CIIS Public Programs Podcast

Transcript

[Cheerful theme music begins] 

This is the CIIS Public Programs Podcast, featuring talks and conversations recorded live by the Public Programs department of California Institute of Integral Studies, a non-profit university located in San Francisco on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone Land. 
 

Carol Queen has been on the frontlines of the sex-positivity movement since the 1970s. A cultural sexologist, author, and co-founder of San Francisco’s Center for Sex & Culture, Carol is a long-time advocate for sexual health and pleasure. In this episode, Sex Therapist and CIIS Sex Therapy Certificate Program Lead Zoe Sipe joins Carol for a lively conversation exploring the state of sex in 2021.  
 

This episode contains explicit language and, as the title suggests, discussions of sex. It was recorded during a live online event on June 9th, 2021. A transcript is available at ciispod.com. To find out more about CIIS and public programs like this one, visit our website ciis.edu and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms. 

[Theme music concludes] 

Zoe: Hi, Carol. 

Carol: Hi Zoe. It's so nice to be with you. 

Zoe: So good to be with you. In fact, I want to just do a little bit Carol-bragging, is that okay? 

Carol: [laughs gently] Yes. 

Zoe: I just want to bring a little bit of the humanness that I was looking up when I was thinking about introducing you and this is from a Good Vibes article celebrating 28 years of your service there as the staff sexologist. And here's what they had to say: “Carol Queen has made it her life's work to help all of us have better sex and feel comfortable in our bodies. To say that she has helped shape the world for the better would be an incredible understatement.” So, I just wanted to presence that. And let's begin by saying, happy National Sex Day.  

Carol: Yes! 6/9 is National Sex Day and I don't even think we knew that when we scheduled this event! 

Zoe: I don't think we did. 

Carol: Kismet, it's a beautiful miracle. 

Zoe: And what was, what's the history of National Sex Day? Do you know?  

Carol: I honestly don't know. It's like, like so many other holidays that someone thought needed to happen on a particular date. [Zoe: Yeah.] It appeared on the internet and is taking off like wildfire, I assume. I'm encouraging people to celebrate National Sex Day, according to their own traditions. 

Zoe: I'm going to celebrate it right here today with you. [Carol laughs] This is my way. [Carol: That's right.] 

Zoe: So, I thought we could begin, Carol, by you sharing with the audience members about what does it mean to be a cultural sexologist? How do you think about that?  

Carol: Well, the sexologist is someone who has professionally studied or dived deep academically into sexuality. At The Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality, where I got my degree, Ted McIlvenna, the person who was the co-founder and the president of the place, used to just describe it as “what people do and how they feel about it”, which is a nice and simple elevator speech for sexology. But I also let people know that any professional focus on sex that's a higher-level focus than another professional of that type would have, they those people veer into sexology very frequently, I think. I have a degree in sociology too. And I'm really interested in social movements, identities, the politics of sex, the cultural change around sex and so I coined the term cultural sexologist to differentiate myself from the white coat clinician types that I was meeting more of when I first got into sexology studies.  

Zoe: So I- that's a nice lead in, I think, for our conversation, the cultural lens and what, what my intention for tonight is…we're exploring the, like you said, the ways we think about sex, how cultural movements, how political movements, how they shape ourselves sexually. And that means, I imagine and this is what I'm interested for you to comment on, is the ways not only that we feel about sex, how we think about sex and how we actually act and behave sexually, inside of a cultural milieu that we may not even be aware of, inside of socialization processes. So my, my thought is we will take a little bit of a cultural history tour together, beginning at around the 1950s, centered mostly in this country and then we'll spend some time in the last 20 or 30 years, since the topic of our conversation here is the state of sex in 2021, which is no small feat for 60 minutes.  

Carol: We'll do our best.  

Zoe: We're gonna do our best. [laughs] So, how does that sound to you?  

Carol: That sounds wonderful. Yeah, I just want to remind people that the last century of our history has, has given us a lot of options and a lot of, a lot of fraught options, in some cases about sexuality, it's changed a lot of things that my grandmother, when she was of the age having my mother in 1920, probably wouldn't recognize now. So I just want, I just want to set the stage with that. We're going to talk about maybe half of that time, but this has been one wild ride of a century.  

Zoe: Yeah. So let's, let's start there. Why don't we? And again, this is not going to be an exhaustive list by any means, as we both know. But let's start sketching out, maybe some of the big moments in sexual history beginning in the 1950s and then we'll kind of flesh out some of the ones in more recent times. 

Carol: Well, the 1950s, we had all the work that was leading up to the pill. Quite a, quite a few people devoted time and money and energy and political focus to that. I also want to say, we had the most, to date, high-profile transsexual person: Christine Jorgensen, that was in the 1950s. We had Allen Ginsberg reading Howl at the Six Gallery in San Francisco, talking about homosexuality in a really open way. And we had people who are doing the work that, that is often not acknowledged today when we talk about the gay and lesbian movement, bringing the homophile movement together, the organizations and the groups and the support systems and publications that were going to transform into the gay and lesbian and gay- GBLT movements soon enough. 

Zoe: And, and I- that makes me think of also Kinsey in the, in the 50s that makes me think of Masters and Johnson as a sex therapist and the impact that had.  

Carol: Absolutely and Kinsey, of course, Kinsey, Kinsey began to change our world in the 1940s, actually his research started before that time. But sexual behavior in the human male was published in the late 1940s. And he was on the cover of LIFE Magazine, a beautiful portrait of him pictured with a bird and a bee, my, in my bottomless collection of cool sex stuff from the last many decades. I've got a copy of that somewhere. And he died at the end of the 1950's partly because he was hounded when he released his volume about women's sexuality. It was one thing to think about men and their sexuality, their, the several ways, they achieved orgasm and all the different things. It was another thing to talk about our wives, daughters, mothers, sisters, like that. [Zoe: Mhm] And he had quite a lionized first part of his career and then a lot of pressure at the end.  

Zoe: What do you think the impact of his work was? From a personal perspective, like how did that land for people individually, do you think?  

Carol: I went and took a little tour of the Kinsey Institute 20 or so years ago. And one of the things I saw there that made a really big impression on me was a black and white photo. I think it was hung in the office. We pass through that a, like the secretarial pool on the way to see the cool secret room of fine art that Kinsey had collected and had been donated. And this photo showed Kinsey on stage in his bowtie, in his brushy crew cut, looked a little like my dad, in the 50s some time on stage at the Greek Theater in Berkeley and you could see the audience beyond him, and the Greek Theater was packed with people. We only see that during rock shows now. But they came out for Kinsey as though he was a rock star and people finally could read a book all about sex. It might be a little dry. There were a lot of, a lot of things. A lot of sociological charts and stuff like that to go through but it told gay men that there were a lot more men who had sex with other men than generally was talked about. That, I think the percentage of men who had sex with men and women, was all they counted in those days, was close to 35%. And the idea that there was one normal way to be a sexual person was blown up forever by the Kinsey reports. He wasn't the first person to do, to send that message. That message had been growing in the world of sexology and psychology for decades already, but he was the best seller, and he changed the discourse.  

Zoe: And that, that's such a profound shift in the discourse. I mean that, to me, from your perspective, does that bring us up to the sexual revolution, where the discourse then changes, again, at a wide level. Like how would you, how would you think about that piece? 

Carol: Well, I sort of think about, about the counterculture, the, the sort of modernist, post World War Two, “wait a minute, what's the world? what does it have waiting for us?” The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Bob Dylan name-checked him. It was a, it was a book in the 50s. But, but the Betty Friedan’s Problem That Has No Name. There was a, there was a counterculture before what we think of as the sexual revolution and The Summer of Love and that the 60s counterculture, it was related. It was the, the on-ramp to that, for sure.  

But it was the, it was the Beats. It was people looking to live more authentically and to, and to galvanize a criticism of US culture as they saw it. US role in the world, the kind of things that people talk about today, right? That was going on 60, 60 plus years ago. And floating on top of that was this new knowledge about sexuality. And I don't know if anybody has done any deep dive studies into how that sexology touched the counterculture, but we know that from the 1950s through the end of the 1960's, things shifted profoundly, it was, it was LGBT visibility and access, you know, coming to a head at the Stonewall Riots of 1969, but as I said, there were things going on for a couple of decades at least before that that also played into that.  

So, I don't think you can, I don't think you can take one specific thing off our list and say it's not, it's not in a string of pop beads with at least two other things and there- it’s all, it's all mashed up, this cultural change. One thing inspires or puts a new lens on another thing and so culture rolls on. So, sex in culture rolls on.  

Zoe: And that- when did you move to the Bay Area because that, that whole generation that you're talking over, that movement, really, it was located in this area and that was one of the things that I was inspired to have this conversation with you because you, you are a living, breathing embodiment of somebody who walked that through much of the city and the evolution of San Francisco and the Bay Area, am I right on that?  

Carol: You are. But I'm also- I feel like I'm really the second generation- I'm in my 60s but I feel like I'm in the second generation, at least, of the people who changed San Francisco culture and the- its home as a place of sexuality communities to become the San Francisco that you're talking about when you asked me that question, right?  

So the- I mentioned Ted McIlvenna and the Sex Institute at the very top and Ted McIlvenna was hired by Cecil Williams at GLIDE Church to be the night minister in the 1960s before The Summer of Love where he ministered to druggies and street walkers and the trans women who hung out in the Tenderloin and who were later the ones who started throwing coffee cups at the Compton Cafeteria riots, which preceded- we had two queer riots in San Francisco! That preceded Stonewall, not that anyone's counting.  

But we did and, and The Summer of Love, of course, pretty well known and it wasn't just sex that brought people to San Francisco for that but early, early on, before the, the Pride that we think of is associated with the 70s and the 80s 90s and on till now; now it's Pride Month. Now, of course the big march down Market Street or whatever Zoom variant we're going to be doing this year. There was a sexual diversity march of sorts that went through the parts of San Francisco that are most associated with sexuality: the Polk, the Tenderloin, and there are still people living in those communities now who can remember when that was going down. Then I was a kid, and I was reading everything I could already about what was going on in California and San Francisco and dreaming of coming here.  

So, obviously my on-ramp took the entirety of the 1970s, I started to visit San Francisco in the 70s. I did go to one of those Prides. I went to the Pride before Harvey Milk and George Moscone were shot. So, if you want to start my first step of trajectory there, that's a fair place to put it. I saw a fabulous drag queens with glitter in their beards, that hippy drag queens, not the, not the well-shaded drag queens, with a protest sign that said, “US OUT OF SAN FRANCISCO”. And that about summed it up in that, in that decade, San Francisco was transmogrifying into a place that was safer than any other place in the United States and most places in the world [Zoe: Yeah.] for queer people, for sexually and gender diverse people. There were all kinds of communities, movements, little startup entities that later blossomed into all the things that have all the different pride flags now.  

And I didn't show up to live in the Bay Area until the mid 80s and what brought me here then was the AIDS epidemic. I thought I would get my sexology degree and devote myself to that work. And I did devote myself to that work, but it turns out, a lot of other kinds of work too. Because of course, once I started at The Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality, diving into sexuality as a big picture topic. Anything I did and explored became relevant, I must say that if you want to get extra credit for doing all the sexual exploration, sexology is a great place to do that! [both laugh]  

So, I did my dissertation of a variant of my book, Exhibitionism for the Shy that was born in a peep show booth at the Lusty Lady theater, thinking about exhibitionism, of voyeurism, not as problematic perversions, not as, not as codes in the DSM. But as erotic preferences, as enhancing activities. And of course, if there's one thing that this foment of sexuality and diversity and communi- community has brought us by this time in the 21st century, it's that there are all kinds of ways to add enhancement and to find your own sexual space. Not everybody is the same and not everybody needs to be the same. I know, it’s sort of the essence of sex positivity, really.  

 
Zoe: Yeah. And I mean, I'm, I'm imagining you as a little girl. Where were you, were you in Oregon? At that time? 

Carol: I was in Oregon, I was in the sticks when I was a little girl. I lived outside of Cheshire, you don't know where that is. Do you, everybody out there? Hardly anyone does. And then later, it was Glide. Glide was a little more famous because Glide had a wildflower show that showed up in Western Highways magazine or something. But neither one was very large, both of them didn't feel really like the late 20th century had quite arrived except that boys kept going to Vietnam. And so, when I went to Eugene for college, it was a, that was a great cultural leap.  

Zoe: And that's-  is your life is a kind of microcosm, you know, if we're looking at how large cultural sweeping trends can inform an individual's personal sex life and this is the, you know, because I'm a psychotherapist, I work so deeply in that realm and the family systems and intrapsychic and the relationship and how it shows up. If we're talking about the, the awakening, the sexual revolution movement, and all that came after that was sexual diversity and what San Francisco is. Here, we have you a little girl dreaming, knowing there’s someplace she can go to find a home and to find a kind of expression. And so, it's that's one of the ways I hear as, we're reflecting on these larger cultural trends. How does it impact us personally? And your, your story is so interesting in that way to me, because you, your book, especially Real-Live Nude Girl, is an erotic exploration into the realms that many people would not- might not, have felt so free to go.  

Carol: I knew from the very jump that sexuality was interesting to me, one of- I didn't know why that was the case, actually. It was pretty obvious that I was more interested or at least more willing to talk openly about it, than other people around me, but it wasn't until I was in my late 20s that I found out that my mother had dealt with sexual abuse in her girlhood around the same time in her life span that I started to perk up and go, “what is this?” And of course, that happened to her in the 1930s and my uptick of interest happened in the 1960s and very early 70s and those two decades were worlds apart as far as sexuality and discourse was concerned. Thank you, Dr. Kinsey!  

So the, the things that were options for me: good old learning about sex in the gutter, going to the library trying to figure out what all this was all about. What are the definitions of these words that I'm reading in my mother's magazines? What can I read that's beyond that, where can I explore, how can I talk about this, what's safe? Wait, bisexuality is a thing? What I found is that no matter what kind of sexual experience or attempt toward sexual experience I had because not everybody took my hints or said, yes to whatever, whatever I was offering. But I always learned something from any of the experiences that I had whether I would think back on them as good sex or not. They were always informative. Informational. Opened new questions for me.  

And so, when I learned that there was a thing called sexology, where do I sign up? Clearly, I've been working towards this notion for this whole time. I came out as bi in the 70s. I heard a lot of, “well you're just a fence sitter. well, you don't you just have to choose one or the other!” Why?!, Why do I have to choose one or the other?! Who made that rule?! That's ridiculous! And you know, like you could get the homophobia in that but it's also, it would be better to be gay than bi? Where is the logic? I do not understand the logic. And, and every time one of these kinds of opportunities or great curiosities came into my life, it gave me more space to be, who I was, gave me more information about who I was, allowed me to think more broadly about sexual diversity in general, and ultimately helped me, think about what wasn't there to have the kind of sexual comfort and community that I missed in those years when people were saying “you got to pick just one”.  

I did actually pick one after a little while. I was lesbian-identified for a decade. How are you going to get a girlfriend otherwise? People hear you're bisexual. And they're like, “oh, I know I've heard about you people”. It's like, well, you haven't heard about me and well, alright, alright I'm a lesbian. Let's, let's find out what this is going to teach me what I can give, what I can get, I mean, you know, why do- why do we, why do we reach for sexuality and relationships in the first place, right? We’re, we're connecting, we're learning, we're giving, we're getting, we're building identity, there’s, we're building, we're building support in a life, we’re building community sometimes. All of that's been true for me.  

Zoe: And how much do you think that was about- that was linked to what was happening culturally? I mean, you're in a very unique place, you’re in the Bay Area, you're obviously a very unique, unusual human with an interest in sex, an interest in your own personal self-expression and freedom. How much do you think your, your particular story was influenced by what was happening at the time?  

Carol: Enormously. Totally. If, if I hadn't had access to these streams of thought, even the ones that I could just get wisps of as a little kid, as a teenager…you know, by the time I went to college, I had a pretty good read on feminism, on homosexuality and bisexuality, I mean there were, I was I was figuring it out as best I could given the constraints of what I had access to. But in the 1970s, I had access to so much more discourse than my mother had had, than many people in other places now, maybe even have if their Internet connection is really bad or if they don't have Internet at all.  

Because now, of course you have access to everything on the Internet, the challenge now is to winnow the information and put it into some kind of context. It's not always contextualized, but I was building my context in retrospect partly by affiliating with queer community. And becoming one of the, one of the people in my school who, you know, I was the director of the Gay Alliance for a while, before there were lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender people, much less all the rest of the people in our alphabet now. Thank goodness. We have more and more and more people being added to this acronym. And I'm glad there are vowels because someday it will spell a word. [Zoe laughs] More vowels please! But I had access to- I co-founded a gay youth group, I had access to other gay kids and learned about their, their paths and journeys and, you know, mourned when they didn't make it to 21. And would I have founded a gay youth group pre-Stonewall, no, I don't think I would. You know would I have, would I have explored bisexuality, pre-Kinsey? Yeah, but I might not have known the word for it. There was this, this is why I say I'm at least second generation. You know, any of us who have done any work in this space stand on the shoulders of giants, you can go back and back to find people who were restive in their norm. They couldn't stay in their norm, they had to step outside of it and when you do that, you make more space for other people, and you find the people who already did it. And you find more space for yourself. That's how I think of it. But [Zoe: That’s a beautiful way to say that.] without these ideas, without these ideas to get hold of and interrogate and ask how do I relate to that idea or that sexuality? Or would I want to try that thing? I'll try anything once [laughs] because I'm learning from all of it, I'm learning what I don't want, as well as what I want.  

So, yes, enormous, enormously important, and the things that I didn't know then, once I delved deeply enough, I started to learn about and realize in retrospect, there was even more going on that was shaping the culture that I was fortunate enough- privileged enough to come into. And I, when I use privilege in this particular way, I'm saying in access to information, even though there was a lot that I didn't have access to, I still had access to a lot and the accident of history that brought me into this world when I came here because it would have been different at a different time. 

Zoe: And that's such a huge part of any cultural force is access to information. So, if we fast forward so this is, and again, I get it, it's like we're just doing a very brief sketch of some of the main events…the pill, Kinsey, Masters and Johnson, the HIV epidemic. We're going to fast forward now up to the last 20 or 30 years. So, what are some of the movements that have impacted us recently?  

Carol: There's just been a fabulous, new history of ACT UP. Sort of the activism that came out of the AIDS epidemic and the, and the fight, to get AIDS acknowledged to find treatment, find a cure all of that, you know, Fauci was just talking about that this week, Sarah Schulman was just on a on a webinar that I heard her talk about the book, which she co-wrote and, and did all the help- did all the oral histories. Actually, she wrote the book & co-did the oral histories that the book comes from. And so, there was that going on there.  

So, what that means is that there was a, an uptick of politicization associated with the AIDS epidemic and that carried all the way through the 90s. Mostly. The speaking of politicization of sexuality, the mid-80s also gave us the feminist sex wars and I think I have, I have learned a lot and reacted a lot and had a lot to say about the feminist sex wars. This notion that there are kinds of sexuality that really, women are not interested in and shouldn't be exploring. And so, I went out and explored all of them just to check. [Zoe: Laughs] [Zoe: Thank you.] BDSM, check. Porn, check. Sex work, check!  

And so, all that stuff happened and of course while we're talking about cultural changes the, the development of discourses and support networks and systems around the sex industry, around the sex industry and always but certainly about prostitution. Margo St. James, who founded COYOTE in 1973 just died a few months ago. And so, we're still in that stream. There's, there are young ones leading a new part of the movement now.  

There was the, there was the introduction of the term polyamory to those of us who hadn't heard it before. Polyamory came from a pagan circle actually, a Northern California pagan circle. Morning Glory Zell, I believe is the name that we should link up to the popularization of that word but soon stepped out of that space and went into other alternative spaces. The Bay Area is not the only place by any means where polyamory is a real thing, but it certainly got a boost in the sexually open and now we can say relationally open world because polyamory isn’t a form of sexuality, it’s a form of relationship structure and choice. So, there's lots of different ways to shape our relationships too and going all the way back to the 60s. We know that because of Kerista and the other communes that were Bay Area staples in the run-up to The Summer of Love that had sexual freedom, or specific kinds of sexual, relational rules and regs as part of what these various communes did. So, I'm sure there are places very much like that even now and many, many people have realized that if you learn how to communicate about sex adequately, you can shape open relationships that don't have to involve sneakiness and subterfuge and lack of consent…or “well, if nobody ever even knows about it, it's not a lack of consent, is it?” Yeah. Probably. And it probably is actually, I'll just be judgmental for a second. [Zoe: Go ahead.] [Carol laughs] 

Zoe: So, the politics of sex and the changing institution of marriage. That's one of the ways I hear about the expansiveness of relationship forms and thinking of in 2016, when OkCupid added its non-monogamy click box, at least in the Bay Area. I don't know if that hits all states. 

Carol: I expected it does, actually.  

Zoe: Yeah. 
 
Carol: And part- connected to that but not the same thing, this is the pop bead theory that I just invented a few minutes ago, is of course, marriage equality, which we have you know in the early 2010's we get the legal, the legal cases that that added up to marriage equality, but you know, I think from this vantage people think, oh, they, they had the gay rights movement really had to work hard for a few years to get marriage equality. We were talking about marriage equality the year I came out in 1973. [Zoe: Long time.] A long time; anybody who signs up for these kinds of cultural change projects, please be aware that you're going to do culture change projects for decades and decades because even if you get your cultural change project accomplished relatively soon, somebody will pop up and push back and we're seeing that now.  

So those things are, those things are part of the mix mentioning politics and the pushback around politics. There was a certain intern who is now the star of Twitter who had something going on with a certain President who said, “I did not have sex with that woman.” Under oath? Duuuuude!!! And one, I just want to say, I bet she thought she was having sex with him. Which like asks us, what is sex anyway, we don't even have enough time to get into that! [Zoe: We don’t have enough time to get into that.] We don’t even have enough time for that, but I will say that that was another one of those moments where just like a decade before when the Surgeon General finally put out a pamphlet that talked about safer sex, it was mailed to all the households in the United States, just like that and just like Kinsey. When something that high-profile and political, and normative, and all the way up at the top of the food chain. I suppose, we need to include the Kardashians now and all of that, I guess! Probably! [Zoe: Sure.]   

Because that's how people in a culture without good sex education, I truly believe that we bounce off cultural reference [Zoe: mmm-hmm], including rom-coms and porn, including sex in the news, all the kinds of cultural reference that that stand in for “let's tell everyone all about sexual diversity and help everyone understand all of this” because that isn't a thing, not a state-sponsored or sanctioned thing. [Zoe: Yeah.] So, we get to talk about oral sex. And possibly inappropriate relationship growth with our kids. And now, those kids are deciding that they need to go to CIIS and get a degree in sex and public policies because, because this stuff changes us, and the pushback changes us too. 

Zoe: So, marriage equality and its backlash, gender equality and its backlash. And what you're mentioning really is the internet, the rise of the internet and the public nature of sex, particularly that makes me think of the Me Too Movement and how that as a cultural reference is impacting how we think about sex, what we’re willing to do with sex, behavior about sex. And I'll say, one last thing, just before it loses, goes out of my mind, is sex addiction as a cultural reference point and how much that, that goes into the news, which is such a controversial area.  

Carol: Just yesterday, we find that Armie Hammer went to rehab. Yeah. It's right up, it’s 2021, for sure. Yeah. The, the way that- the thing that has surprised me the most about the sort of the quasi or pretty progressive perspective, on Me Too, and marriage equality, and, and many of these other issues in the mainstream press. Not talking about the right-wing press, they’re its own, they’re its own thing. But the mainstream press; like did I think when I was reading in feminist journals and queer publications in the 1970s about all of these issues, which I was because we've been talking about these things for decades, these are not new things. But did I know that I would be reading thoughtful think pieces about that kind of stuff in the Washington Post? Did I know that we were going to start to hear the issues of sex workers laid out in newspapers that have been around for a couple of centuries, eh, century plus, in ways that I feel good about even though I've been steeped in that sort of political set of arguments for decades now, we have got, we have got a great dredging up that has happened of alternative perspectives on sexuality and the world. The political things too that don't have anything to do directly with sex or gender identity but that are, are related to what I'm describing that lived prior to this in alt spaces, only, pretty much only. You know, the most out of the depths that it got was in three or 400 level college classes that were sociology or, you know, political science or things like that.  

Now, it's part of the world that we can understand if we take those voices seriously and of course, not all Americans do. But there they are, the things that I was impacted by and influenced by, reading essentially in secret in the 1970s, are now in the Washington Post. That blows my mind. It's actually probably the only thing I'm surprised about by 19-  by 2021. Nothing else totally surprises me, that surprises me. But of course, without the internet, would that have happened? That's a good question. We know that the…the way that porn has come out from the shadows has really so much to do with the internet and the accessibility of search, of looking up, what's, what's making you curious and finding out “wait, I'm not the only one?” That's what people riffled through the index of the Kinsey report to find out. But this is different. This is, this is that on steroids or something. This is this with a rocket lit under it. And it means that the people turn to the internet thinking that all the information is there. And it probably is unless it happened before the year 2000 and it's not there in that event. Only some of it is.  

So, if you're, if you're delving, you've got to go to old school history, archives, books, whatever in order to fill in those gaps, but I mean in a way I think that's why we started 50 years ago tonight, isn't it? Because you can't talk about the present. You can't talk about the present without talking about the past, right? I think many people think that you can, but you can't, it's influenced. It goes back and back. It's a change.  

So, now, now we have the ability to really open these things up that- to, to out abusers to engage in pretty sophisticated discourses about what the right next step would be about all of this. The legal world is going to catch up with those practices. It wasn't the legal world that gave us solutions first, it was activists who stepped up to say, what are we going to do? And the internet also gives a platform and a communication space to people who want to push back on all of this. So it's…it’s balls in the air all the time now, it seems to me. It's not easy to say that we’ve come through all this history and got into a space where we can have sex positive community now. We have sex positive communities, here and there. And of course, as you know, I don't just mean, whee! Sex! I love sex. That's not how I define sex positive. That's nice and I love it when people love sex, it's great, but it's not a requirement. I don't want to erase asexual folk and demisexuals. I, you know, I don't want to do that partly because sex positivity as a political philosophical set of ways, we could still change the world for the better around diversity, information, culturally appropriate, health care, psychotherapeutic care, all the things.  

Zoe: Can I pause you on the sex positivity piece because I have a question about your reflections on the role of politics and sex, the role of the internet, in a more public way, the role of social media that can breed comparison? Because as a therapist, one of the things I work with so deeply is shame, sexual shame, erotic shame. And it's so often bred as, as we know from am I normal? But if you go even deeper than that, it's a desire to belong or wanting to connect, a fear of disconnection. [Carol: Yeah.] And when sexuality is made public in the way that it's made public, the tendency toward comparison or the tendency toward: if my eroticism and my preferences doesn't match what I'm perceiving the cultural norm is, then some people might do what you did, which is move head-on into it and just confront the cultural taboos and see what happens. That's one way. Many people I think will tend to either placate or please or hide or it becomes subversive again, becomes in the shadows. So, I'm curious as we’re reflecting on this movement where it's so much more out in the open and that's the beauty of the internet. That's the beauty of the labels. That's the beauty of expansiveness and yet, this role of shame and how that- the dual nature of that and I'm curious what your reflections are on that. 

Carol: You know, I think that one of the things that I have assumed for my whole working life, and when I say, working life right now, what I mean is that since the time that I co-founded the GAYouth group in Eugene and the mid-1970s that was, that was of a piece of the work I do now in many ways. So, my working life, I think, maybe started then. And certainly, around LGBTIQA friends and family, queer and questioning all of, all of that work and with sex work in the BDSM world. And even people getting the nerve to walk into Good Vibrations and start talking about their, you know, physical sexual response and try to figure out if there's a way to improve it or fix what they perceive to be a problem. I think I have always assumed that making more space, more discourse, more community would put a lid on shame and its effects on us because shame is, it's truly the problem.  

When people have sexual issues that are painful and you’re patching to them, it may be their own sense of shame that you just described as fear of being cut out from the herd, right? If you're being shunned, fear of not being accepted by your family anymore, your old friends, all of that. And you don't have to read all of the Q&A agony aunt columnists like I do to know that people are full of that worry now for all kinds of reasons, certainly including sex, and gender, and identity, and all those pieces. But innocent people who haven't even gotten to the point of thinking. “I'm not like everybody else. There must be something wrong with me.” Are shamed by others and there's no better example of that than this uptick in anti-trans activism against kids.  

You know, there's- it's, it's rough enough when people decide to go after adults, for being different, that's not good. Going after children! This, this means that we have not figured out what the cure is to shame. Some individual people. Sure. But I also think that this business of comparing ourselves to others, sometimes it seems like it happens outside of a sexual context, right? But, but selfie culture and, and influencer culture and how many likes do I have? And there's a way in which social media really- nobody planned this, I don't think but happens to really connect with these human challenges that we've been carrying for such a long time.  

So, I really, really want to encourage people to feel free to think outside whatever box they think they have to stay in. There are places outside of it. They're good places,  they’re places with friends and appropriate partners, you've got to be able to step outside the limitations that you think the culture is putting on you because a part of the culture isn't necessarily doing that and I really want to say that to conservatives who are living in their shame because I feel like there's plenty of conservative people have actually really gained from the changes that we've been discussing this whole time. There are, there are heavily politicized issues there. Of course there are, but I'm interested in the way that we act out when we don't feel safe and we don't feel like there's a place for us and we're worried about being ejected and, you know, it's- in the 70s, the first thing I saw that sort of referenced, all of this stuff was this, the pro-gay psychotherapy work done in loving someone gay and Society and the Healthy Homosexual and being introduced to the notion of internalized homophobia.  

And now, of course, I know that any of these kinds of sex and gender and identity phobias can be internalized, and we have cures for that, but they're not cures for everyone because not everyone can step away from this cultural matrix that holds them of belief of family, of a particular kind of community. So, you know, I grew up in the sticks in Oregon and I grew up with them and I know that there's this pain happening there too, and I would like to see that gone for everyone because I think things get a little safer for everyone when that happens.  

Zoe: Yeah. Yeah, it's like, I'm, it's the- it's interesting to hear you reflect on the, the dual nature of the politics- of politicization of sex. The internet, social media. These large cultural movements that we’re inside of and how it's both. It's both so positive, but there is, there is this other side to it. And there's the other side of comparison. There's the other side of shame. There's the other side of fear of judgment and how that plays out and in erotic life, in sexual preference life, in how we actually allow ourselves, or don't allow ourselves to explore sex, relationship forms, even fantasies, that there can be such a, such an internal level of it's not okay, because it doesn't match what it's supposed to and it doesn't match politics and it doesn't match the perceived nature of what is supposed to be okay, with all the movements that we’re coming from. Marriage equality, gender equality, that it becomes actually quite complex and that's what, that's what I hear when I'm hearing you speak. But I'm curious, is that my lens or is that something you're actually saying? [laughs gently] 

Carol: No. I think, I think I am saying that, and I just have a, I have a little tiny anecdote about that, in fact. I was talking to a young man who is living in the hip quadrant of Oakland and working at a hip job and surrounded by a wonderful community of people. And we were talking about sex positivity, and he said, “can I ask you something?” And whenever anybody I've been hearing that, since I founded GAYouth, I was 17 years old. Can I ask you something? There's always something in there. What is it? “I'm the only person in my social circle that, I mean I didn't- do you have to be polyamorous to really be sex-positive?” I was like “no, no! I mean it helps to be sex-positive if you're going to be polyamorous, there's that, but, but no it's not a part of a definition of sex-positive. You don't have to be any particular way except consenting in your activities to be sex-positive.” That's about the bottom line. From there on out it, you know, it's many options. Many, many waves, one ocean, right? He's like, “because I get really jealous and I don't think anybody else in my circle feels this way at all.” I’m like, “oh boo!” [Zoe: Yeah.] You know. And what does that go to show? It's always something. You know, we can't, we can't run away from what we would consider a hidebound space. It doesn't serve us and hold us. Leave room for us and who we are. Who we want to be and then create something just like it only different only opposite on the other side of town. It's not how it works. We've got to make more space for us to be different and together in community and in the polity, we've got to do that. There’s a lot riding on it.  

Zoe: And as a culture- we actually have 10 more minutes, so we have a little more time- as a culture, would you say it's moving in that direction? 

Carol: I would say it's moving in both directions at once. Remember The Wizard of Oz and the Scarecrow doing this? [Zoe laughs] Yeah that's my- that's my physical gesture to think about these things because…I'm aware that I'm talking about a certain kind of polarization, and I'm making it a little bit binary in the way that I'm speaking about it. And I don't actually think it's that simple. It's as we, as we know, when we step away from any binary, it becomes complicated in new ways that growing up in binary mindset hasn't necessarily given us immediate skills to be able to pull apart, and understand, but we could do that. That's a good hobby for those of us to spend the rest of our lives, you know, doing a little of that work on the side every now and again, because it makes a difference and it means that we don't have to think of everybody we’re around as being the same or opposite us because that isn't true either. There's the same and opposite; opposite might not exist, you know, I insist on people not using the term opposite sex because that implies two and there are more than 2 and this opposite- it's a, it's a geometry that in the- these years of the 21st century, that is an outdated geometry. So, we can, we can take a piece of paper and fold it up in little shapes and learn from that. That's what we need to do in order to step away from this idea that there's only two points and everything else isn't even really what we're talking about. We're really only talking about those two points. That erases so much. And I'm talking about political ideas, as well as gender, and sex, and identity, and all of that. 

Zoe: And that's, that's really a part of the philosophy of sex positivity.  

Carol: Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely. Sex positivity acknowledges that sex could be a positive force in anybody's life if certain things line up right for us, we need to tackle shame, we need to tackle opprobrium, we need to tackle, any anti-state, the Trump administration had plenty of that aimed at plenty of different people. We need, we need to have that off of us. We need to train our doctors and our therapists and other helping professionals correctly so that they can give appropriate and compassionate and culturally sensitive care. You know, when we talk about cultures, we so often don't think about sexuality or sexual diversity as culturally inflected, but I think that our discussion tonight has been all about that. I fully understand this stuff as people gathering together in cultures and subcultures, and communities of affiliation, of safety, of support and, you know, the right kind of partner finding. So those things are all built into sex positivity and the sex ed that would give us the tools that we would need to understand this without having to go to graduate school and stuff, that would be great.  

Zoe: I think we're pretty far from that. 

Carol: We’re pretty far from that. If I had to tackle any two of the things that end there, probably more things that I didn't even mention about sex positivity, if I had to tackle two things, it would be shame and education. And of course, those two things are linked, you know, education is linked to almost all of this, so is shame, or the potential of shame.  

Zoe: It's why we have to teach each other, we can't really depend on the larger culture to teach us about much of anything, really. But particularly about sexuality and I think that's such a huge part of what your, what your work is and what you stand for and who you are and what, what you're saying right now about this integration of sex positivity as a philosophy. But where do you, who do you speak to, how do you engage with the cultures? The subcultures, the relationships, the ideas, the ways of thinking that would support one to even know how to step outside of what we're living in. 

Carol: Because the practice can't be telling somebody that you want to have sex with that they're not sex positive because they don't want to have sex with you or have sex in the way that you want to have. You know, that's not the practice. The practice is, the practice is stepping up to learn better communication to learn that the, that if the Me Too Movement has taught us anything, it's that plenty of people out there, whether they mean to or not, breach boundaries and consent and willingness and desire. Fences all the time and that the sequelae of that are terrible.  

And I just want to say people, if you all want to go out and have good positive sex, learn to talk about it and learn to be consensual about it and you'll see an uptick right away. You know, when you don't have to get somebody completely fucked up in order for them to be open enough to having sex with you or not noticing what's going on or whatever you think it's supposed to look like, it can look a lot better than that and we're human beings in the 21st century, we ought to be able to get on this train and ride it to the next station. It's, I'm going to say something people might push back on, but it's not that hard. It's really not that hard. Once you start realizing you can communicate about sex, starts to feel really good and you, you, then you get the nuance, then you can have an effect on what's going to happen to you.  

You know, like I said, I went- I learned about sex, the best possible most informative way: in the gutter. Did I have good experiences in the gutter all the time? No, no. I didn't. I don't think I always had a good time, but I know that I always got information. That has been serving me ever since. And maybe one day, that won't need to be the way that we get our information. I'm not suggesting that everybody has to follow that path. That was the path of its moment and place in time. And I was eager to get busy and figure stuff out, so I went ahead and did it, but we have a beautiful opportunity now because the discourse has raised in all of us an awareness of detail. We don't always read the detail the same way, all of us, but we've got much more detail because people didn't talk about this stuff before my mother told me that she had had non-consensual sex when she was a young woman when I was 28. And she waited until my dad died so that she didn't have to mention it to him and say who the perpetrator was because don't rock the boat. I think we should rock the boat. 

Zoe: Absolutely. And it's like, we've come so far, and it shouldn't be that hard. And as a therapist I'm always, I'm often asking the question. And why does it occur as hard as it does? I think with that Carol, we have a couple of minutes. I think we've covered a lot of the state of sex in 2021, but I'm just curious if you have any kind of final thoughts, or reflections.  

Carol: Well, I just don't want people to think that we are on a trajectory that is going to solve all the challenges that we've talked about, nor do I want people to think that we're in a politically fraught time, that's going to come down on us, like a ton of bricks, and, and erase gains that we've made. I want people to know that sexuality and pleasure are worth advocating for, and maybe, in some cases, fighting for and that there are so many people to ally with around this. There are so many ways to boost awareness and insight and thinking into the experience of people that live sexual lives that you don't. That's so worth it. And it's [Zoe: So worth it.] not just that something's natural and it'll just come to you just like that and if it doesn't something's wrong; no, what's wrong is sex information and the way that we are limited in our vision and our desires by the cultural constraints that we come up in and those are not either/or and binary. And they are malleable, even in the conservative side of things, we've seen changes.  

So, I want people to be attuned to this stuff and be into what it means to be themselves. Which all by itself is being a change agent for somebody else, you're making space for other people and the more we do that, the more safety we can create and the more awareness, if everybody doesn't feel politicized around it, that's fine but please register to vote anyway and do it. Do the things that we need to do to get past these issues in every place that you can because there are many ways to do all of this work, any kind of, any kind of social change work you need to do, there are many ways to do it, sex and gender and identity and relational structure. Those happen to be close to most of our hearts in some way or another. So, I don't see why most people wouldn't find ways to participate in this cultural change. 

Zoe: That was beautifully said. 

 
Carol: I always love talking with you. 

Zoe: I love talking with you. I always think of you as the, the ideal dinner guest [Carol laughs] that I would pray that I could sit next to at a dinner party.  

Carol: I want to thank everyone who is watching and, and I really appreciate you thinking about all of this stuff along with us. 

Zoe: Yeah, likewise, I mean just listening is a form of participation; listening, education, being willing to be in the conversation. It's such a huge part of it. That's- it's how you and I met, we met through, through the CIIS program, we met through having a conversation, we met through a shared commitment to education, which I feel is a huge way, or a small way that one can contribute to exactly what you're saying. [Cat meows in background] 

Carol: Absolutely and you know we've been using the word discourse over and over tonight and with that's a, that's just big cultural discussion. That's talking to ourselves and each other about these things that are important to us. [Carol’s cat meows loudly] And clearly, my cat wants to participate in the discourse. [Zoe laughs]  

Zoe: I just want to thank you so much for taking your time and just who you are in the world and your contributions to this conversation in particular, are immense. They are truly immense. And I just, I honor you and I thank you from the bottom of my heart. 

Carol: Zoe, thank you a million. Thank you so much and thanks to CIIS for wanting to make this space for us to talk together and for you all to be with us. I really, really appreciate my affiliation with CIIS. So, this has been a lovely, lovely conversation.  

Zoe: Thank you. 

[Uplifting theme music begins] 

Thank you for listening to the CIIS Public Programs Podcast. Our talks and conversations are presented live in San Francisco, California. We recognize that our university’s building in San Francisco occupies traditional, unceded Ramaytush Ohlone lands. If you are interested in learning more about native lands, languages, and territories, the website native-land.ca is a helpful resource for you to learn about and acknowledge the Indigenous land where you live. 
 
Podcast production is supervised by Kirstin Van Cleef at CIIS Public Programs. Audio production is supervised by Lyle Barrere at Desired Effect. The CIIS Public Programs team includes Kyle DeMedio, Alex Elliott, Emlyn Guiney, Jason McArthur, and Patty Pforte. If you liked what you heard, please subscribe wherever you find podcasts, visit our website ciis.edu, and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms. 
 
CIIS Public Programs commits to use our in-person and online platforms to uplift the stories and teachings of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color; those in the LGBTQIA+ community; and all those whose lives emerge from the intersections of multiple identities.  

[Theme music concludes]