Carol Queen: Real Live Nude Girl? a Feature by alice (alice ) Carol Queen, author of Real Live Nude Girl: Chronicles of a Sex-Positive Culture, avoids the hype and talks frankly about the sex industry. JB: As you are not yet terribly well known here in Australia I was wondering if you would like to start off by briefly describing yourself? What are you interested in, what do you do and how do you think about yourself? (ie insert what ever you would like to say about yourself here :-) CQ: I'm a writer and cultural sexologist, almost finished with my doctorate. I've written scores of stories and essays and authored or edited several books:Exhibitionism for the Shy, Real Live Nude Girl: Chronicles of Sex-Positive Culture, The Leather Daddy and the Femme(my first erotic novel, coming this spring), Switch Hitters: Lesbians Write Gay Male Erotica and Gay Men Write Lesbian Erotica and PoMoSexuals: Challenging Assumptions about Gender and Sexuality (both co-edited with Lawrence Schimel) and Sex Spoken Here: Stories from the Good Vibrations Erotic Reading Circle (co-edited with Jack Davis). I've been involved in several explicit videos too, notably Carol Queen's Great Vibrations: An Explicit Consumer Tour of Vibrators, How to Female Ejaculate and Bend Over Boyfriend which will be done this month and which is about anal play for male female couples. I live and work in San Francisco, and in addition to my writing and teaching projects, I'm also the director of continuing education at Good Vibrations, the women-owned, worker-owned sex shop. Lately too, I've been working on a solo performance piece, Peep Show. My passion is for sex as an issue and a cultural question, not only as a physical/emotional act - though I'm quite passionate about that as well, naturally! To me, sex is anything but monolithic. It's incredibly diverse and always fascinating. I'll soon have a web page up at http://www.carolqueen.com - I hope readers will come visit it. I live with my partner Robert and two cats, Teacup and Bracelet, and we share our lives with various friends and lovers. When I'm not working I read, do art and haunt old bookstores and antique shops. JB: In your book Real Live Nude Girl you refer to a variety of sex work that you have done over the course of your life, including stripping, prostitution, performing in a peep show and working at a sex shop. Are you still working in the sex industry, and if so, in what capacity? CQ: I began doing sex work a bit late in life, over the age of thirty. When I worked at the peeps I was the oldest woman there, and I was only thirty-two! I'm forty now and still occasionally see one of my old clients, though it's been years since I've seen anyone new - prostitution isn't a sideline that combines well with a very busy life, which I now have, and for that reason my whoring days are largely past. I still work at the sex shop - Good Vibrations - though not always behind the counter - I help out with PR and marketing now and of course with staff education, a job I've had there for years. Also, I see my performance as a variety of sex industry work - it involves sexual depictions and nudity - and I also still make explicit videos from time to time. JB: How do you feel about this part of your work? (How does it make you feel about yourself, and your clients?) CQ: Sex work is an intense kind of work - besides any physical contact it might involve, as with prostitution, there is often sort of an emotional miasma of confusion, desire, fantasy, discomfort, ignorance. Each kind of sex work is different and burn-out issues can be very diverse. In general, I got a lot out of doing sex work: it has encouraged me to learn more about my own sexuality and my own issues and boundaries; it has given me an enhanced sense of attractiveness and let me get in touch with the fun of roleplay and costuming and discover my great pleasure in exhibitionism; and since I am fascinated by sexuality, it has been a sort of laboratory arena for me. I feel mostly a lot of compassion (and often affection) for my clients/customers - many people think sex work must be cold and anonymous, but that hasn't usually been my experience - but I have certainly felt affected by different customers' notions about me. It has served me best to be as fully myself as possible, not to hide most of me away behind a persona. I also think it served me well to begin doing sex work when I was a little older. I'm not sure I would have had a positive experience if I'd begun when my sexuality was less fully formed and 'mine'. I often miss doing sex work, which I did as my main occupation for about three or four years. But I found that as I got busier with my other work, it became ever harder to have the emotional energy for whoring or peep show work. For me it works to have plenty of space around seeing a client or going to do a shift at the peep show and plenty of time off in general. I no longer have that luxury. When I began, I had plenty of down time, which I used for writing and social time. I was able to take care of myself well because I had the free time not to get stressed. JB: It seems from reading Real Live Nude Girl that it was very much your own choice to get into the sex industry; what were your reasons? CQ: I was curious about it: I was emerging back into bisexuality from a decade identifying as a lesbian, and I began to realize I didn't know much about male sexuality. Sex work let me observe and interact with lots of men. I was curious about the life and about my own responses as well. Also, I was broke - almost always the #1 reason for entering the sex industry! That fact transformed vague curiosity into resolve to try it out. Once I had done one kind of sex work (I started with prostitution) it was easier to check out others. I know that isn't everyone's experience, but it was mine, perhaps because I started with the 'scariest' thing first, felt I was successful at it and then decided to broaden my base. I should add that part of my curiosity came from having heard through feminist theory how downtrodden sex workers were - then I met a couple of whores who were strong, well-spoken women. I began to wonder about how right on the theory was, and that was an impulse as well. It probably won't surprise you to hear me say that I found the sex industry to be a much more diverse place than it is usually depicted, and the people in it expressing a great range of attitude and experience. JB: Did you aspire to being a sex worker when you were young? I don't so much mean did you actually think you could/would be, but did you think of it as something that appealed to you? CQ: In a way, yes. I remember having fantasies about having that kind of sexual appeal and power. Later, influenced by '70s-era feminism, I gave up those notions - only to remember them later, after I began to do sex work. I was an oddball as a kid, bookish, too bright to fit in well and shy - I was very interested in sex yet not popular. As an adult I'd had many more chances to explore my sexuality, but sex work was one place I could really let my hair down. It's the one place where sex is the central thing. JB: In the City/State in which you live and work, what are the legal lines drawn in the sex industry? (ie Is stripping legal but not prostitution, brothels but not 'street walking', etc?) CQ: Prostitution in any context is illegal; that means any genital, sexual contact with the exchange of money. Stripping is legal (pasties and g-string must be worn if alcohol is served in the club); professional S/M is in a grey area but generally considered legal - at least it is rarely prosecuted, since S/M does not (or need not) focus on genital sex. In general, street walkers are arrested more than anyone, and 'call girls' are mostly left alone. Masseuers are not supposed to give hand jobs but they do anyway; they are licensed and are rarely arrested. Prostitution is a misdemeanor, not a felony, unless the prostitute is HIV-positive (this is true no matter what sort of sex s/he provides - even hand jobs are a felony if the pro is HIV+). Madams and anyone else profiting from prostitution are subject to felony arrest, though. In practice this means I have committed a lesser crime having sex with a client than the madam did who made the phone call to refer him to me. Arrests go up before elections or if local politicians are trying to divert the public's attention away from something else. The only legalized prostitution in the US is in several counties in Nevada, the ones with the smallest population. San Francisco has considered legalization, but it is not on the near horizon. JB: How do you think that these laws effect sex workers? (I am just as interested to hear what you have to say about the effects of both legal sex work and illegal - so please answer this question regardless of the answer to the last.) CQ: Obviously they make it very hard on HIV+ prostitutes. In general, that prostitution is illegal makes the work less safe and it means that it is difficult to form trade associations or do professional development or training (this is criminalized too). It tends to make legal workers like strippers emphasize their separation from whores, so sex workers do not as effectively stick together. That our work is illegal is demoralizing too, and makes it harder for people to come out, to get support and to alert each other about bad tricks. In the legal businesses - strip clubs and peep shows - workers are beginning to unionize, although the 'straight' union movement in the US has very mixed feelings about embracing these workers. I should add that some prostitutes are glad that their work is illegal - they feel that it keeps down competition and keeps prices higher. JB: Real Live Nude Girl is a collection of articles that have mostly already been published. Could you tell me over what period - in which years - were those articles written? CQ: The earliest one was published in 1990, the newest ones were done in late 1996. The others span that range, although many of them were expanded for the book. Many of them were originally written for 'zines. JB: Do you feel that the content that came out during this period was influenced more by what was happening in your own internal journey or more by what was happening 'out there' (in the community or politics of feminism for example)? C:Q Absolutely both. I write personal essays that seek to connect my own experience and that of people within my communities (by this I mostly mean communities formed by sexual identity or behavior, like queers or prostitutes or S/M people) with what's going on in the larger culture, nationally or even globally. That's why I term myself a 'cultural sexologist' - I am also trained in sociology, so I am always interested in the ways individuals' lives (including my own) fit into the bigger picture, with the ways subcultures emerge into the greater public's awareness, etc. Besides, what happens out in the world affects my ideas around what is possible. Without the awareness that feminism had grappled with sexual issues and that any women had come out on the side of exploration and supporting sexual diversity, I might not have had the courage to explore as much as I have or to speak out about it. I have been very influenced by the lives and work of the people who came before me - Pat Califia, for example, whose work and writings have made so much space for me. JB: What does it mean to you to be able to share your experience with people all over the world, from feminists to people who may never have read any sex theory but pick up your book because it sounds appealing and stick with it cause it seems accessible? CQ: It's very important to me. I write 'because I have to', as some other author said; that is, I have always used writing to make sense of my relationship with the world around me, although for many years I didn't publish anything, just wrote in my journals. But 'publish' because I want to take part in a dialogue. I'm well aware that most people haven't had my experiences. I want to give them a first-person look at alternative ways of living in the world and I want to speak for often-silent people who do live in these ways, but more secretly. The notion of coming out is hugely important to me, and I use it not only in a gay/lesbian/bisexual context but also to express other kinds of diverse experience. I think what's most wrong with the world is people's inability to live in ever more diverse societies, which breeds intolerance and xenophobia (not that either of those is a new thing). Put simply, I want to shine a light on alternative points of view and urge people to think. JB: It (Real Live Nude Girl) is a very accessible book; is accessibility an important aspect of writing about sex for you? CQ: Absolutely. I am academically trained, but choose to live out in the world where academic language serves to separate people from knowledge. I don't respect that tendency among the highly educated; it's like a secret code to keep knowledge contained. I'd prefer to write in a style many readers can get through; I can punch it up for academic conferences if I have to! Besides, I think reading saves lives, and so I want to produce work people will want to read. read more of this interview: Created on Tue, 30 Dec 1997 and last modified on Fri, 27 Feb 1998.

LOUDonline - http://www.loud.net.au - Wed, 8 Jul 1998