| Interview w/
Carol Queen by tinA butcheR |
| Published on
02/12/05 at 19:36:40 PST by Admin |
Carol Queen Ph.D., profound revolutionary
writer on sexual behavior, erotic smut, sex educator for
Good Vibrations sex shop, and mastermind behind the annual
masturbate-a-thon in celebration of May as National
Masturbation Month.
Carol has written such books as "Leather
Daddies", "Exhibitionism for the Shy",
"Pomosexuals", and "Real Live Nude
Girl".
I've had the pleasure of sharing the stage with her at
erotica smut readings and the set with her in the
educational erotica on g spot education by Sex Positive
Productions, "G Marks the Spot". This evening I
had the pleasure of spending several hours in Carol's
humble San Franciscan abode and the home to The Center for
Sex & Culture, chatting about health care for sex
workers, sexual binaries, and sex positive feminism. This
woman makes my head spin, in the most fabulous way
possible, and I hope she does the same for yours. www.carolqueen.com
Tina: Helloooo Carol
Carol: Hellooo
Tina: How are you?
Carol: I'm fine, thank you.
Tina: So you just hosted St. James huge party at
DNA?
Carol: Yeah
Tina: How was that?
Carol: That was fun. It was an enormous show. The
DNA is a pretty big club and they have really been around
for a long time sort of affiliated with the sex community
doing shows for at least ten years.
Tina: Really?
Carol: The night was extremely hot in both senses.
It was a really hot show. Of course a lot of people were
dressed as "naughty nursies".... cuz that was
the theme. And many people were not dressed as nursies,
but were dressed naughty. That was very fun and very
festive. It was about 90 degrees in there. People were
sweating like pigs. It was like the sex sauna performance
art night and the first half of the show were bands,
mostly,.. umm except for a dance performance from Miss
Sharon Mitchell, who came from the AIM clinic in Southern
California. Then the second half was all performers and we
only hosted the first half. We were the tired old whores,
was what I said. Then there were the fresher more
energetic whores for you later, to carry you on till the 2
AM hour, so that we can go home and go to bed .
Tina: Were you dressed as a nurse?
Carol: No. I was going to put on my pink corset,
but it was too fuckin' hot to wear my pink corset.
Tina: Did you go naked?
Carol: It was a bar sooo.. you can't go naked.
Because they get all freaked out about it. So I just wore
a bra and a latex skirt. Which it's a super cute skirt
except latex and heat are amazing. It was like being in
the weight loss sauna. It was really something. I was
sweating all night.
Tina: Yeah. I perform a lot in saran wrap.
Carol: Same deal. So St. James Infirmary, which is
what the performance benefited, is an occupational health
and safety clinic for sex workers. Current, former, and
perhaps future, but mostly the people who both volunteer
there and who utilize the space are current and former
prostitutes and strippers, porn performers, and models.
you name it umm... they're not restrictive about their
definition of sex worker or if you feel like that's what
you are they're not going to turn you away at St. James.
It's named after Margot St. James, who founded COYOTE in
the early 1970s. She'd been a sex worker/activist even as
far back as the 60s. But she founded this support and umm
consciousness raising organization, Call Off Your Old
Tired Ethics. I think it was 1973. But certainly health
and safety is such a major issue almost everyone is self
employed or in a context where they don't get any employer
provided health insurance. If a sex worker, whether
self-employed or not, has some sort of a physical problem
there goes their income. So.. it's a wonderful wellness
clinic. They do HIV/sexually transmitted disease tests
there, but they do so much more. They do massage, stress
counseling..
Tina: Reiki.
Carol: Reiki, chiropractic, all kinds of stuff,
basically any kind of health issue that someone has they
can start at least at the infirmary.
Tina: How long have they been around?
Carol: They have been around for four years. This
was their fourth birthday party.
Tina: OK
Carol: And the other person who is really
instrumental sort of philosophically in starting the
clinic. She's not here and she's not running it, but
another prostitute activist who hasn't been a prostitute,
but has been very very involved in prostitute rights for
over 20 years is Pricilla Alexander. Who worked with
Margot in COYOTE. She sort of took things over when Margot
ran away to France. She went and worked at the UN and
World Health Organization on HIV issues globally for
prostitutes and then went and got her degree in New York
and talked about OSHA type issues for sex workers. People
laugh at that at first, but it's like, well, you know any
kind of work has its own unique stresses. And its own
unique set of circumstances. Whatever lens you want to
look through. And just because its a little bit new for
American's to think of sex work as work doesn't mean that
the stripper doesn't have to worry about falling off the
stage and breaking her ankle. Robert my partner, used to
be a chiropractor and we joke that he was the chiropractor
you could tell how you really hurt your back. He had a
heavily loaded sex industry practice just through who we
knew, high heeled shoes and low back problems, mistresses
elbow, which is much like tennis elbow, but a little
different. I, at the Lusty Lady, used to go back and
balance on my head and do all of these wiggly things. So I
was on a three point stand of my head, my butt, and my
high heels, very bad for your back. Thank God Robert's a
chiropractor or I would be paralyzed by now. Every
sexually active woman practically has probably had the
experience, much less sex workers, of going to a doctor
and having them just be bone headed. They assume she needs
birth control, but she's really a lesbian or whatever and
to be able to have a place to go for care where all that
stuff isn't a loaded conversation. And you don't have to
take it upon yourself to educate your provider, who
supposedly is the professional your paying big money to or
the insurance company, if your lucky enough to have it.
All of that is just so radical about the Infirmary. And ps..
let me tell you what the AIM clinic is. The AIM clinic is
the Southern California sister of the Infirmary. Founded
by Miss Sharon Mitchell, who is a huge mondo-famo
fantastic porn star. Her biggest decade was the 80s and
she's just an extremely beloved person in the adult
industry. She looked around at the HIV situation and the
fact that many of the heterosexual porn companies weren't
even requiring condoms. She just galvanized into action,
got a grant, and started to provide HIV counseling,
testing, other sexually transmitted disease counseling,
testing and ultimately more services for adult performers
and other sex workers. So she's in the LA area, in the
valley, where most of the porn is made. They go out and do
HIV testing on the street practically. I was in LA last
month for the grand opening of Grand Opening, a women's
sex shop that's also in Boston and now in West Hollywood.
And I walked to the back of the store and there was Sharon
Mitchell in a closet, with her needles, and she was doing
HIV blood draw. She was doing testing.
Tina: That's awesome.
Carol: On site at this party and she's like yeah
we'll take em' back to the lab and see if every bodies
doing' ok. It's a great great thing. And you know the
adult industry, the sex worker movement in general, I mean
its come to this basically, "Well what can we
do?". We have to take care of ourselves. Other people
are not going to take on our responsibility.
Tina: A lot of clinics are providing affordable or
free health care, but its still just as awkward to talk to
them about sex work, even if your a pin-up model or
dominatrix.
Carol: And they may be really uneducated.
Tina: And they look at you differently.
Carol: I once went to city clinic when I was doing
active prostitution and the doctor asked me how many sex
partners I had, she looked up and very calmly said
"Are you a sex worker?". I said,
"Yeah" and we just talked as though it was the
most normal thing. Then she sent me over to this specific
guy in this little room to talk about HIV issues because
it was like mandated that you talk to a separate person
and he tweaked, I said, " Look, yes it's your job to
be concerned about my number of sex partners, ok.. but
before you tweak at me, ask me what my practices are like.
You know you could have found out that I was a sex worker
and assumed that I was having full on intercourse with
everyone and I could have been a hand job giver, come on?
Ask me a couple of explicit questions at least before you
go off on me". If this is the quality of health care,
at least this bad or worse for many people, its no wonder
people might avoid taking care of themselves. How can you
not take care of yourself? You know? Who is going to take
care of you? Nobody but you. I went every four months and
got a battery of STD tests. I was using condoms very
safely, but I just thought well you know.. just like I did
that when I was a sexually active college student. The
health center was right over there and it was easy to do.
I think one of the barriers to health care is whether
there is anything around. It's easy to get to. If it's
easy to get to, that's the other thing about the
Infirmary. It's a pretty accessible location. It's open in
the evening. There are a lot of things that make it more
accessible.
Tina: I want to ask you about this cuz ...I'm
reading "Cunt" right now. And have you read this
book?
Carol: I haven't read it all the way through. I've
read part of it, but not the whole thing.
Tina: The author refers to "Real Live Nude
Girl". I've told you this before .. that book just
thinking about it makes me cry.
Carol: Sweetheart.
Tina: It really means so much to me and to so many
people. I've seen people come up to you and thank you for
writing that book. And I mean....its so great to have
those words out there, on paper, and to know that it's all
right, what you are feeling and thinking and doing. To
know that you have the right to enjoy your body and to
enjoy pleasure and your own personal fetishes, it's
beautiful. I want to thank you for having the guts to do
that and put it out there.
Carol: Thank you Tina.
Tina: Do you get that a lot about that book? When
did you first put it out?
Carol: The book came out. I think it was first in
1998. It had been in the works for a really long time. The
oldest piece in the book is also published in the
anthology "Bi Any Other Name". Which came out in
like 1989, which is like way back in the 20th century. So,
basically it was a collection of essays that I had done
for other anthologies or just that I had published in
Spectator, then I fleshed out and added a little more
academic spin to or just more contemplation and made it
longer. The whole thing itself was really in the works for
all of the 90s. I mean it really ties the 90's up in a
package. Sort of puts out in the world what I learned.
Through all the different communities I examined and all
the adventures I ended up having and so forth and I really
had to put it together with the "Leather
Daddies" to get the full vision of what I was
thinking. And it hasn't ever been out of print, but it
just got its 5th year reprinting this spring sooo....it
made its way to colleges, cultural studies, queer studies,
sexuality classes, especially some on anthropological,
sociological perspectives. Certainly not into the
sciences, but we'll take on the science w/ Robert. Take
that on next, but umm but in terms of what I get back..
Yeah.. and there's so much that's diverse in that book in
terms of orientation and experience and stuff that um
different people really get different things from it.
Partly I wrote those things because the few circumstances
when I got reflected back on me from a book, in the 70s or
80s, that whatever I was wanting or doing was ok, was a
rare situation. Those were somewhat restrictive decades.
Certainly as a dyke feminist, which is how I identified
for a lot of that time, there was not a whole lot of
"Ohhh kick your heels up, go try everything swing
from the chandelier". That just wasn't part of the
discourse .. right? It's more like you can't really be
sexual. You can't really be a lesbian if your going to do
this. This whole point of view really came to permeate
what people thought of as the feminist view on sexuality.
And of course for that minute there ..1990.. 91' I was
running around being all cheeky calling myself "post
feminist". Then I got into this conversation with the
great Carol Vance, who is a professor of anthropology and
she was there all through the feminist sex wars. She's
brilliant and she said "Don't you dare let them have
the word feminist. Don't you dare give that to them."
"Fuck you're so right. You're so so right". So
my post feminist moment was over and I'm back to being
"I'm a feminist" and by that time there had
grown enough of a community sort of around sex positive
feminism that it wasn't hard to identify that way at all.
There weren't very many writers. Increasingly through the
eighties Carol Vance started to publish her stuff.
Tina: Who did you look to for support?
Carol: Well Pat( Pat Califia) was really one of my
heroes from a pretty early time. I had found Pat's book on
lesbian sex in the late 70's that she published and Lord
knows how I found it. Pat was like, "There's the
world. What parts of it are you gonna play with?" and
that Pat had such a journey himself I don't think that
it's at all surprising given how far Pat herself stuck her
neck out back in the day. So, that was my biggest hero.
And for a long time one of the only people that I knew
about especially in lesbian context. It wasn't until I
moved to San Francisco and started to do my doctorate
program in sexology that I really got to meet and find out
about and delve into the work of people who are also real
colleagues and influences, of course Annie Sprinkle, Susie
Bright.
Actually the people who were the most important to me way
back when, were the gay men and their leaders. In my
world, the only people who talked frankly about sex at
all, were gay men. They were the ones you could just dish
with and that was the community of people with whom I
worked politically and socially, that made it ok for me to
open my mouth and let possibly outrageous stuff come out.
Eugene, Oregon is where I came from before here, you know
I was the weird girl who talked about sex too much? I was
always that person who would talk more and more openly,
making other people blush.
Tina: Lets talk about being bisexual and what that
means in San Francisco.
Carol: Or if you simply don't care or prioritize
sexual identity labels, which in some ways, that's the new
radical.
Tina: I've been saying "sexual".
Carol: Yeah. I know people who have said human
sexual. Where does that leave my Hitachi Magic Wand?
That's obviously not going to do. I've written a lot about
bi-sexuality and I'm certainly a member of sort of the
bi-sexual community, bi writers, thinkers, activists,
whatever, and at the same time I have a critique of it
which is that .. well let me start by saying...of course
there was a time if you were bi behaving or identified umm
you were shunned. I mean there are still places where
that's still very actively true and so talking about and
raising the profile on bi- ness is important and still is.
It's certainly not true that people who are bi-sexual are
always you know on short or long journeys from one side of
the Kinsey scale to the other. There not all straight
trying to be gay or gay trying to be straight or whatever
it is. So the whole set of problematic understandings of
bi-sexuality is an unstable space for whatever. I just
like to say whose confused are the people who can't
imagine desiring both females and males and that confuses
them, so they immediately put it on to bi-sexuals. But the
thing that I think is important to say is that at this
point in sexual and cultural history I don't think there
are only females and males. And that's where the possible
problem with bi identity is to me. I don't want the
trueness of what is implied by bi-sexuality to limit the
way people understand and experience the world. And I
don't want it to reinforce any prejudices. And I don't
want it to imply that it an either or thing /either or
both thing. It's not a both and it's a both, as far as I'm
concerned. Because I certainly know plenty of people who
identify all kinds of stages on the gender scale and in
some cases off the scale all together. This culture deeply
deeply deeply wants to reduce things to binary. And
binaries are useful, they're also rather simplistic. And
there not terribly helpful especially if you don't live on
one end or the other. Or the people that your attracted to
or sort of belong to on some level don't live on one end
or the other. So when I say bi-sexual, what I mean is
pan-sexual. I mean multi-sexual. And I understand and I
respect that for some people it does mean bi-sexual. And
for them there are only attractions to females and to
males. And anybody who has any sexuality, I want to find a
way to respect it or as long as they have figured out a
way to have it consensually. It's not that I want to turn
around and horrang people who aren't critical of this
binary, but I definitely want to put it out there that it
might be a good moment in history to be critical of that
binary. And the thing that the bi intelligencia have done
that I like the very best is the notion of mono-sexuality.
It's the idea that there are some people who are bi or
multisexual, however you want to phrase that, and then
there are people who are only have one set of gender
presentation that they find attractive just one. It
doesn't matter if its males or females or whatever but
there's only one. And those people really don't get it
about loving or desiring more than one. It's just not part
of their reality. Not that they can't respect people who
do necessarily. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes they're
fine. But they don't feel that themselves. So they're not
in the "everybody's really bisexual" category
that people sometimes say. Yeahhhhhhh.... I've met a bunch
of fags that I've tried to fuck and they wouldn't. So
actually, I don't think everybody is really bi-sexual.
Maybe it was just me but..
Tina: Do you think that a lot of that has to do
with the way that we are raised ?
Carol: Absolutely.
Tina: If we listened more to our bodies and less to
what is ingrained upon us...
Carol: There are plenty of people who swear that
they were born a particular way that its genetic for them.
There is no movement, never mind desire. I have to hear
them and respect what they say. That the degree that they
have looked inside themselves, they understand themselves
as mono-sexual and that's all there is to it, period, end
of story. And I find it not helpful to try needle those
people. If a space in there life hasn't opened to make
that possible for them especially in San Francisco, if
anybody's going to find a place to be whatever they want
to be, probably they could find some support for it here.
So I'm willing to believe what they say. At least
provisionally. Until we find this utopia place where we
can all get retrained and figure out whether or not that
will change. But where is that? I mean it's like its a
sexual reeducation camp except we're still in the United
States. And this is an enormously gendered culture. And
our queer communities are still enormously gendered, even
though there was one second in the 1970s where we all
pretended by now we wouldn't be anymore, but that didn't
work out. Somebody dropped the ball somewhere or else it
wasn't possible. I'm not sure which, but I do agree with
you that in a culture where gender was not so profoundly
binary and so profoundly required, regimented, you gotta
pick one: orientation, identity, gender, the whole deal
pick one stay there. In a culture that chose some other
thing to mark difference or that didn't choose to mark
difference(what a concept?). What would that look like? I
don't even know. That's what the science fiction writers
are for. I can't even wrap my brain around that and I
think.. I think about these things more than the average
person. So yeah maybe in a utopia that statement would be
true but its not true here. And utopia is closer in some
parts of our world than others. You know if somebody
proves a genetic link to something somewhere down the road
which in my view has not been proven yet, no matter what
some of those folks say. Then I'll go "Wow that's
really fascinating. How bout that?", and I'll really
want to look at there study, make sure they did it right.
But I'm not sure that that will be true for everyone or
there's a genetic setting that says ok this one is going
to be open to all erotic experience. You know we're
getting into social science concepts a little too much to
make the science people anything but nervous. You know?
It's almost as though we haven't found a way to make those
two ways of understanding a reality. And both things are
part of our reality as sexual people we are biological
creatures. We do have hormones. |
Original Link: http://www.feminapotens.com/cgi-bin/index.cgi?action=viewnews&id=15
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