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I first read Audre Lorde’s seminal text, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, during my sophomore year of college. At the time, I was teaching sexual health education courses in high schools across Los Angeles, and couldn’t help but feel that our work, while important, was missing something critical. Sex, I was beginning to learn, could be about so much more than STI tests and condoms. It was one star in the wide constellation of "the erotic,” or being in touch with the power of our strongest desires.
When we listen to that part of ourselves, she writes, we have “the energy to pursue genuine change within our world, rather than merely settling for a shift of characters in the same weary drama.”
Today, a new generation of Black, queer activists have taken up that call, including authors like adrienne maree brown, whose 2019 collection Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good expanded Lorde’s work to include a wider spectrum of gender and sexual identities, as well as disabled folks and sex workers. Other disciples of Lorde’s are bringing the writer’s ideas into direct practice. Enter Mx. Lena Queen, a clinical somatic sexologist whose work focuses on “Healing the Erotic Self.”
For almost a decade, Mx. Queen has helped queer and trans people navigate the rich territory of their own sexualities through “somatic sex therapy,” to help deepen the mind-body connection. As an outpatient psychotherapist who specializes in sexuality and gender, they help clients notice the “defaults,” or social expectations, that keep them stuck in cycles of dissatisfaction, self-neglect, and shame. In a culture that forces queer and trans people to question everything about their desires, Mx.Queen says redefining our relationship to embodiment as seeing our queer and transnes “as the answer [when] we have been taught that we're the problem.”
Another of these “defaults,” of course, is Valentine’s Day, which traditionally centers monogamous, heteronormative love. When we spoke a few weeks ago, they shared that they are eschewing the holiday altogether and declaring February “Self Love Month.” Out with Hallmark, in with defining holidays on our own, revolutionary terms.
Through hosting workshops, organizing wellness retreats, and penning workbooks, Mx. Queen is helping survivors, queer, and trans people learn how to identify and embody the erotic “yes” within themselves. Below, we discuss tools to call forth the erotic self, challenging commodified notions of self-care, and the importance of being gentle with oneself while navigating the choppy waters of modern dating.
I’d love to hear a little bit about how you become a sexologist. Was that always something you were interested in?
I'm an agender, tender late-bloomer who came into this work because the personal and the professional intersected. I didn't come out to folks until I was 40. I'm 50 now. I graduated from an HBCU, which was very conservative and Christian-centered. And so, I realized, “I need to go back to school to become a sex therapist, because social work by itself is not going to permit me to show up fully.” It wasn't until I went back to school to become a sex therapist that I was introduced to Audre Lorde, which brought everything together. I no longer felt like a weirdo. That's how it started.
How did you come to Audre Lorde’s work?
It all started with Uses of the Erotic and Sister Outsider. [Her writing] reinforced everything that I thought about spirituality, about sexuality, about the erotic being our power. I use the erotic as a litmus for my wellness. When I am not feeling sexy and desirable to myself, there is something up.
The first quote I came across was, “caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation and that is an act of political warfare.” I was moved by the emphasis on taking care of oneself because systems at large want to see your demise. I am here [in the United States] because my ancestors survived chattel slavery, so my very existence is radical.
When I read Uses of the Erotic, which is a pleasure manifesto, I identified seven [literal uses of the erotic that she gave; I was like, “Say no more. This is what I'm talking about.” Literally from her work I developed somatic sex therapy. It gave me permission to say, “These are the pieces that are missing.”
As part of that work, you talk about the “erotic self.” How would you define that?
That term comes from Dr. Tracy Gilbert's work, [in which she] asked “What does the embodiment of sexiness look like in Black sexuality?” The Erotic Self is the intuitive relationship between one’s mind, body, and spirit. It is the embodiment of all of who we are, both sexually and nonsexually.
One of the reasons I was drawn to your work is there’s a sense of possibility in the way you speak about healing. Can you talk a little bit about the spectrum from sexual distress toward the erotic self?
Yes. That's something that I discuss in my sexual healing guide, Healing the Erotic Self. In our current system, there’s a lot of focus on trauma. As survivors, we're [constantly expected] to relive our experiences from a place of disempowerment.
Dr. Shemeka Thorpe defines sexual distress as “any negative emotions in which we cannot show up fully and functioning in our sexual selves." When you think about moving from sexual shame, guilt, and anxiety toward this place of sexual liberation and healing, we're activating the erotic to say, "What is our relationship to our power and to what we desire?"
As survivors, we can move from this place of disempowerment to a place of power [when] healing becomes rooted in what we want to experience, what we desire to experience, which has this spiritual, soulful connection. It's not just a level of satisfaction, but a level of fulfillment.
How do you define those differences between satisfaction and fulfillment?
Looking at the sexological research, satisfaction is a level of contentment, but it can be self-sacrificing. It's like “I'm okay, but there's still more I want to experience.” In contrast, fulfillment is about the relationship of pleasure and feeling full, feeling satiated. It’s saying “I am soulfully happy.”
Beautiful. It’s Valentine’s season, which places so much pressure on people to be partnered. You speak about how people often define themselves by their relationships instead of their own feelings. How do you encourage LGBTQ+ people to cultivate that self-definition process?
I start with that core question: Who am I? Begin to define yourself with adjectives that are not related to your relationships. For me, it would look like being a tender, quirky, queer person, and knowing the pleasure-centered relationship to my body, not the shame-centered relationship to my body. I recognize, too, cultural context is important. Valentine's Day is a Western way of engaging that reinforces what I call “the defaults of societal and sexual assumptions and expectations.”
We have to ask, how do you challenge those defaults? By challenging them, we can say that my lived experience outside these defaults is still valid. Queer and trans people already, by self-identifying, are liberatory.
Can you talk about some of those defaults that are all around us?
Absolutely. One is thinking about “assumed sexual debut.” Some of us who were sexualized early in our lives, we are forced to assume heteronormativity and cisgendered-ness. There is an assumption about respectability, desirability, or assumed thinness as a place of desirability.
When you think about what those societal sexual defaults are, and you feel shame for not being in that box, remember there is no box. It's very much like the Matrix. It's all about remembering that these defaults are made up, and there are power dynamics that reinforce them, but our existence as queer and trans folks is real.
Yes. Are there any exercises that people can begin to practice as we think about healing that erotic self in our own lives?
Ask yourself clarifying questions: What is the purpose of this moment? What is in my best interest? How do I take care of myself? That way you don't have to fight a tug of war between making other people feel better and making yourself feel better.
Another practice is self-nurturing. What are the actual care practices you do? Self-care has become very commodified. I want to challenge that by saying, “What's your relationship to your care practices in which the full self shows up?” Think about your senses and create one care practice per sense: aromatherapy, sound therapy, meditation, favorite foods.
Another powerful tool is to create both erotic and daily affirmations that [address] the spiritual, sexual, and mental [components] of feeling self-worth and self-esteem. Talk lovingly to yourself. Talk compassionately to yourself. Depending on where you are in your healing journey, there is a tendency to minimize language because you've heard too many unkind words and affirming words about yourself, especially for queer and trans folks. And so for us to take back our dialog and to pour that back into ourselves, is honestly one of the most powerful things that we can do.
Wow. I wanted to ask you about dating. What guidance do you give folks as they're trying to navigate that experience, which can be so difficult?
It is. So one, be gentle with yourself. Know that you are love. See yourself as the source of the thing that you want, and therefore, who are you sharing it with? Who deserves it? From there, you’ll be able to name what love feels like as an experience for you. I love bell hooks’ book, All About Love, and how she uses M. Scott Peck's definition of love as “the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth.”
Then she lists the attributes of what love should feel like as an experience. I encourage people to start with that. What does love feel like as an experience? When you're dating, date with that in mind and develop the courage to communicate that, because the flags will be flagging. The greens, the yellows, the reds. Trust your intuition and what you see.
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