Dr. Carol Queen is a writer and cultural sexologist with a Ph.D. in human sexuality. She is a noted erotic writer and essayist whose work has appeared in dozens of anthologies and is read in university classes across the US. She’s written three books: the essay collection Real Live Nude Girl: Chronicles of Sex-Positive Culture; the erotic novel The Leather Daddy and the Femme, winner of a Firecracker Alternative Book award for fiction in 1999; and Exhibitionism for the Shy, which explores issues of erotic self-esteem and enhancement. She’s also edited several volumes of erotica and essays. Queen works as Staff Sexologist, Company Historian, and Curator of the Antique Vibrator Museum at Good Vibrations, where she has worked since 1990. She writes for the Good Vibrations web magazine at goodvibesblog.com.
She is co-editor of the anthologies Best Bisexual Erotica (volumes One and Two), Sex Spoken Here, Sex Still Spoken Here, Switch Hitters, and PoMoSexuals; the latter won a Lambda Literary Award in 1998. She’s also edited Whipped! and two volumes of Five Minute Erotica, short-short erotic fiction.
She has taught in several educational videos as the expert instructor, notably Carol Queen’s Great Vibrations: An Explicit Consumer Tour of Vibrators and Bend Over Boyfriend: An Adventurous Couple’s Guide to Male Anal Pleasure. She’s the writer and presenter of G Marks the Spot: The Good Vibrations Guide to the G-Spot and Female Ejaculation; and the Pleasure-Ed series: Gush (about female ejaculation and the G-spot), Heads Up (fellatio), and Going Down (cunnilingus). Her expert advice has been sought in the pages of Glamour, Cosmo, Marie Claire, Men’s Health, Playboy and many other magazines, and she is a frequent commentator for TV programs and documentaries about sex and culture.
Carol is the co-founder, with her partner Robert, of the nonprofit Center for Sex & Culture in San Francisco. She has been speaking publicly about sexuality for close to forty years. She co-founded one of the first LGBTQQ youth groups in the country in the mid-1970s and served as the first Education Director of the Willamette AIDS Council (Eugene, OR) in the 1980s. Her perspective in addressing sexual diversity incorporates personal experience, accurate sex information, and informed cultural commentary. She has addressed many conferences, including the International Condom Conference, the International Conference on Prostitution, and the International Conference on Pornography; she frequently addresses college as well as general and specialized audiences. In 2009 she traveled to England to debate the question of promiscuity (“Virtue or vice?”) for the Oxford Union at Oxford University. She’s on Twitter at @CarolQueen and pops up on Facebook once in a while. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with two grey cats and her partners Robert Morgan Lawrence and Dina Fayer.
For more information (including CV and bibliography) see her website: www.carolqueen.com.
• • •
Editor and writer Shar Rednour is also a spoken word performer, radio host and Audible author. Shar wrote the empowering, hilarious whole-life anthem for Femmes of most ages and all genders: The Femme’s Guide to the Universe, nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. Her passionate work on the feminist reclaiming of virginity began with an essay in The Last Sex: Feminism & Its Outlaw Bodies (Editors Marilouise & Arthur Kroker)—the resulting collision of condemnation and applause led to her two anthologies Virgin Territory 1 and 2. She also edited the ‘zine and book Starf*cker nominated for an ABA award. Now as a mom, she is eternally writing Sharlene Rednour’s Fabulous Guide to Parenting also known as How Great Sex Made Me A Good Mom.
She’s toured nationally with spoken-word troupe, Sister Spit and has been an invited speaker at NYU, Brown, Mills College, Wesleyan, SFU, UC Berkeley and other Universities. Shar hosts a biographical podcast called The Deeper Truth (recorded at Catalyst Con), and hosted radio and TV segments in the Bay Area. She was proud to be selected to narrate the biography Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown by Jennifer Scanlon.
Shar Rednour worked at the original On Our Backs Magazine/Fatale Media both as an editor/writer and in video production. In 1998 she co-founded her own production company with her wife Jackie. Their explicit sex education films were best-selling and critically acclaimed and include the cult classic, Bend Over Boyfriend. Shar co-directed the non-explicit film project Healing Sex: A Mind-Body Approach to Healing Sexual Trauma featuring Staci Haines.
Shar’s been a featured interview subject in award-winner Ken Swartz’s historical documentary San Francisco: Sex and The City, among others including HBO’s Pornucopia and Hot and Bothered: Feminist Pornography directed by Becky Goldberg.