As part of Sexual Health Week, San Francisco-based activist Carol Queen will speak today at 8 p.m. in Grainger Hall. Queen is an author, advice columnist and owner of Good Vibrations, a female-owned sex toy and book emporium in San Francisco. The Daily Cardinal recently spoke with Queen about her work and views on sex and culture.
The Daily Cardinal: What led you to this kind of career?
Carol Queen: Well, um, long story short, I, in looking at my family when I was a kid, was really conscious that there was some sort of issue, something wrong, with what was going on with my mom and dad. It turned out that I found out ... from my mom that she had been sexually abused when she was a girl, and she had never had any support. And he had never had any way of understanding why he couldn't connect with the woman that he loved and had married the way he believed he should be able to do... By the time I was a teenager, I was like, whatever was going on there, I'm not going to be like that, I'm going to be a sexually free individual and so my sexual trajectory was so different that ultimately the sort of dissonance between the two led me into wanting to do sexual education professionally.
DC: What kind of stigma do you try to combat in all your talks and writing and all your work?
CQ: Well, I think there are a couple of stigmas about sexuality in this culture. I think that ... sex is acknowledged by much of the majority culture as interesting to people, certainly interesting enough to have people buy consumer products, but true access to sex information for example in public schools is worse than it was 25 or 30 years ago. And that's a scandal; that's just awful. ... The other thing that I think is extremely important is that sexual diversity and variation, while more openly discussed than it was then, is still not well understood.
DC: Are you going to talk about those kinds of issues when you come here?
CQ: Yeah. I'm going to talk about thinking about sex positivity and, of course, something about its corollary, sexual negitivity and sexual diversity issues... I think people from sort of all places in the sexual spectrum will be able to relate or at least be intrigued by what I have to say.
DC: Is there anything else that you wanted to add?
CQ: Yeah. Just that I've been to Madison before and had a really delightful time doing workshops and readings at A Woman's Touch [600 Williamson St.] and I'm going to be glad to be back. And this time ... I'm also doing, um, a solo show, Peep Show, which is sort of a spoken word storytelling evening about one of my most interesting jobs ever, which was working at a peep show, which is something I did about 13 years ago. So I'm looking forward to the opportunity to sort of take people behind the scenes to sort of a place that people never visit and sort of unpack sexual politics and sex and culture issues and of course sex industry issues from that venue.
