Carol Queen (born 1957) is an American feminist author, editor, and sexologist active in the sex-positive feminism movement. She has served twice as Grand Marshal of San Francisco LGBTQ Pride. Her writing on human sexuality includes Real Live Nude Girl: Chronicles of Sex-Positive Culture; the hands-on tutorial Exhibitionism for the Shy: Show Off, Dress Up and Talk Hot; and erotica such as the novel The Leather Daddy and the Femme. She has produced adult films, events, workshops, and lectures, and starred as instructor and performer in both installments of the Bend Over Boyfriend series on female-to-male anal sex—pegging as education and porn craft. She has also edited compilations and anthologies. For BDSM and sex-positive readers she is a bridge figure: leather erotica, shop-floor sex education, and cultural critique from inside San Francisco’s queer adult world rather than from the outside looking in.
Good Vibrations and the educator pipeline
Queen serves as staff sexologist to Good Vibrations, the San Francisco sex-toy retailer. In that role she designed an education program that trained many current and former Good Vibrations–based sex educators, including Violet Blue, Charlie Glickman, and Staci Haines. She continues at GV as Staff Sexologist, Chief Cultural Officer, curator, and historian. Toy-store education is where a huge share of American newcomers first hear practical talk about lube, harnesses, pegging, kink toys, and shame-free curiosity. Queen’s curriculum helped professionalize that front-line teaching.
From journals to instructional video
As a professional editor, writer, and commentator she is known for Real Live Nude Girl, Pomosexuals, and Exhibitionism for the Shy. She has written for juried journals and reference projects such as The Journal of Bisexuality and The International Encyclopedia of Human Sexuality. She contributed “The Queer in Me” to the anthology Bi Any Other Name: Bisexual People Speak Out. The through-line is sex-positive feminism that treats bisexuality, exhibitionism, leather fantasy, and porn literacy as legitimate subjects rather than pathologies—and that is willing to put the same author on a scholarly page and in a pegging instructional video.
Absexuality as reverse lens
Queen also helped introduce the neologism absexual, though her partner coined the term. Built on the prefix ab- (as in “abhor” or “abreaction”), it names a form of sexuality in which someone is stimulated by moving away from sex, or by moralistically opposing sex. Betty Dodson defined absexuals as “folks who get off complaining about sex and trying to censor porn.” As of 2010 the term was not an official psychiatric category. Queen proposed including the concept in the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-5. Scholar Darrell Hamamoto reads Queen’s view of absexuality as playfully broad: progressive and conservative critics of porn who compulsively impose their sexual mores on others may be enacting a kink of their own—self-righteous condemnation as erotic posture. For BDSM audiences, absexuality is a sharp reverse lens: the censor and the moral crusader as people with a sexual charge of their own, not as neutral referees.
SHARP / SARP and personal life
In 2000, Queen and her partner Robert Morgan Lawrence jointly published an essay in the Journal of Bisexuality on the role of San Francisco bisexuals in developing safer-sex strategies during the emerging AIDS crisis of the 1980s. They described building a safe-sex version of the SAR (Sexual Attitude Reassessment) training, which they called the Sexual Health Attitude Restructuring Process, or SHARP. Originally tied to programs associated with the IASHS, SHARP combined lectures, films, videos, slides, and personal sharing with massage techniques, condom relay races, a blindfolded ritual known as the Sensorium that emphasized transformation and sensate focus, and more. The design treated safer sex as embodied practice and culture change, not only as a list of forbidden acts—useful for bisexual and multi-partner networks that public health messaging often ignored. In 2007 Queen expressed interest in reviving the training under the name SARP—Sexual Attitude Reassessment Process. Personally, Queen is Wiccan and bisexual; her public work stays grounded in San Francisco LGBT culture, Good Vibrations history, Fatale Media’s Bend Over Boyfriend series, and sex-positive institutions such as the Center for Sex and Culture and the Woodhull Foundation.
