Good Vibrations Magazine

I had just about worked up a head of steam about Mark Foley. And now this! Ted Haggard, whose name probably felt especially apt this weekend, is outed by a gay sex worker. Can schadenfreude get any sweeter? (Well, it could, actually, if it were revealed between now and tomorrow which White House denizen last [...]

Happy All-Hallows, people! The holiday most sacred to pagans and people who need to unbutton a little: at no other time is so much room given to our personae, from horrific to juicy. I wrote about it in Exhibitionism for the Shy, recommending that folks who are too nervous to get wild the other 364 [...]

Clarice of Cokke’s Lane, perhaps? This was
the art in our lovely room at the Rookery,
just going to show that we are not the
first to bring vice to London.

I know, I know, it’s about time! I have a good excuse: All Has Been Chaos. We’ve had to rather suddenly move the Center for Sex & Culture [...]

We came, we saw, we conquered.
No, that’s not right. We came, they all came. One lady came 49 times! But I’m getting ahead of myself.
What follows is my travelogue of the days leading up to the first London Masturbate-a-Thon: Robert’s and my Tour de ‘Thon. Consider it the behind-the-scenes dish to accompany the forthcoming documentary [...]

Just back from the London Masturbate-a-Thon, which got more big PR than any masturbation event we’ve ever done in the States, we are happy to announce several new winners!
The Longest Time Spent Masturbating record for men was set this year at 8.5 hours in San Francisco; for women the SF record was set in 2004 [...]

Good Vibrations has a tradition — part of its brand, by now — that I’m quite delighted to uphold when I go out on the speechifying trail to talk about the biz. I’m in the Universal City Hilton as I write this, here to attend the ANE (Adult Novelty Expo) convention: that is, the place [...]

Since Good Vibrations created National Masturbation Month and the Masturbate-a-Thon back in the last century I, as GV’s primary spokesperson for Masturbation Month-related press, have given about a zillion interviews extolling monkey-spanking, pink-salad-tossing, Surgeon-General-firing, and Coming for a Cause. I helped develop Good Vibes’ NMM taglines, and am especially proud of “I’d Rather Be Masturbating” [...]

I hadn’t intended to start my blogging career with an obituary, but sometimes life just hands us the unexpected, and I need to write about Steven Brown before I write about Bettie Page or dildos in Tennessee or any of the other things on my list to deconstruct, chew on, go over, share, kick around, [...]

On October 27, a lawsuit will be heard in a New York City courtroom that could have great repercussions on what you can see and read on the Internet. The suit, Barbara Nitke and the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom vs. John Ashcroft, seeks to stop the US Justice Department from prosecuting certain web-based material [...]

Darren James’s fellow adult industry performers speak well of him, calling him “a real gentleman.” Women liked working with him, and his professional standards were higher than those of many up-and-coming porn stars: he got tested oftener for HIV than the customary once-monthly checkup. This requirement, adopted by most porn companies in the 1990s after [...]

Editor’s note: the Lusty Lady is now a co-op!
Sometime this month the legendary Lusty Lady exotic dance emporium and peep show, a fixture of North Beach’s sex life since the 1980s, will undergo major changes. As I write, negotiations are still underway between the performers and support staff and the ownership — at issue is [...]

Originally printed April 23, 2003 in adult newspaper The Spectator.
It’s May… Time to Masturbate!!
This year, the National Masturbation Month theme is “I’d Rather Be Masturbating!” Truer words were never spoken, eh? In fact, if you like, I can just wait right here for a few minutes so you can run off and wank. Come back [...]

One of my regular tasks at Good Vibrations is touring new staff around the store to familiarize them with the toys and products we sell. Merchandise occupies separate areas: dildos here and vibes over there, lubes across from massage oils, so it’s easier for customers to consider their choices and find what they want. A [...]

At heart I’m just a small-town girl from Oregon — granted, a girl who got called queer even before my tormenters were old enough to know what the epithet was supposed to mean — and moving to San Francisco fifteen years ago was a big deal for me. It meant I had to learn the [...]

I finally made an appointment to get my hair cut today, at the trendy little salon in my suddenly trendy neighborhood. I have been trying to hold out for long hair, in spite of the fact that I haven’t successfully grown long hair since I had it cut off, against my better judgment, in high [...]

…is one of the many clever ways to describe masturbation, and of course May is National Masturbation Month, so here’s hoping you’re loving yourself as well as possible these days. I’ve talked about masturbation to several jillion people since Good Vibes began National Masturbation Month five years ago; I routinely talk to large groups and [...]

I spent last week in Tennessee, a fact that caused some consternation among my California friends when they heard about my travel plans. “Be careful!” they exhorted. “Get out of there alive!”
Oh, come now. The Tennesseans I met were all very polite, even when they weren’t crazy about what I had to say. Even though [...]

You know a genre has arrived culturally when people start making fun of it — not garden-variety, “Nyaah, nyaah, it’s stupid” type fun, but actual spoof or satire. By this measurement, porn est arrivee. Oh, sure, I know the argument can be made that much porn is already a spoof of itself — mostly not [...]

It’ll probably be ignored by more mainstream bastions of contemporary, even pop, culture, but a minor miracle happened this week at the Adult Video News awards ceremony in Las Vegas — the so-called “adult Oscars,” where porn movies and their stars, directors, and box cover designers get recognized for their excellence. “Excellence” has sometimes been [...]

The holidays are a hell of a time to go to the hospital (although in San Francisco we do have a special attraction: the award-winning SF Gay Men’s Chorus singing carols), but last week I checked in my partner Robert. A routine exam had gone wrong, showing a stricture at a previous surgical site, and [...]

Carol was so busy being San Francisco Pride’s most beautiful Grand Marshal ever that we gave her the month off. We’re running an archived, yet still important, column in its place.
First-time Good Vibrations customers often ask us whether they’ll become “addicted” to their vibrators. When I do public speaking and talk about toys, people occasionally [...]

We stop at farmers’ markets whenever we’re on the road, especially in July when the peaches come ripe, timed with the Perseid meteor showers. We get enough fruit to sate any summer hunger, not just peaches but whatever is juicy and sweet, bearing it away in brown bags like we are smuggling jewels.At the bed [...]

My partner Robert and I recently went out to grab lunch at the Tempest, our favorite burger joint, a place near the Good Vibrations office that hosts bands, a bar, and an active pool table. Robert headed for the restroom to wash up and came back steamed. He described a Planned Parenthood poster he’d seen [...]

The sharp, animal fear at the first touch. Fear of what? We’d already played this out in dreams, after all. Sarah and I were hardly strangers. There was a time when I thought the fear would leave me when I could at last make love with a woman. Puzzled to find it actually grew stronger [...]

I’ve had the wonderful task over the course of the last three months to help re-envision our already-terrific web site. As fast as the Internet moves — and in as many directions — it became clear to us that we have been tapping only part of the web’s potential with goodvibes.com. It’s my pleasure to [...]