S.F.’s sexual revolutions get Ivy League respect

Once upon a time in the hinterlands of America, Carol Queen was a young college student participating in the University of Oregon’s first “alliance” for lesbian, gay and bisexual students. Listening to her fellow students, Queen, now 61, realized “that history was being created, and I was standing in it.”

So she started collecting evidence — pamphlets, buttons and discussion materials that reflected a community moving toward its first stirrings of political and social power.

Like many people interested in alternative sexuality, Queen moved to San Francisco in the 1970s. Here she discovered a wealth of communities exploring all kinds of things. There were people interested in kink, and people who were interested in bondage. There were feminists who hated pornography, and feminists who loved it. There were people creating non-monogamous frameworks for their relationships. There were people who were queer, and people who were transgender.

There was evidence of history everywhere, and Queen collected it all. Her collections became the backbone of a historic San Francisco nonprofit, the Center for Sex and Culture in the South of Market neighborhood.

Until it closed its doors at the end of January, the Center for Sex and Culture served as a gathering place for San Francisco’s “sex-positive” community, regardless of orientation. Thanks to a rent hike (another common story in San Francisco history), the center’s activities — the bondage courses and memorials for deceased adult film stars, the erotic readings and “masturbate-a-thons” — no longer have a permanent home. But Queen’s archival work will. In recognition that Queen was, in fact, standing in history, the center’s archive has been acquired by Harvard and Radcliffe universities. In the closed yellow building on Mission Street, the center’s all-volunteer staff is boxing up more than 3,600 books and periodicals to be sent to Cambridge, Mass.

“I was never trained to create an archive, but I kept all of this stuff because I knew it would allow people in the future to understand how all of these communities lived,” Queen said. “I was just really fortunate that other people thought this way, too.”

The center’s archives may be documents of history, but in many ways, they offer a window into our present.

To understand a hot-button contemporary issue like sexual consent, for example, it’s interesting to know that radical sexual communities in San Francisco were creating the rules around it decades ago.

“The BDSM community, for example, was really trying to think about consent, and writing up ideas and sharing them with other practitioners,” said Laura Frost, the center’s archive director, referring to participants in bondage, discipline or sadomasochism. “Scholars around the world are going to want to see that material, because it’s not like you can just download what small, private groups of people were communicating with each other about these practices back then.”

Similarly, the center’s archives reflect other big social issues that are only coming to the forefront in mainstream culture right now. These include schisms in feminism, women’s halting progress toward sexual pleasure, and the slow, steady battle for transgender people’s rights.

“You might say that these people were working on a more extreme version than the rest of us are on issues of feminism, agency, consent, sex education and sexuality, but they also had to create the language that’s really informing all of our discussions right now,” Frost said.

As for the center, it may no longer be open to the public in a building, but its staff is continuing to plan pop-up events, podcasting and publishing.

While they have concerns about the ways in which San Francisco is becoming less welcoming to people who want to explore their sexuality — mostly because the rent is just too high — there’s also an understanding that the center’s specific trajectory has ended as well as it could.

Queen sees the center’s closure as an opportunity to return to her other projects around sexual education. Also the staff sexologist at Good Vibrations, she wants to “recommit to the important cultural work that place does.” She’ll also do more writing, including work on a memoir.

As sad as she is to see the center close, Queen said she does feel a sense of relief that her life’s work of documenting San Francisco’s sexual revolutions will be preserved for those who need it in dark times.

“When I started collecting a lot of this material, it was considered the type of stuff that most towns in America would’ve burned in a trash can,” Queen said. “I saw saving it as a kind of activism for people who were trying to make sense of their sexuality, their gender and their place in the world.

“And the truth is that we could go back into another moment in this country where all of this material is difficult to access. I hope we never live in that country again, but there are no guarantees.”

The Center for Sex and Culture archive has been acquired by Harvard and Radcliffe universities.