Introduction

An early nickname inflicted on me by my evil little classmates was “Queen the Queer.” The hormones of junior high hadn’t quite begun to simmer and most of my eleven-year-old “peers” didn’t really know what a queer was, but xenophobia and homophobia can be hard even for adults to differentiate. I was clearly a child from Mars, especially compared to all the loggers’ and ranchers’ kids with whom I shared a mediocre school in a remote Oregon valley. In fact I liked this nickname, for I felt it meant I had been recognized for my obvious, peerless eccentricity. When my best friend hissed, “No, stupid, they’re really calling you a homo,” I got very huffy. I made her look it up in the dictionary, and of course in the sanitized dictionaries of the small-town sixties no such definition could be found.

But so much of life never finds its way into the dictionary—or is severely misrepresented once codified there—that I eventually lost the bet. In fact, I even became a homo, although that came later. Actually, my instinct had been right—the playground taunts of sixth-graders had nothing to do with the sex life that, even then, evolved under my skin and in my daydreams, and everything to do with the fact that I wore my difference like a badge.

In retrospect, I’m glad I got such an early start. I did wear my difference the way I later wore “Gay Is Good” buttons—with pride, defiance and a bruised, sullen fear. I developed a healthy suspicion about anything anyone tagged “normal,” especially if by this label I sensed they were trying to bully me into participating in something I didn’t feel cut out for. I’ve had twenty-five years of practice saying No to this (and about the same amount of practice saying Yes to those things to which I was supposed to say No), and sometimes I think I had everything at age eleven I have now—except sex partners and community.

Now, I no longer feel alone in my queerness. In fact, as an openly sexual (and sexually divergent) person, I have become confidante and repository for many, many people’s secrets, and I know that queerness of one kind or another is…well, normal. And honey, we are not just talking homo.

I do not mean to imply, as many people assume when I begin to talk about queerness, difference or deviance, that I devalue people who live their lives in ways they or somebody else would call normal. I wish, primarily and profoundly, that each of us might lead the life that brings us the most happiness—that feels the most “right.” We all know, however, that many obstructions stand in our way. My childhood defiance and fear had one wellspring: concern that people would hurt me—and in a sense, most of my politics have evolved in order to understand and fight the tendency many folks have to treat those who are different as if they are not okay just the way they are.

Progressive causes called me. Feminism won my heart at the age of twelve (only to bruise it later). I spent my teen years arguing with brainwashed Christian kids who seemed to think God had given them carte blanche to spread small-mindedness everywhere. During college I analyzed structural inequities with the Marxists in my sociology department. I seemed, once my hormones hit, to have too much sexual orientation; staying safe in a sisterly niche called Lesbianism proved too difficult for me, and the minute I picked up John Rechy’s mid-seventies book about gay male sexual hunger and police oppression, The Sexual Outlaw, I knew it was about me, too.

I did not become acquainted with sex-radical philosophy until the feminist sex wars were in full swing, and until I did, it proved a lonely few years spent worrying that I was perhaps even too queer to be queer. I didn’t know any other bad lesbians who eroticized men (especially the gay ones whose “male-dominated” organizations we weren’t even supposed to join), staring lasciviously at leather-clad men’s chests with ring-pierced nipples when they bared them on Gay Pride Day, masturbating surreptitiously to gay men’s porn or, worse, kinky psychotherapy case books from the turn of the century.

I know plenty of women like that now. But ’til I moved to San Francisco and met them, I felt like my eleven-year-old self riffling helplessly if defiantly through Webster’s, searching for clues about what I could be, finding only the most oblique references to sexual difference. The present incarnation of the feminist movement has spent more than two decades grappling with gender, as has its subset, the lesbian-feminist community. When gender intersected with desire, most of us fell speechless, having no language to talk about sex but the paltry one we learned from our frequently sexually stymied and dysfunctional parents. We excoriated Freud for having the gall to ask what women want, then most of us rapidly changed the subject. We assumed we knew; or we hesitated to ask. We failed as miserably at listening to one another’s sexual needs and truths as our families and our culture had.

No wonder I stayed silent, while a decade-long, acrimonious argument carried out in the feminist press and in café conversations left me feeling judged even before I had a chance to speak up. Before the right wing co-opted the term politically correct to undermine everyone’s best attempts to deal with difference, we used it the way the Maoists had: for helpful self-criticism and to attack our own renegades. My secret sexual flowering happened amidst this din. My hand snuck into my pants over the most awful things. I read The Story of O—then crossed the picket line to see the movie. My ideal man was a cross between the Sweet Transvestite of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and a Tom of Finland leather daddy, but of course I didn’t talk about ideal men to anyone. My ideal woman was anyone who would growl, “I want to fuck you, not talk politics.” I kept myself busy with star-crossed romances, two at a time, and fell sweetly, quietly in love with a dozen gay men—most of whom, now, I have lost.

The lesbian-feminist community, with the gay communities in general, believed in our difference as much as any homophobe down at the trailer park or up in the Pentagon. Because we were not heterosexual, our issues were our own. We told ourselves that heterosexuals did not have to keep their lives and relationships secret, that heterosexuals received social blessing for their sexual feelings and that the heterosexual world teemed with role models. Heterosexuals did not have to contend with rejection based on their desires, they did not have to worry about growing old alone, they did not kill themselves when they realized they might be heterosexual.

I don’t intend for one instant to mock these concerns; the culture’s bigotry against gays and lesbians has shaped the gay community and its politics. Before AIDS, there was suicide, anti-gay violence and the stifling life of the closet. Before I’d turned twenty-one, I had lost a friend to his own self-loathing and terror; I had seen loveless, lustless heterosexual marriages entered into that were supposed to protect gay men or lesbians from detection. But I’d also seen a classmate committed to a mental institution, not for being gay, but because he was a cross-dresser. (Big difference, though many, including some gays, don’t get it.) I had lived as deeply in the closet as any queer while I pursued an affair with an older, married man—the discovery of which might have resulted in incarceration for us both, since I was underage.

In truth, the culture is lousy with sexual secrets and people who have been punished for them. My parents lived their pain around sex in airless silence, though their pain around everything else was easy enough to see. I was eighteen before my mother admitted to me she had been married twice (imagine that as a source of shame!), twenty-seven before she told me she had a history of incest. She had only told my father a few years before he died. He lived for thirty years with a woman who took no pleasure in sex; for most of those years he had no way of knowing why. I knew, before I knew what sex was, that something was wrong with them, very wrong. Today I know what was broken, and I know it never had half a chance to heal.

Gays and lesbians are incorrect when they say straight people have it easy. Sometimes straight people lack the very language to name the pain they feel when the culture thwarts their desires, even cuts off their access to desire itself. Did it ever occur to my parents to try to get help with their broken sex life? Did it seem “normal” to them—men wanting sex, women resisting? Did they even understand they each had a sexuality, much less that they had choices around how they would manage their sexualities over the course of their lives? My friend Will Roscoe once told me his theory of homophobia: Straight people, he said, are jealous of us, because we have a sexual orientation and they don’t. In our sexual otherness, we have to learn to talk about sex; it defines us in a way it doesn’t define heterosexuals, and in the process of becoming a community, we learn comfort with the language.

Many of us do, anyway. Not all of us escape the closet, the self-hatred, the too-tight clothes of Normalcy that fit us so poorly. But no one can tell me that the life of a hidden queer is unhappier than the pain I saw in my father. No one can tell me that heterosexual privilege did my mother a damned bit of good.

I saw in my parents’ example, and I learned from the gay movement, how crucial to happiness sexual honesty is. When I realized that my fantasies hid a sexual profile much more complicated than I admitted to, I knew I hadn’t yet done justice to Harvey Milk’s directive to “Come out!” I started by moving to San Francisco, where every kind of queer has fled to escape restrictive homes.

There my world no longer seemed split so neatly into Us and Them. I learned in the gay and lesbian communities a way to understand and politicize sexual identity: The idea of “sexual minority” lends itself to looking at other secret or embattled or oppressed ways of living in the desire-and-gender-coded body. But when gayness proved unable to contain all my desire, I learned to translate “Gay Is Good” to “Sex Is Good,” and that is a badge virtually all of us could learn to wear.

It is clear to me today that the pain and failure at the heart of my parents’ sexual relationship does not mean less—or more—than the pain and oppression the gay-rights movement works to alleviate; that even below the hatred and small-mindedness that power homophobic and all manner of censorious impulses, there is distress and pain about sex that, were it healed, might wither the roots of the poisonous tree. Erotophobia and xenophobia work together to empower every sort of despisal, including many of those at the heart of the “war between the sexes.” Given this, I wish to speak to a vast and varied audience.

More than any academic credential that provides both an overview and a screen of depersonalizing ivory-tower smoke, my experience living in many different sexual realms sources my qualification to speak up now. Too often we hear talk about sex that never seems to come from anyone’s first-person experience; how much easier to discuss other people’s real and imagined sexual experiences and shortcomings. We lack, more than any other thing, an atmosphere in which each of us might tell the stories of her or his experience and be heard by an audience who did not presume it appropriate to immediately hit the switch of excoriation or analysis. While we lack this in any sort of public arena, too many of us also lack it in private, in the silent circles of our marriages and significant-otherhoods, which should be the first places adults practice the skill of tolerance. And in our families, within which most of us failed to learn that our desires are our own, failed to have our growth in them respected, too many of us find our sexuality undermined and learn from this the habits of secrecy and blame.

I got my early sex information via a frustrating interplay of hands-on experience and book learning, but books proved hard to come by—literally as well as figuratively. A very few adults gave me everything from support to more books to a compassionate ear, though in today’s climate of fear about child abuse I wonder if any of them would dare to go out on a limb for me. Surely my adult lover would have been in the most trouble of all, even though he gave me more than any of them: warm skin, hard cock, heart (even though both of us refused to call it love), company on the rough passage from child- to adulthood.

As I grew, I took lovers the way I devoured books: hungrily, expectantly, looking for information as much as pleasure. I loved sex even when I didn’t like it, believed in my ability to piece together information that would let me see into the heart of (and avoid repeating) my parents’ pain.

For a while I believed what others told me: that men and women were erotically incompatible; that males got what they wanted out of sex while women did not; that it was my partners’ incompetence that kept me from having orgasms during sex with them. Men and women were seemingly separate species, and only gradually did it dawn on me that the legacy of my parents’ and my culture’s sexual silence resided in my own body, not just in mismatched sexual couplings: I did not know how I could be pleased, and so how could anyone be expected to know how to please me? By now it seems that I can trust my own experience more than anyone else’s version of love and sex, but in those days I had practically no experience on which to draw. Most of the sex I had had was not very impressive. It seemed as likely that clumsy, selfish male sexuality was to blame for this state as any other thing.

But in retrospect I realize I didn’t have enough information. I couldn’t even make myself have an orgasm until I snitched my parents’ vibrator (and, bless them, they never asked for it back—it must not have been missed). It shouldn’t have been surprising that my partners couldn’t “make” me have an orgasm, either. When my lovers asked me what I wanted in bed, I said, “Oh, everything you do feels wonderful,” even when it didn’t. I failed them as thoroughly as they failed me—partly because, as a young woman, I’d gotten too little access to good sex information and even less access to anything that would encourage me to take my own sexual needs seriously. Of course, my adolescent male partners hadn’t had much access to useful information, either.

I think now that much of the sexual resentment I see troubling women and men derives directly from our having been hormone-ridden, largely ignorant teenaged animals struggling to learn to make love while burdened with the weight of acculturated shame and crippling gender roles. My prescription for change—that children and adolescents be freely given permission and correct, wide-ranging sex information—seems farther away in this decade than it did when I was a teen. Child abuse is heinous—but why do I hear no outcry about the abuse that lies at the heart of sexual silence, of inculcated shame?

There is a multiculturalism of sexuality and of gender, and America today struggles as hard to bring it forth as we have struggled to respect and accommodate racial and cultural differences. In fact, some of the issues parallel each other. We know about the murderous toll racism can take in damaged lives, lynched bodies and dispirited communities; we must also look at the queer-bashed faggots, the murdered whores, all those who’ve been institutionalized for their sexual difference, the abortions botched or not available because birth control wasn’t available first, the HIV infections that would not have happened if clear safe-sex information had reached the people who needed it—in short, we must acknowledge the pink and the black triangles (which the Nazis forced homosexual men and whores, respectively, to wear in the camps) when we remember those forced to wear the yellow star. Allen Schindler’s murder notwithstanding, most of America tries not to dwell on the fates of those who die because of sex, though the skeletons rattle loudly.¹

The parallel goes further, to the proactive, remedial efforts of the multicultural movements. Just as racial and cultural tolerance must be taught, and generations of inculcated ignorance about and hostility to difference stand as the first barrier to this teaching, information about sex and sexual difference needs to be available and accessible. Just as racial and cultural pride can serve as an escalator to higher self-esteem, sex information is necessary first on the individual level; we have little access to sexual role models, and the rudiments (much less the fine points) of sexual functioning stay beyond the grasp of too many people. I do not mean birth control information, which serves as the only sex information many people get from school or parents. Contraception is only a subset of sex information, relevant only to a subset of the sexual population. Sex does not equal reproduction—even for heterosexuals—and society’s subtle insistence that it does decreases sexual possibility even for those whose preference is for other-gender partners. A culturally sanctioned emphasis on masturbation would avert more teen pregnancies than any other sex-ed strategy, but even those educators who know that are afraid to try it.

In fact, a culturally sanctioned emphasis on masturbation would avert a substantial amount of misery in youth and adults alike—especially if it were coded, as Betty Dodson says, as “self-loving.” (In China, hardly a sex-positive bastion, it goes by the charming euphemism “self-comfort.”) It seems to me that at the heart of the culture’s shame and antipathy about masturbation lies not only sex-negativity—that goes without saying—but also a bias that sexual pleasure is supposed to be about coupling with another, whether for an evening or a lifetime. Reveling in sexual pleasure when you’re all alone doesn’t foster what many of us, deep down, still believe is what sex is all about: relationship.

But sex is just as much about nerves firing and fantasy images playing on our private mental screens as it is about love or marriage. These might have gone together like horses and carriages back when that was how we got around, but the divorce rate suggests marriage and sex are no longer necessarily linked. In fact, I’m struck by how much of sex and its many layers of possibility remain unacknowledged by the most common cultural teachings, which continue to emphasize sex as embedded in relationship and rarely give much attention to the importance of the relationship we have with ourselves.

My journey into sexuality has been deeply informed by my relationship with myself: At different times, my curiosity, shyness, low or high self-esteem, orneryness, fear, bravery, anger and sense of awe have all affected the sizzling hormonal soup that began to bubble when I was eleven. If I hadn’t believed it was important to know myself—to listen to the stories I told myself in my fantasies, to unearth the ways I am my mother’s and father’s daughter as well as the ways I have proved myself a changeling, left to find my way—if I hadn’t faced up to my fear of being different, I probably would have wound up a lot more like everybody who called me Queen the Queer.

I’m lucky. The little demons I grew up with insisted that I understand my own individuality. Like rampaging animals everywhere, they lived to cut others out of the herd. And I got just enough love (and learned how to make my own) to make that separate place a refuge.

Each of us can stop cowering at the notion that we might be different. Of course we are—we all are. Each of us can care to discover what bubbles inside our skins, to pay attention to what makes us hard, wet, inspired or afraid.

While there’s more to life than sex (I guess), sex is a good place to start this project of listening to our own voices. Sex-positive, a term that’s coming into cultural awareness, isn’t a dippy love-child celebration of orgone—it’s a simple yet radical affirmation that we each grow our own passions on a different medium, that instead of having two or three or even half a dozen sexual orientations, we should be thinking in terms of millions. “Sex-positive” respects each of our unique sexual profiles, even as we acknowledge that some of us have been damaged by a culture that tries to eradicate sexual difference and possibility. Even so, we grow like weeds.

With Real Live Nude Girl, I am showing you the sex-positive world I could only discover after having been ostracized by a pack of scared kids. Once I decided most of what my culture had told me about sex was wrong, I set out on a prolonged walk on the wild side, and by now I’ve walked into more secret places than I ever knew existed.

They are wild and spirit-filled gardens, indeed.

 

Carol Queen
December 1996