A Stroke of Success: A Look at San Francisco’s Masturbate-a-Thon

Part of National Masturbation Month, the event celebrated solo sex and togetherness

Photo by yanyong on iStock

After sexologist Dr. Carol Queen*, along with her colleagues at San Francisco-based sex toy company Good Vibrations, created National Masturbation Month in the nineties, she looked for creative ways to promote it. This included partnering with other sex-positive companies like Babeland, which had started doing private events where people masturbated together. After hearing about this — as well as a live masturbation event hosted by a group in Salt Lake City, Utah — Queen, along with her partner, sex educator Dr. Robert Morgan Lawrence, decided to create the San Francisco Masturbate-a-Thon to help get the good word out about both Masturbation Month and the validity of masturbation itself.

Sounds great, right? Get a bunch of people together to do what they would naturally do at home alone and a host of erotic pleasures would ensue. After all, Queen and Lawrence, who cofounded the Center for Sex & Culture, were no strangers to hosting sex parties. In fact, by the time they started organizing the Masturbate-a-Thon in San Francisco, they had already been hosting a safer sex party called Queen of Heaven, from which they amassed a sizeable mailing list of frisky folks who would…