SAN FRANCISCO — The Center for Sex & Culture (CSC) announced its participation in “Give OUT Day,” a national charity campaign geared towards the LGBTQ community that will take place on Thursday.
Give OUT Day rallies thousands of people to support the LGBTQ community through donations to one of the campaign’s sponsored organizations; CSC, helmed by Dr. Carol Queen, the chief cultural officer at Good Vibrations, was selected as a sponsored foundation for this year's fundraiser.
The campaign will open its site for donations from 9 p.m. PDT on Thursday to 2:59 a.m. on Friday and allows supporters to find the nonprofit or fundraiser of their choice using a group name, keyword, city or zip code. Donations will be tax deductible.
The CSC, founded in 2000 by Queen and her partner Robert Morgan Lawrence, is an archive, library, gallery and community space aimed at preserving and sharing information and artifacts of sexual identity, sexual products, and sexual ideas. It is also a 501(c) (3) educational organization.
“There’s no other archive like this one,” Metis Black, founder and president of Tantus Inc. said. “For those of us who make a living from the adult industry, this collection is particularly important. There are so few archives that collect sex-related materials, and even fewer that make it a sole focus as the CSC does. The cultural ideas around sexuality have changed so much in the last few decades, and this is a chance to preserve materials that relate to the ways the adult industry has transformed the way people think about sex.”
Donations to the CSC will go towards helping to develop the archives, hiring their first paid staff member and necessities such as hot water and insurance, a CSC representative said.
The Horizons Foundation will be granting an additional $5,000 to the Bay Area organization that tallies the most individual contributions on Give OUT Day.
“Any person’s donation, even $10, might be the gift that puts us over the top and allows us to raise another five grand,” said Queen. “We are so honored and excited to be involved in this project.”