Coloring Books for Congress
By Dr. Carol Queen • Sep 21st, 1998 • Category: Carol QueenIn spite of the fact that I can’t keep up with mine, I just love e-mail. People send me amazing tidbits all the time. Last week’s favorite factoid is a perfect counterpoint to all the Lewinsky stuff that’s all over the Net and everyplace else, and it also reminds us to remember a “holiday” that all the furor over the presidential sex life threatens to eclipse: Banned Books Week.
Tee Corinne e-mailed me news that her book The Cunt Coloring Book, which has been a steady seller at Good Vibrations for close to 20 years, is being used by the Traditional Values Coalition in an attempt to smear James Hormel, the gay San Francisco philanthropist who is up for the ambassadorship to Luxembourg. No, they’re not alleging Hormel likes to relax with a box of crayons (though I can imagine a really funny skit based on that premise): Corinne’s art book can be found in the Gay and Lesbian Center of the San Francisco Public Library, which Hormel helped to fund. The TVC sent someone with a library card in to look for dirt, and the right-wing group then sent Corinne’s book, along with a packet containing photocopies of other book excerpts, to all 100 US senators. They thoughtfully included packages of crayons, as the Washington Post put it on September 2, “for lawmakers who are feeling artistic.”
Some of Susie Bright’s work is also included in the packet, including the introduction to Susie Sexpert’s Lesbian Sex World and Nothing But the Girl, the volume of erotic lesbian photography edited by Bright and Jill Posener.
This incident represents a different wrinkle in the history of book-banning — but it’s part of that history all the same. Using books to discredit a political enemy is a first step towards attacking the books themselves, and in some ways it’s even more insidious than the extreme right’s usual tactics, which more often than not involve banning books the old-fashioned way: getting them removed from libraries (and, once in a while, throwing them on a nice traditional bonfire).
Corinne’s book is an interactive relative of our own book Femalia — a non-threatening tool to help women and the people who love them get familiar and comfortable with “cunts” (that is, clits, vulvas, labia, vaginas, and all the rest). I suppose many of the senators can actually use the information — and, unless the TVC got the 100 copies by hook or crook, Corinne will get a few bucks in royalties out of the deal. But the notion that books have been used in this sort of dirty political game is chilling. And if the strategy works — if Hormel loses the ambassadorship because of the books he helped make publicly available — the forces of sexual literacy and sanity lose even more decidedly than we will if Clinton’s president is shot down over Monicagate. It’s a worse defeat because lying about sex can’t be spun as a good thing — understandable, sure; forgivable, maybe; but not good. But it’s terrifying to see someone under attack for putting information into people’s hands. And if this tactic works, you know we’ll see a newly inspired extreme right wing — inspired in their anti-gay venom, and inspired to ban books. (Wait ’til they read Vox, the wonderful Nicholson Baker phone sex novella allegedly given to Clinton by Lewinsky.)
If you feel like talking sense to your senators, this would be a good time. If you just want to know what the fuss is about, we have plenty of copies of The Cunt Coloring Book on hand. It’s also a nice balance if you’ve been reading Ken Starr’s overpriced report — all that focus on the presidential penis! But you’ll have to get your own crayons.
Dr. Carol Queen >> Carol Queen is a writer, speaker, educator and activist with a doctorate in sexology. First as an organizer in the lesbian/gay community, where she helped found one of the first gay youth groups in the United States, and later in the emerging international bisexual community, as a sex worker and a practitioner of alternative sexualities, she typically teaches and writes from her own experience and that of her communities even as she references academic thought on these subjects. See her website: www.carolqueen.com.
All posts by Dr. Carol Queen
