RECALL RECAP

What’s that old proverb? “The people get the government they deserve”? “May you live in interesting times”? “If it can go wrong, it will”?

Myself, I gaze daily upon an old Quote of the Month from my Working Assets phone bill. It’s from Mark Twain, who is, as far as I know, no relation to Shania (I note this for all of you who are overawed by celebrity): “Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”

This almost never happens to me, though. Whatever hell I’m bound for, Mark will be there, and we’ll chat. I only wish we could have elected him governor.

I am heartened by one result of the recall election (which happened yesterday, as I write this) it looks like the porno vote was about 25,000 people. Sure, it’s a fraction of a percentage point, but it’s a large percentage of Spectator’s readership! Since we at Spectator gave more press to Mary Carey and Larry Flynt than most other media outlets, it seems clear that we swayed almost all of you! Except you dyed-in-the-wool Pumping Iron fans, that is. Well, you’ll get what’s coming to you.

I only know one thing for sure about this election outcome, and that’s that I’d love to be a fly on the wall when the Governator tries to intimidate John Burton. Ha! There’s your Hollywood/Real Life split right there.

Best day-of-election campaign sign spotted: “Grope me, Arnie! Total Recall!” This was on a car with a sort-of-soccer-mom inside. This confirmed my worst fear about California politics: The majority is standing in line waiting to get their ass grabbed by somebody famous.

BUT BEFORE ALL THE SPECIAL EFFECTS KICK IN…

There’s Halloween! And you always need something to do on Halloween, don’t you? It’s not a good day to be stuck indoors. For one thing, that makes your inner exhibitionist sad. For another, it means you’ll have to answer the door three million times and face legions of children whose mommies (the ones who voted for Schwarzenegger because they secretly dream of being groped by Conan the Barbarian) drove them to your condo complex to extort all the sugar-laden goodies out of the pantry.

Don’t even think about giving them Tootsie Rolls twisted into obscene shapes. You know how much trouble that’ll cause. Just come on over to San Francisco and come to HallowQueen.

HallowQueen! Yes, I’ll be there. Yes, it’s about me sort of. No, it wasn’t my idea. But it will be a fun and frisky Halloween night party, so c’mon down! Here’s the story:

HallowQueen is a benefit for a documentary about me and my younger brother John. John’s a born-again Christian… and I’m not. Magen Callaghan, a filmmaker who’s a friend of a friend of John’s, told him a couple of years ago that there was a woman in San Francisco who had the same last name, but who wrote all about sex and stuff. Gloomily, John fessed up: “Errrr… that’s my sister.”
“Score!” thought Magen. “A great subject for a weird documentary exploring American family life and its many dissonances!”

Or something like that. “Two Queens” (the movie-in-progress) does look at the strange phenomenon of a family where the kids turn out really, really different yet with many of the same influences. We weren’t separated at birth, neither of us was raised by wolves in fact, we were both raised by the same mom and dad, neither of whom was a born-again Christian or a big sex fiend. Perhaps you have a strange dissonance like this, or like something else, in your own family; at any rate, ever since we began the documentary project, people have been telling me about their own inexplicably different siblings, so I know it’s not just us.

John majored in computers and I majored in sex. But this difference was already well-established, and religion has been important to him for a long time. For Magen the documentarian this has meant great opportunities to show us in our natural environments in John’s case, a spartan apartment with a Bible on the table, and in mine, onstage at one of the many gigs I do. I do gigs a lot, as many of you know, and one of the first things Magen did was have John join me at one of my readings. I assume her camera caught the top of his head from behind as it got redder and redder I know I saw it glowing there like a beacon because, though John has long known intellectually what I’m up to here in the City, he hadn’t ever seen me stand up in front of a room full of people and hold forth about bondage, pelvic exams, or any of the other things I write about.

I know some families have a close enough relationship that they can talk about anything together. Maybe you are one of those dads or moms, influenced by the 1970s, who has made a point of creating a family setting where your kids can ask you about birth control and drugs. John and I didn’t grow up in a family like that. I recall the Dad Lecture about sex, which for some unexplained reason I was sent out to join (he held it in the back yard, away from Mom, next to the empty gas tank that was covered in weeds). He was in the middle of telling John about wet dreams when I got there, which made both of them acutely uncomfortable. I wasn’t too thrilled about it either; I didn’t know about wet dreams, and I always hated hearing new sex information from my parents. I prided myself on the ability to find all that stuff out on my own so when they started a conversation about something intimate, I could suavely say, “Oh, yeah, I know about that already.”

Like when Mom had the Masturbation Talk with me: She started out with the question, “Honey, do you know what masturbation is?” I was eleven and loath to admit that I didn’t know what she was talking about. For one thing, Mom was so uncomfortable about sex that getting her to explain masturbation to me would likely have put me off the practice forever. I had two choices: I could breezily say, “Oh, yeah, Mom, I know all about that, we don’t need to talk about it,” or admit that I was clueless. I would have done the former, but I was afraid that if I said I knew what it was, she’d make me elaborate. What a rock and a hard place! I did in fact have an idea about it (which turned out to be nearly correct), but I just didn’t want to go there with Mom, so I said I didn’t know anything about it.

“ Good!” she said. And that was that.

See why part of my job description now is public masturbation? That incident scarred me for life. It took scads of fruitless trips to the Roseburg Public Library before I was able to get a working definition of masturbation. Books for youth about sex were not exactly jumping off library shelves in 1970.

Another great Mom Lecture happened when I was on my way to college. At this point I had long been de-virginated. I knew I was bisexual though hadn’t been lucky enough to find a girl who would actually sleep with me. No, that’s not right they’d sleep with me, just not have sex. But I’d had threesomes with two guys, talked trash with my gay teacher I was well on the way to being the Carol Queen you know today. And Mom said:

“ Honey, uh, um, er, well, you’re leaving for college soon, er, and you’ll be exposed to… you’ll be out on your… well, what I’m trying to say is, without your father and me there… well… there will be times… uh…”

I said, “Mom, are you trying to tell me about birth control?”

“ Yes!” she said. And I reassured her that the info had already been imparted to me, and that was that. Poor woman. She was not comfortable talking about sex.

I don’t know what other Dad and Mom Lectures my brother had to endure, but chances are, they scarred him worse than they scarred me. My mission became Stalking the Wild Sex Facts. His probably was Let’s Get the Hell Outta Here! It’s Too Weird!

I’ll have to ask him about that maybe on camera.

EMBARRASSING MY FAMILY IN PUBLIC

I suppose you thought, as many people do, that my royal surname is a fake, a campy pseudonym to protect the innocents in my family. Not so. I am a Queen by birth, as was my dad as is my bro. Which means I’m not protecting anybody. In fact, there are several other Carol Queens running around the United States, no doubt getting strange emails intended for me. Any of my far-flung family of origin can get an eyeful by googling me, and in fact, the whole crowd of relatives who live in Boise long ago saw me on HBO. Masturbating, naturally something I’ve done for TV shows not once but three times. I do all this not only because I’m an exhibitionist, but also because I don’t want other teenagers to have such horrifyingly stilted sex talks with their moms. I want moms, dads, and everyone else to talk about sexuality in a more comfortable and matter-of-fact way. I do this work in part because I had so little luck getting easy access to sex information when I was young, at a time when I wanted and needed it. I’ve always thought the culture needed to change, and now I’m doing the things I can to try to make that happen.

John didn’t come away from the Parent Talks with that goal. John, I expect, thinks I’m going to hell. He might be right, but I’m going to sit in Mark Twain’s lap the first chance I get. Benjamin Franklin will be there too, I expect, and eventually I’ll meet Bill Clinton. And what about all the excellent whores in history, all my foremothers and sisters? We’ll be partying. Ironically, I also expect to meet John’s idol Woody Allen. By the way, I’m not telling you anything here you won’t learn in the movie.

In spite of my hellbent behavior and John’s deep moral concern for my soul, he and I get along fine. He is doubtless aghast at the way I live my life, but I think he knows I’m doing it for a reason. Besides, I’m his sister, and families even very weird ones, like ours are families. I am in fact horrified by his choices too. But why make an issue of things like that? We would never have had some of these conversations, I expect, if Magen hadn’t come along, desiring to excavate what she saw as a promising vein of American strangeness.

SO COME TO HALLOWQUEEN!

You can meet John if he doesn’t freak out and stay home. He’s actually very funny and smart, and maybe he’ll even get on stage. But mostly the stage will be reserved for the drag queens and drag kings and other frisky San Francisco-style performances planned for the evening. Also, I think Magen will show the “Two Queens” movie trailer on the big Castro Theatre screen. She needs a new camera to finish the project, which is what your admission will fund. Best of all, perhaps, HallowQueen is an early evening event, so you can avoid the trick-or-treaters but still get home before the witching hour the event will be over by 9. On the other hand, that also puts you smack dab in the middle of the Castro Bay Area Halloween Central. Don’t get too drunk, now. Stay safe, so you can live through another Thanksgiving with your own weird family.

The details: October 31, 6 pm. Tix are $25. HallowQueen is at the Castro Theatre 429 Castro in San Francisco. For more, see www.hallowqueen.org.