Carol Queen

American author, editor, sociologist, and sexologist

Carol Queen (born 1957) is an American author, editor, sociologist, and sexologist active in the sex positive feminism movement. Queen is a two time Grand Marshal of San Francisco LGBTQ Pride. 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 novel The 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, a San Francisco sex 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, Chief Cultural Officer, curator, and historian.

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 Bi Any Other Name: Bisexual People Speak Out.

The neologism absexual has also been introduced by Queen, although it was coined by her partner. Based on its prefix ab (as in "abhor" or in "abreaction"), 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. 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."

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." She is bisexual.

Carol Queen's Great Vibrations: An Explicit Guide to Vibrators, Blank Tapes, ~1997.