Carol Queen is an American author, editor, sociologist and sexologist active in the sex-positive feminism movement. Queen has written on human sexuality in books such as Real Live Nude Girl: Chronicles of Sex-Positive Culture. She has written a sex tutorial, Exhibitionism for the Shy: Show Off, Dress Up and Talk Hot, as well as erotica, such as the novelThe Leather Daddy and the Femme. Queen has produced adult movies, events, workshops and lectures. Queen was featured as an instructor and star in both installments of the Bend Over Boyfriend series about female-to-male anal sex, or pegging. She has also served as editor for compilations and anthologies. She is a sex-positive sex educator in the United States.
Queen serves as staff sexologist to Good Vibrations, the San Franciscosex toy retailer. In this function, she designed an education program which has trained many other current and past Good Vibrations-based sex educators, including Violet Blue, Charlie Glickman and Staci Haines. She is currently still working for GV as The Staff Sexologist and Chief Cultural Officer.
Writing
Queen is known as a professional editor, writer and commentator of works such as Real Live Nude Girl: Chronicles of Sex-Positive Culture, Pomosexuals, and Exhibitionism for the Shy. She has written for juried journals and compendiums such as The Journal of Bisexuality and The International Encyclopedia of Human Sexuality. She contributed the piece "The Queer in Me" to the anthology .
Absexual
The neologismabsexual has also been introduced by Queen, although it was coined by her partner. Based on its prefix , it represents a form of sexuality where someone is stimulated by moving away from sexuality or is moralistically opposed to sex. Betty Dodson defined the term as describing "folks who get off complaining about sex and trying to censor porn." absexuality is not an official psychiatric term; though note the mention of absexuality in a psychiatric manual in 1988, a decade before Carol Queen popularized the concept in feminist circles. Queen proposed inclusion of the concept in the American Psychiatric Association's DSM-5. Darrell Hamamoto sees Queen's view of absexuality as playfully broad: "the current 'absexuality' embraced by many progressive and conservative critics of pornographic literature is itself a kind of 'kink' stemming from a compulsive need to impose their own sexual mores upon those whom they self-righteously condemn as benighted reprobates."
Development of SHARP
In 2000, Queen together with her partner Robert Morgan Lawrence published a jointly written essay in the Journal of Bisexuality detailing the role of San Francisco bisexuals in the development of safe sex strategies in response to the emerging AIDS crisis in the 1980s. Queen detailed her and Lawrence's development of a safe sex version of the SAR or Sexual Attitude Reassessment training, which they termed Sexual Health Attitude Restructuring Process or SHARP. Originally a program started by the IASHS, SHARP is described as a combination of "lectures, films, videos, slides, and personal sharing", as well as "massage techniques, condom relay races, a blindfolded ritual known as the Sensorium which emphasized transformation and sensate focus, and much more." In 2007, Queen expressed the intention to revive the SHARP training, now referred to as SARP or Sexual Attitude Reassessment Process.'
