s and continues to this day. She was an early organizer for LGBT equality, an AIDS activist in the ’80s, and a sexologist who has lectured and written on all aspects of human sexuality. She has served as staff sexologist for Good Vibrations, a sex shop in San Francisco, since 1990; is the founding director of the Center for Sex & Culture; and has helped create adult movies, events, and workshops.
Queen’s books range from sex tutorials (such as Exhibitionism for the Shy: Show Off, Dress Up and Talk Hot) to the erotic novel The Leather Daddy and the Femme. She is perhaps best known for her personal essays (many collected in Real Live Nude Girl: Chronicles of Sex-Positive Culture). A contributor to over seventy anthologies, Queen popularized the term “pomosexual” to refer to postmodern sexualities that avoid a fixed sexual or gender “identity.” She’s also credited with coining the term “absexual” to refer to moralistic types who oppose sexual freedom but find an erotic charge in the “immoral” behaviors or depictions that they abjure.
I spoke with Queen by telephone in early July. — DEH
Diane Ellen Hamer: You started as an activist in the gay liberation and feminist movements of the ’70s. How would you describe the changes that have taken place on these fronts since that era?
Carol Queen: Things have changed enormously. Many of the goals that we were talking about in 1975 have largely come to pass. People were talking seriously about gay marriage, gays in the military, the priesthood and the ministry. So the things that are wedge issues now did not first occur ten or twenty years ago. They were actively part of the discussion forty years ago. If I had been around for Daughters of Bilitis and the Mattachine Society, I would say sixty years ago. They have been part of our conversation all along. It was tempting to look at heterosexual people who got married and say: “we could do that.” Or we could explore sexual liberation. One thing I learned early on is that straight people of various stripes—the “straight but not narrow” people—also wanted to experience sexual liberation. It was there all along, with various issues coming to the fore at different times.
DEH: How have you seen feminism as affecting sex and culture for GLBT people?
CQ: One high-profile issue now is the whole bullying and “slut shaming” that we have, because we have to worry about how our young people are treated even after decades of change. We don’t take responsibility for sex education for our queer kids—or straight kids.
I think there’s a way in which the discourses of feminism did have an impact. You can look around and see older women whose lives were changed when feminism and the “sexual revolution” hit in the ’70s. But we have to figure out how to make that change earlier in life, so that it sets women’s whole life on a better trajectory. My interns, the young women who come to work at the Center, are all deeply touched by feminism and queer discourses that look familiar to us. But today gender and trans issues are integrated into the discourse. This is radically different from when we were younger. I think the question of gender is more profound than the marriage issue.
When kids get to college and into the work force, there is less opprobrium now than there used to be among people in that age range. But they all need support around sexuality. At this moment in time, it seems to me, the culture is more gendered, not transgendered, but gender-rigid, than it has been for a long time. There is a masculine–feminine divide that is extreme now, and we are seeing the ill effects of binary gender being acted out. For example, slut shaming and rape culture are deeply associated with this insistence that the sexes are truly “opposite.” Which, I might add, they are not.
On the other hand, today it is much easier for a young person to come out and find other people who are queer-identified. This of course is a result of how we get information from the Internet silos. We select information according to our interests and identities. There’s a downside to this self-selection—which implies excluding many possible avenues—but it does make it possible for young people to explore their budding sexuality. Linnea Due wrote a book about how LGBT kids are “joining the tribe”––and now it’s easier to find a “tribe” that meets their needs. Even twenty years ago she found Internet early adopters and noted how much easier it is to find other queer kids that way, especially for kids in the boonies. And now, of course, it’s the norm.
DEH: How are young women meeting each other now?
CQ: Young women might seek each other out in college or look on-line. There are a few Internet websites that are lesbian or mainstream where she can look for love, like Lesbotronic, Curve Personals (which is associated with Curve magazine) and OKCupid, which caters to people across orientations. Even Match.com advertises that it’s a good place for women to meet! Someone may also be one of those frisky young women who’s turned on by queer porn, such as movies made by Courtney Trouble, a woman who’s been making porn for about a decade. And, yes, lesbians do watch porn and can find each other through that interest. I don’t know of any brick-and-mortar women’s sex clubs, but in the Bay Area we still do have women’s sex parties.
If you are in a large enough city and you’re a queer woman and want to play publicly, or be identified with BDSM culture, you can find your girls to play with. Doubtless there are numerous scenes that I don’t even know about. The Internet can also foster play parties that are open to all genders and orientations. I have run into women who say there are various scenes around the Bay Area, but there’s been a bit of a cool-down around sexual exploration more recently. Things are more conservative now in a way, though the picture is mixed. One example: I was invited to be a consultant by a Russian bi guy who was creating an app like Grindr called Pure. He thought there should be an app for anybody to hook up whenever they wanted to. He wanted people of every orientation to use it. He thought women would flock to an app like this, and that men who found Grindr too conservative would too. He felt most men use Grindr now as a dating app rather than for hook-ups. I told him that the number of women who would use such an app was likely to be small—and this proved to be true. It is now a dating app.
DEH: What kinds of things are women buying these days in Good Vibrations?
CQ: Over the course of the last five years or so, we’ve seen a real rise in well-designed and beautiful vibrators. The days of the Magic Wand dominating are mostly gone. At one time, there were no other vibrators that came close to matching its quality. It’s still one of the most popular vibrators in the store, it still earns its reputation for queer women, and we still see young women coming in for their first one. But there are also other groovy choices now. One radical change in the toy world—one that lesbians will appreciate—is that instead of a dildo harness made out of leather, they’re also now m
aking them out of quality fabric similar to foundation garment fabric, so they are tight to the body and elastic, and they look nice. There are some femmy ones and some butch ones that are more comfortable and attractive.
Silicone dildos are still with us and are state-of-the-art—nothing better has been devised. It isn’t only lesbians who buy and use these kinds of toys, but many lesbians still like having access to them. Anal toys are bought pretty much by anybody who decides to experiment. After all, the anus is right there. There isn’t a new normal where all the queer women are doing anal play, but there are plenty who do. One thing that attracts people to the leather community is the opportunity to be more sexually exploratory. It isn’t only bondage or S/M that people seek out, but that’s the easiest place to find the frisky anal-positive women.
DEH: Do heterosexual people come into the store?
CQ: Oh, sure, including married ones. Anyone who thinks that getting married means that you aren’t sexually adventurous or wild hasn’t looked into it. Many people have their most adventurous sex with just one partner. We have to watch our assumptions. For instance, in the 1970s we defined gay people as sexually liberated but assumed that straight people weren’t as adventurous. By the same token, today when we see queer couples getting married, we may see it as conventional, but we don’t know what’s going on in their relationship. Marriage covers up the question of how sexually adventurous those people are. It isn’t either/or.
I think we live in a moment in which almost any of us can at least aspire to a married life that has something in common with the married life aspirations of anyone else around us. It won’t be the same until there is marriage equality everywhere. If anyone lives in a state with marriage equality, we see that many of us so deeply want that kind of life. But that doesn’t mean that anybody who gets married, queer or not, might not have an open relationship. There are many more people identifying as “poly” or open across orientations.
DEH: Let me ask you a little about yourself. How did you become an advocate for sexual freedom, and how did that eventually lead you to Good Vibrations?
CQ: In the 1970s, when I came out at the University of Oregon, I started an LGBT group on campus that included high school and college boys. It was supposed to be LGBT, but kids with other sexuality issues came as well. So in some ways it resembled the gay-straight alliances we saw later on. This was during the Anita Bryant years. I was director of the campus LGBT organization in Eugene, Oregon, which was one of the cities that had its non-discrimination (on the basis of sexual orientation) ordinance overturned. Ours was Measure 51, and this all went down in 1978, just a few months before Harvey Milk was assassinated. If you think the politics of marriage equality today is intense, you should have been around for all this!
For readers who only know the marriage equality years, this a time when marriage equality––ever––was by no means a foregone conclusion. We had to go door to door for a referendum on LGBT lives. The issue on the ballot was whether our neighbors would vote city protections on jobs and housing off the books, leaving us unprotected again. It was an extremely important moment for me, thinking about sexuality and learning to speak to a range of people. Just a few years later, I was a founder of the Willamette AIDS Council: AIDS was the other life event that shaped my work the most. I was finishing up my degree in sociology and had to figure out what to do next, and I found out about the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco. They offered a masters and doctorate in sexology, so I resolved that instead of getting a masters in public health, that’s what I would do.
Living in San Francisco, I took a crash course in the city’s sexual culture. Thus I was studying sexology by day and exploring the sex-inflected communities by night. This was around 1987, and there was a lot going on. There were still dyke burlesque shows; the S/M world was vibrant. I got in on the first Jack and Jill Jack Off parties. It was then that I met Joani Blank, who invited me to work at Good Vibrations. And the rest is history.
DEH: Is there anything else that you’d like to add?
CQ: I do want to say that a fair amount of the queer and sex community discourse at the moment is a little ahistorical to me. I see many younger queer people coming up and coming out and taking it for granted. They aren’t all that curious as to how we got here. I would like to remind queer-identified people across the spectrum of younger generations that it’s valuable to understand the discourses and fights of the past, because there has been so much important work done, so many important people contributing their energies. The Internet goes forward easier than it goes backward. You can learn things on the Internet, but the depth of knowledge on our past is harder to find. We are always in danger of our history being eradicated. I want young and old to remember that if we don’t learn to appreciate our history, we run the risk of losing much of what we’ve gained.
Diane Hamer is a writer and activist based in the Boston area.
