By M.Christian

YNOT – Carol Queen is the expert’s expert: writer, editor, educator, activist and much more. Sporting a PhD in sexology, Queen has worked for Good Vibrations since 1990 and is the founding director of the Center for Sex & Culture, a non-profit sex education and arts center in San Francisco. Her dozen books include Lambda Literary Award winner PoMoSexuals and Real Live Nude Girl: Chronicles of Sex-Positive Culture. Both are used as college textbooks.

YNOT sat down to chat with her.

YNOT: Can you give us a little background about the Center for Sex & Culture — where it’s been and where it’s going?

Carol Queen: CSC has been a nonprofit for more than 10 years, and we have had an actual space since 2004. I started it with my partner, Robert Morgan Lawrence, after conversations with Betty Dodson in which she said “you kids should start a place.” She meant a space where sex workshops could be hosted, since at that time there was no one place like that in San Francisco — or, of course, pretty much anyplace else. We realized that because we had a real breadth of connections and contacts in communities across the sexualities spectrum, that we perhaps were the people to initiate such a project. All these years later, the center does host workshops, all right, but also encompasses a library, archive and gallery; hosts discussions, panels and salons, and features cultural events on a regular basis, like readings, performances, etc. I feel strongly that the arts have a place in broad-based sex education.

In future, we’d like to be able to have paid staff — right now it is a labor of love and community-building — and we’re beginning to fundraise to that end. And we really want to develop an online presence with our events, for streaming and both free and pay-per-view offerings. We really want to bring more of what the Center for Sex & Culture has to offer to people outside the SF Bay Area.

What recent changes have you seen in the world of sex and sexuality, especially considering the anti-sex and anti-gay rhetoric coming from conservatives?

Well, in a way, it’s the same as ever. Many people are living their lives, and others are freaking out about it. I really am struck by how much sexually conservative issues and ideas are part of the Republican primary campaign. I mean, contraception? Do people in the U.S. understand what life would be like without access to legal contraception? I guess some do see that as a way to travel back in time. But for all that, there are such positive things, especially in the fight against homophobia and for LGBT rights: the It Gets Better campaign, marriage equality and so forth. I am not pro-marriage, but if heterosexuals can get married, I see no reason to restrict that ability.

The issue I think most vital today is sex education, and some positive moves have been happening. Of course, U.S. sex ed is so terrible that incremental change does not get us where we need to go. I really believe conservative policies and bad sex education are linked, and making sure our youth don’t know a lot makes it far easier for conservative manipulation to happen. This is why continued internet access and privacy and good-quality material on the net is so vital. At least some people go out to learn things on their own, and increasingly they connect to information and communities online.

What do you consider to be the next sexual rights battlefield, and how can adult business respond?

I believe we are entering a new phase of the anti-porn wars, where we will both need to be able to articulate the ways people should be able legally to access adult fantasy materials and also make sure someone is making diverse porn and porn of good quality. The more people find adult entertainment that speaks to them and does not insult their intelligence or sense of their own sexuality, the greater ability advocates will have to stop attacks against adult material. It’d be a good idea if there were more safer-sex porn, too — not because it’s required or mandated, but made by people who want to normalize and inform. I am so angry to see [AIDS Healthcare Foundation President Michael] Weinstein represent that porn documents people giving each other STDs. Having obvious images where performers show how hot safer sex can be would be one antidote, among others, to this sort of misrepresentation.

Cultural conservatives clearly also have been riled up, and business owners can help by voting with their checkbooks — making sure the more progressive candidates on sexual issues have the resources they need, supporting organizations that work for a sexually open culture and good sex education. As these conservative times attest, it is hardly possible to have one without the other. And don’t forget the way sex-positive feminist organizations help make it clear that women, too, are consumers and producers of erotic entertainment, making the playing field wider and the range of allies larger.

In your opinion, how has the world of adult entertainment changed? Is this for the better?

I see real developments in awareness about diversity — women’s, trans, queer erotica and many more examples — but I have to say I think as it has become easier to sell porn, the bar often has been set very low. I’m about to do an interview that will be included on the DVD re-release of a title from the Golden Age of Porn, and it is so interesting to me — and not in a completely good way — that the very best of contemporary creativity is often put toward making porn parodies of pop-culture shows and movies. In the 1970s, some, though by no means all, pornographers believed the world was changing in a direction that would embrace explicit media. It did, but not in the way people imagined. I’m not sure there is as much room for creative dreamers now, or as much money to support such projects.

Between quick-and-dirty gonzo and wall-to-wall sex titles — both legacies of the old loop sex films — and a business model changing all the time to take advantage of opportunities and avoid threats like piracy, it is somewhat less easy now to describe pornography as a liberating, creative force. But this is just one historical moment, a particular moment in our economy and our technological history. If we know anything, we know there is always an interest in sexual media, and as new technologies develop, adult entertainment will morph along with them.

What do you see as the future of erotica and adult entertainment?

Eventually? A true interface that will allow us to feel that we are in the movie, or whatever we’ll call the medium then. As the winner of Good Vibrations’ Millennium Sex Toy You Wish Existed Contest described it, a way to record not just images associated with a sex act, but the sensations themselves.

Sometime in the next century, the brain tech will catch up to this idea, I am sure. But there will be decades of ups and downs as the culture wars continue to play out. Some people think we are experiencing the last gasp of the culture wars now. I was just at Yale, where their Sex Week was almost banned and canceled because some students were so upset about porn’s “influence” on past Sex Weeks. By that, they meant both sponsorship by sex-toy purveyors and condom and lube companies and also visits by porn performers. I have to say we should all be taking this pretty seriously. When young people are anti-porn enough to organize against another group of sex-positive students, we are not, my friends, out of the woods yet.

Carol Queen has a PhD in sexology. She calls herself a “cultural sexologist” because, while her undergraduate degree is in sociology, when she addresses individual issues and couples’ sexual concerns, her overarching interest is in cultural issues (gender, shame, access to education, etc.).

Queen blogs at Good Vibes Magazine and at SFGate’s City Brights bloggers page. For more information, visit CarolQueen.com.