Good Vibrations Magazine

At heart I’m just a small-town girl from Oregon — granted, a girl who got called queer even before my tormenters were old enough to know what the epithet was supposed to mean — and moving to San Francisco fifteen years ago was a big deal for me. It meant I had to learn the [...]

…is one of the many clever ways to describe masturbation, and of course May is National Masturbation Month, so here’s hoping you’re loving yourself as well as possible these days. I’ve talked about masturbation to several jillion people since Good Vibes began National Masturbation Month five years ago; I routinely talk to large groups and [...]

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 [...]

You know a genre has arrived culturally when people start making fun of it — not garden-variety, “Nyaah, nyaah, it’s stupid” type fun, but actual spoof or satire. By this measurement, porn est arrivee. Oh, sure, I know the argument can be made that much porn is already a spoof of itself — mostly not [...]

It’ll probably be ignored by more mainstream bastions of contemporary, even pop, culture, but a minor miracle happened this week at the Adult Video News awards ceremony in Las Vegas — the so-called “adult Oscars,” where porn movies and their stars, directors, and box cover designers get recognized for their excellence. “Excellence” has sometimes been [...]

The holidays are a hell of a time to go to the hospital (although in San Francisco we do have a special attraction: the award-winning SF Gay Men’s Chorus singing carols), but last week I checked in my partner Robert. A routine exam had gone wrong, showing a stricture at a previous surgical site, and [...]

Carol was so busy being San Francisco Pride’s most beautiful Grand Marshal ever that we gave her the month off. We’re running an archived, yet still important, column in its place.
First-time Good Vibrations customers often ask us whether they’ll become “addicted” to their vibrators. When I do public speaking and talk about toys, people occasionally [...]

My partner Robert and I recently went out to grab lunch at the Tempest, our favorite burger joint, a place near the Good Vibrations office that hosts bands, a bar, and an active pool table. Robert headed for the restroom to wash up and came back steamed. He described a Planned Parenthood poster he’d seen [...]

I’ve had the wonderful task over the course of the last three months to help re-envision our already-terrific web site. As fast as the Internet moves — and in as many directions — it became clear to us that we have been tapping only part of the web’s potential with goodvibes.com. It’s my pleasure to [...]

Last month my partner Robert and I went to Ohio to visit his family. They live out in the middle of many thousands of acres of corn and soybeans in Clyde, a town no one outside of Ohio has ever heard of (in fact, few Ohioans we talked to knew where it was). This little [...]

While politicians gear up to outdo themselves sounding like each other — another election year, mostly banal but with real implications for those of us in the sexuality communities — a case in Attleboro, Massachusetts reminds us how close we are to the bad old days when sex was dirty and if you engaged in [...]

You may have already received the Good Vibrations Summer 2000 catalog in the mail (if you’ve requested a paper catalog recently or are on our confidential mailing list, that is). Each summer we give our catalog a special theme, usually having to do with travel to San Francisco. After all, our store is a landmark [...]

For a couple of weeks early in May, my life was a blur. I was trying to keep track of dozens of details for the Annie Sprinkle show at the Castro Theatre which Good Vibes sponsored and simultaneously getting ready for the live worldwide webcast of the “One-Handed Reading” Reading. And perhaps most importantly, I [...]

You must know by now that May is National Masturbation Month. I’ve spent many early morning hours for the last few weeks telling the world via interviews on drive-time radio shows — blessedly, this year we’ve mostly avoided the shock jocks whose real reason for having us on the air is to see if they [...]

Just last week the Supreme Court once again took on the question of whether nude dancing is covered by the First Amendment as a form of protected speech. Previous cases have suggested that it is, even though it isn’t literally speech — dancing is considered a form of artistic expression, though, so it shouldn’t matter [...]

“The problem with Dr. Laura’s anti-gay rhetoric is it doesn’t stop even after you turn it off.”
That’s the headline of an ad placed in the San Francisco Examiner and other papers last week by the Horizons Foundation. It shows a picture of an old-fashioned radio — Dr. Laura Schlessinger’s estimated 20 million listeners a week [...]

Valentine’s Day has always been a big deal around Good Vibrations. Long before you could buy heart-shaped merchandise virtually everywhere, the lovers’ holiday brought shoppers to us by the score. Sure, you can always fall back on a Hallmark card, a bouquet of roses, or a box of candy: those things telegraph romance, at least [...]

About a week before Christmas — the hottest time of the year for retailers — the staff of Good Vibrations’ Berkeley store stopped the bustle for a couple of minutes for a toast. Then they jumped back behind the register and out on the floor, asking overwhelmed holiday shoppers and first-time store visitors whether they [...]

There’s a lot more to what we do at Good Vibes than celebrating porn. Some nights we drag home after a long day’s work and would rather read the Sears catalog than cue up a blue movie or open a smut book. On the other hand, porn is more than just a product around here. [...]

I’ve been writing an advice column, “Queen of Hearts,” for the past three years. It appears regularly in the East Bay Express, one of the Bay Area’s free weeklies, and soon it will begin appearing on my own web site, www.carolqueen.com. Though the site is still in the construction stages and will gradually feature more [...]

Staci Haines came to work at Good Vibrations in the early 1990s. Things were shaking in her life and at the business — we were exploring worker-ownership and growing fast, and Staci was developing supportive, sex-positive workshops for survivors of sexual abuse. It was a worker-workplace match with bountiful benefits for her and for us. [...]

Before Viagra, the training tour I gave new Good Vibrations store and mail order staff was a little different than it is now. B.V. (Before Viagra), I introduced mens’ toys like cock rings and pumps by talking about how many customers wanted to use them to affect their erections. Pumps operate by suction and can [...]

Friends of Good Vibes know that Annie Sprinkle is one of our favorite artists. From her beginnings as a porn star in the wild and crazy 1970s to her later incarnation as avant-garde performance artist and videographer, Annie’s one-of-a-kind presence makes the world a better place. (See below for a list of Annie’s work available [...]

One of my jobs at Good Vibrations is showing our stores to members of the press, some of whom visit from very far away. We’ve been featured on television many times in the U.S. and Canada, but also in England, Germany, Sweden, Australia, France, and other countries. The print journalists who have visited Good Vibes [...]

What do you think of when someone says “May Day?” The pagan rite with the flowers and the Maypole? (This old ritual is still with us in the phrase, “Hurray, hurray, the First of May; outdoor fucking starts today!”) If you’re an old Lefty you may think of International Workers’ Day.
At Good Vibes we can’t [...]