Good Vibrations Magazine

I spent last week in Tennessee, a fact that caused some consternation among my California friends when they heard about my travel plans. “Be careful!” they exhorted. “Get out of there alive!”

Oh, come now. The Tennesseans I met were all very polite, even when they weren’t crazy about what I had to say. Even though Sunfrog, my poet/activist/academic friend and host, calls his home in Middle Tennessee “the buckle of the Bible belt,” I cheerfully spread sex-positive feminist sedition wherever I went and emerged with nary a scratch. Sunfrog originally invited me to speak at a Women’s Studies conference at Middle Tennessee State University, where he teaches, but by the time the itinerary was complete he had set me up with nine lectures, workshops, and readings. At the conference, Women and Power: Engendering Risk, I talked about my take on “risky” feminism: I spoke about the sex-positive perspective, sex work, and women’s experience of sexual experimentation and adventure. In spite of its early time slot (8:15 a.m. in Tennessee is the middle of the night, according to my jet-lagged diurnal rhythms), 40 or 50 people showed up to talk about these issues.

Afterwards, Sunfrog kept his ears perked to hear various post-session discussion threads among the participants, while I went and signed books. He came back having found a pod of dissenters too polite to have spoken up in person. They were saying that I hadn’t said anything relevant, dismissing sex-positive feminism because my life, unlike theirs, is lived in “a Utopian bubble of sex privilege.” (That’s Sunfrog’s phrase, not theirs — told you he’s a poet.)

And what a great phrase it is! I immediately pictured San Francisco the way Ernest Callenbach posited his futuristic Ecotopia — a thriving community sealed under a bubble, to keep out the toxic pollutants in which the greater world is steeped. Well, from a sex-positive perspective that’s what San Francisco is, in a way: a place where the toxic homophobia, biphobia, and other erotophobias that plague the outside world recede, so that people’s erotic and gender diversity has a much more supportive place to grow and be expressed. San Francisco is not paradise (especially lately, with traffic getting worse and the digital revolution driving up housing costs). But I can see how someone who lives in Murfreesboro, Tennessee might think I come from a very foreign land, a place where, as the fortune cookie puts it, “strange customs prevail.”

I suppose I do think of San Francisco as a kind of imperfect Utopia. And I had also spoken about privilege in my conference remarks: Not everyone has been given the space and the skills to explore their own sexuality, and to be in a position to do so is, in fact, a privilege, no matter how hard-won or readily available. Creating a more sex-positive life isn’t usually first on the agenda of people with hungry kids to feed, who have to scramble to keep a roof over their heads, or who are living in conditions of abuse. While I believe that sexual pleasure is as much a birthright as food and meaningful work, we all know there are many people who don’t presently have access to any of those basics.

The women who agreed, out on the smoking porch, that my comments were irrelevant were young college feminists. Probably fairly new to living on their own, they had originally asked me about issues like setting limits with predatory guys: How can you explore your sexuality, dress like an erotic woman and go outside, live a sex-positive life when guys keep bugging you? I don’t know their sexual orientation, don’t know about their relationship status, but it’s true that issues of safety and boundaries are basic to this discussion, and the less safe you feel, the harder it is to feel sex-positive. This is one reason that the threat of sexual violence isn’t just a feminist issue, it’s a vital issue for the entire sex-positive community. I’m sorry the way I addressed their question was (apparently) unsatisfactory — but there was also an undercurrent in it of a kind of hostility: “That’s all very well for you, but you don’t live in the real world.”

I didn’t have an opportunity to say it to them, but I want to say it now: People living positive sexual lives, exploring their own erotic individuality, espousing sex-positive ideals, aren’t born in cabbages, and we don’t all live in San Francisco. People fitting this description live in all parts of the country and come from almost all walks of life. Many of us struggled with the exact issues the young Tennessee feminists are dealing with now. Access to self-esteem has not always been easy for us; some of us have had horrific sexual experiences (and most of the rest of us have had at least a few really mediocre ones); many of us have had to search for information about our bodies and the way they function, or information that would help us understand and accept our desires. Many of us come from frankly sex-negative backgrounds, often with religious dogma adding to our own families’ discomfort and dysfunction around sexual issues.

In short, we come from backgrounds pretty similar to those of most everybody else, including the young women who thought sex-positive thought was irrelevant in their lives.

Maybe that’s because they’re stuck in Middle Tennessee? Nope, that’s not it either. While in Tennessee I met a feminist couple whose male partner was a stay-at-home dad and whose female partner brought home the bacon; bisexual polyamorists; a handsome butch academic and her girlfriend, a beautiful femme; male feminists determined, like Sunfrog, to “unbuckle the Bible belt”; three whole communes full of Radical Faeries, the gender-playful, back-to-the-land arm of the queer community (one of whom juggles dildos); a nice Nashville couple writing sex books for women and men; an independent bookstore owner who orders all the interesting sexual material she can get, selling it to Tennesseans hungry for something other than Bible bookstore fare — and many other wonderful folks who are exploring sexuality and relationship possibilities, right there in the Bible Belt. I felt right at home.

What’s the moral of the story? If sex-positivity is Utopian — and in a way, it is — we have to be willing to envision the world we want, wherever we are, and start figuring out how to create it: who our allies and appropriate partners are, how to challenge the internal and external voices that say, “You can’t do that.”

Sure, there are dangers, especially in more conservative places. There are inner stumbling blocks, too, and skills to learn. But this country is growing more diverse all the time, with far more sex-positive people than we ever imagine living in scattered corners, even up Tennessee hollers. If I ever doubted it, this trip proved to me the power of sex-positive thinking.

More about Carol Queen’s Tennessee trip will be available in early April at www.spectatormag.com, in her column “The Royal Treatment.”