Center for Sex and Culture

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Sex-positive, a term that’s coming into cultural awareness, isn’t a dippy love-child celebration of orgone – it’s a simple yet radical affirmation that we each grow our own passions on a different medium, that instead of having two or three or even half a dozen sexual orientations, we should be thinking in terms of millions. “Sex-positive” respects each of our unique sexual profiles, even as we acknowledge that some of us have been damaged by a culture that tries to eradicate sexual difference and possibility.

Carol Queen (via thelastexistence)

Reblogged from The Eternal I

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Interview with Carol Queen at the Center for Sex & Culture

Center for Sex & Culture intern Marilyn Roxie interviewed Carol Queen, author, sexologist, and founder of the Center, in March 2011 for an LGBT American History class assignment. Here now are the contents of the interview, ranging from youth group organization in the ’70s to sex-positivity, from her involvement with Good Vibrations to the founding for the Center for Sex & Culture, plus a guest appearance from her partner, Robert Morgan Lawrence!:

Marilyn Roxie: In the ‘70s, you had founded a gay youth organization and I wanted to know what was the process for starting that out and how did you get going on that?

Carol Queen: Well, in 1975, actually 1974, I was 17 and I started college a year early, and I wanted to go to college and come out. I was already bi-identified and really there was nothing for me to connect with in my small mountain town that I grew up in Oregon, except figuring out who the gay teachers were and trying to get them to give me support and that, then as now, is dicey because teachers are often a little fearful of reaching out to queer kids. So, I mean I did get some support, but I went to college, and at college it turned out, not only was the bisexuality part a little challenging to people, but, I was too young to go to the bar, which is where all the other people really came together and connected. The bar scene, this was in Eugene, Oregon in the ‘70s, and it was not the only LGBT space in town, but it was almost the only LGBT space.

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To combat the “cosmic aloneness” that is integral to being human, that aching awareness that no one can truly share your experience (paralleling the koan that one can never stand in the same river twice; the water that made up the river at that moment is forever gone once the moment has passed), we form communities and subcommunities grouped around shared history and interests, links of family and ethnicity, religion and sexuality, anything which makes us feel more connected to others and less alone.

PoMoSexuals (Introduction by Carol Queen and Lawrence Schimel)

Reblogged from Veggie Kevin Tales