What’s up with the Center for Sex and Culture?

Fab picture of Carol Queen by my friend, Black Pearl 10.

Is pretty much the question I’m asking this week in my column, The (Off)Center for Sex & Culture: After a struggle, the nonprofit plans for a very sexy future, again. I finally got to ask about their crazy collection — and it makes me wish I had $20 million or more to make the center (and sex museum) of my — of our — dreams. Snip:

Our local Center for Sex & Culture, has been a lot like the rest of us City renters: always on the move thanks to crap-ass landlords and rotten neighbors. Incorporated in 2000, it’s a community-based sex education non-profit offering lectures, classes, workshops, salons and discussion groups, book parties and cultural events pertaining to sexuality. It maintains a truly incredible sex library and archive of books, videos, and rare items, attracting scholars from various colleges and universities, including Harvard, Stanford, Bryn Mawr, and San Francisco State. But now, it seems like our Center has found a hell of a fit in its new location and has the kind of neighbors you brag about for at least the next decade.

The Mission Street location once occupied by The Jon Sims Center for the Performing Arts, the LGBTQ arts organization that served San Francisco for almost 30 years before its demise in mid-2007, has been reborn as OffCenter, a partnership between Mama Calizo’s Voice Factory Theatre: San Francisco’s Premiere Queer and Activist Performance Center and The Center for Sex & Culture.

The OffCenter space will be the Center for Sex & Culture’s third location in San Francisco since 2004. Says executive director Dr. Carol Queen:

“We finally feel we’ve found a safe space within which to conduct our programming, and are thrilled to have a location partner like Mama Calizo’s. The Center for Sex & Culture has had to leave its two previous locations, in each case at least partly because of our landlords’ or neighbors’ issues with some of our programming. In order to maintain allegiance to our mission and to retain our communities’ support, we could not let others’ discomfort with our events limit our offerings. The SF Human Rights Commission is currently investigating the situation regarding the space we vacated last year. Under the circumstances, we’re ecstatic to have found a location partner in Dwayne Calizo who values queer, marginalized, and cutting-edge programming — it definitely feels like coming home.”

I asked Dr. Queen a few questions about the present and future of San Francisco’s Center for Sex & Culture, and got some pretty interesting answers:

Violet Blue: Will the Center be open to visitors during business hours?

Carol Queen: At some point yes. At this point we are all-volunteer and everyone has other jobs and lives, so we converge to work together when we can, and individual interns and volunteers come in and do solo projects. But regular open-to-the-public hours will be on the menu sometime, and may even involve the library being a real (though private, membership-based) lending library.

VB: What does your amassed collection include?

CQ: We have academic papers and journals, individual correspondence, old fetish catalogs, your granddad’s porn and grandma’s vibrators, costumes and paraphernalia, all kinds of erotic materials from super-8 to DVD, paste-up sheets from magazines (before the Web, you know, we had to glue stuff to a piece of graph paper and have it printed), old ‘zines, pop-cultural sex tomes from the 1960s onward, phone sex scripts from the 1980s…basically anything sex-related except that involving images of people under 18. We don’t accept that material at all, but everything else is of interest to us.

Mainly we collect it for two reasons: We don’t want it to be lost to history, as so much sex material is — it’s really the original ephemera, so likely to be jettisoned when a collector dies or is convinced by a therapist to get rid of it or whatever. (Actually, we once had a therapist bring a discarded stash of her client’s porn over for him.) Secondly, all this material, especially when you can go through a lot of it at once, is culturally and academically significant. (…read more!).