monthly column from author/activist
Carol Queen

The Royal Treatment

Heading to Nashville

--that's right, the one in Tennessee -- we encountered a famous media doctor, one of those guys who has a syndicated show that plays everywhere. We told him we were heading to Nashville. Funny thing -- he had done a residency there once, oh so long ago, way before he got famous. "And you know," he confided to us, "what they say about those people up in the hollers is true! We saw all kinds of people who married their sister or had kids by their daddy. All kinds of genetic variation out there."

Well! Whether or not he was yanking our chain, the theme music from "Deliverance" twanged through our heads. We had no idea what we were getting into by going to Tennessee, except that I was supposed to speak at a Women's Studies conference and several other gigs had been arranged by our host, Sunfrog, so the Tennesseans could get the most out of our visit (and we'd be more likely to break even). Sunfrog -- our old pal from the bi-poly-anarchist-poet side of life -- had transmogrified into an instructor at Middle Tennessee State University, where most of my gigs would be held. When not busy being English or Women's Studies faculty, he's working on his fabulous 'zines or on his communal land, Pumpkin Hollow. That's where he took us to stay the first night, steering the car away from the lights of Nashville and onto roads as dark as any I've seen since I was a kid in backwoods Oregon.

Roads in that part of Tennessee are often named according to where they originate and where they go. We drove down the "Prosperity to Dismal" road. Uh-oh, I thought, that is such a bad omen. My concerns turned out to be without merit -- the trip was prosperous in every way. Still, I considered that if we just turned around, we'd be on the "Dismal to Prosperity" road, which seemed like a better deal all the way around. Incidentally, there seemed to be no Dismal, TN. Perhaps it got its name by being whisked away by a tornado. We heard it was tornado season, in fact, right at the moment -- made it a little harder to enjoy the flurries of spring wind.

At Pumpkin Hollow we stayed in a converted school bus complete with a woodstove and, it seemed, a pack rat. We never saw the rat, and fortunately Sunfrog's handsome young tomcat Rumi hospitably stayed to protect us, but by damn, we were up a Tennessee holler with the wild animals. So atmospheric!

Middle Tennessee

So far, Middle Tennessee seemed a lot like Middle Earth. Rather hobbitty landscape, very pretty -- like Oregon, in fact, with more deciduous and fewer evergreen trees in the mix. The next day, though, we went to the local big city -- Murfreesboro. My whirlwind campus tour had begun.

I had simply no idea of what to expect. Pretty much everyone in San Francisco who knew we were going to Tennessee had gasped melodramatically and urged extreme caution. We even got a rabid warning or two: "They'll kill you out there!" Hell of a bad rap for a pretty state not even in the way-deep South. And folks were actually very nice. All the profs whose classes I addressed were tickled to have me, and many of the students clustered around, a few even clutching ratty copies of my books. "We read you in class!" one of them piped up, and I had a distinctly Firesign Theatre moment: Carol, Everything you Know Is Wrong.

Now, I cherish these moments. I firmly believe that prejudice hurts the holder as well as the target -- that when we let preconceived ideas fill our heads, it's like stuffing them with cotton (or worse) so no real information can get in. Between worrying about rednecks coming to kill us, wondering about all the brother-sister incest going on up in the hollers, and that "Deliverance" music twanging away, I risked completely missing what Tennessee was really all about. So feeling my brain stretch and strain to take in contradictory information was a real pleasure. We had Thai food for lunch, for Christs' sake! The campus might have been crawling with right-wing Christians (in fact, I'm pretty sure it was), but there were also the usual wonderful batch of alternative-culture freaks who come to see me wherever I go: the bi folk, the poly ones, some sex workers, and of course the emigrants -- just in from one or the other coast or major city, learning to live in a place like Murfreesboro but really happy to hear a voice from elsewhere. For their parts, the Tennessee feminists and Sociology professors were glad to have me show up to say outrageous things that they didn't necessarily feel comfortable saying while having to continue to live and work on a pretty conservative campus.

So I was in great demand that week as a classroom speaker. Sunfrog had set everyone up with my essays for student readers, and everyone knew at least a little about what I'd have to say. Still, it was a terrific mix of perspectives: I talked about sex work for a History of US Morals class, prostitution and feminism for a Women's Studies class, about sexual communities and prostitution for a Sociology of Deviance class (finally, a place I could start my remarks by saying, "Hi, I'm your Deviance poster girl!"), and about my book PoMoSexuals and queer literature for a Postmodern Lit graduate seminar. In fact, that was a pretty postmodern mix right there. All that -- in Tennessee! It turned out many of these departments plus the school's lit magazine, the Scribbling Mob, had contributed to pay my honorarium -- Sunfrog, ever the collectivist, had arranged all this.

But that wasn't all. There were two more campus lectures to give, visits to Pumpkin Hollow's sister communes Ida and Short Mountain, both of them queer faerie sanctuaries (more about them below), and then a trip back to Nashville: I had a reading to do at Halcyon Books, a wonderful little anarchist bookstore, and then a performance at a bar called the Springwater. (In between, a dinner party at an Ethiopian place, accompanied by about a dozen and a half dressed-up faeries -- another great pomo moment!) At Springwater I'd perhaps benefit from the fact that a very interesting and on the whole flattering article had come out about my visit in the Nashville alternative paper -- plus, Sunfrog, Scribbling Mob representatives, and several of the faeries from Short Mountain and Ida were going to perform with me, the latter going by the moniker "The Eggplant Faerie Players." ("When we toured Europe, they called us the Aubergines.") Central to the Eggplants is a duo who both live at Ida, Maxzine and Tom Foolery; they sing and play mandolins, as we had already heard when they'd entertained us at Ida the night before, plus Tom Foolery had a very unusual and fabulous skill: he can juggle anything, including dildos! Rubber dongs went flying -- plus, he balanced a double dong on the tip of his nose. Just try that at home!

I had a grand time reading and doing excerpts from my solo show "Peep Show," but the best fun of the night, and an utter surprise, was when the Eggplant Faerie Players sang their just-written Carol Queen Theme Song! Damn, even Dr. Ruth doesn't have a theme song! I'll have to get you the full lyrics -- I didn't have a chance to memorize them -- but here's the chorus, to give you a taste: "Real Live Nude Girl kinky sexy horny/A real live doctor of Sexu-ology/She'll tell you 'bout your g-spot and your prostate gland/She'll even tell you why it is you like to get spanked/She's Dr. Carol/Carol Queen!"

Sweet, eh? When they send me a recording of it, I'm going to put it on my website.

Unbuckling the Bible Belt

Sunfrog -- with at least as much energy as his namesake -- kept me going all week, showing me everything and everyone of alternative culture interest in Middle Tennessee. His wonderful partner Victoria did her best to keep up, as did we (and for poor Robert, who has been hospitalized again this winter, it was like running a triathlon to stay with us). But Sunfrog had a mission, and I was happy to be his agent: "We're unbuckling the Bible belt!" he crowed (to massive applause) at the Springwater gig, and I took to announcing this everywhere unless he said it first. There's no question that many residents of Tennessee are ready to have the belt pulled wide open -- and maybe even the pants buttons undone. It was also evident that we were not the first who'd come along with this idea in mind. The second day we were there, one of Victoria's friends called to ask if we wanted to buy some "French postcards." Yee-haw! We hoped they'd be circa-Civil War rarities, but instead they were from the '40s -- but buy them we did, rescuing them from some old man's angry widow who wanted to consign them to the fire. They were the perfect souvenir, the proof that Tennessee's Bible belt has been unbuckled many times before -- often in secret, true, but unbuckled all the same.

The Radical Faeries have had a substantial presence in the hills and hollers of Middle Tennessee since the '70s, along about the time that, on the other side of Murfreesboro, Stephen and Ida Mae Gaskin were setting up The Farm. Pumpkin Hollow is the baby of the bunch -- Short Mountain is the oldest and the best developed. We saw it on Sunday, our last day in Tennessee, when we went there to do an Anatomy of Pleasure workshop -- right out in the early-Spring sunshine, and, when the wind changed, noticeably near "the chapel" and "the confessional," a.k.a. the two adjacent outhouses. R.F.D., the rural gay men's magazine, is still being published at Short Mountain (it has been an important organ of Radical Faerie culture since around 1975), and as we talked about g-spots and prostate glands I felt very deeply centered in queer culture. The mainstream gay and lesbian movement has achieved great things in the past thirty years, but I'm not sure what can outdo the impact of groups of faeries going back to the land and learning to live with rural neighbors. The R.F.D. shares phone wiring with the Bible study folks who live up on the ridge. How can anyone doubt, hearing that, that the world is in some small ways becoming a better place?

Even though my all-campus lecture, "What Is Sex-Positive Feminism?", drew one angry campus complaint as well as a decent-sized crowd, I felt my time in Tennessee was well-spent. I sold a lot of seditious books, met some warm and wonderful people, talked until I was hoarse, picked up a few mid-century smutty antiques, and knocked down a few of my preconceived notions about life in the Bible Belt. All in a week's work for this real live doctor of Sexu-ology.

For more on my trip to Tennessee (responding to the charge that I live in "a utopian bubble of sex privilege"), see my column "Queen Online" in the April issue of the Good Vibrations Magazine.