I have experienced many sexual revolutions, and my sexuality and gender expression have never been static. I have been butch and femme—straight and queer. Like many children, my real sex education came from my parents, peers, and the media. It has taken me a lifetime to construct my gender and sexuality, and I’m still evolving. I am queer and polyamorous, and at the public school where I teach, I am currently in the closet. I regularly encounter homophobia in my classroom, where we are forbidden to hang pride flags or teach sex education. When discussing pronouns, I have been accused of pushing a “gay agenda” - an allegation that threatens my livelihood. It would be nice to be out of the closet at work and combat the entrenched homophobia in the school system. But my deepest desire is for my students to embrace their bodies for love and for pleasure. I dream of a cultural revolution where education empowers our sexuality, rather than drenching it in guilt and shame.
In my youth, sexual education from my public school included the condom over the banana, the “don’t get pregnant” talk, the slide show of penises with cauliflower growths, wart-covered labia, and descriptions of “diseases” that would repel all future partners. I only began to combat these myths in my own adult sex education. Later, I learned that many of these “diseases” are common, sexually transmitted infections (STIs), similar to the bacteria and viruses you might contract from a kid at school. [1] They are not a death sentence, are often easily treatable, and do not imply that a person is slutty or dirty. In childhood, sex-ed was rife with fear and shame. There was the classic movie about the sperm and the egg (because reproduction is what sex is for, obviously). Then, girls (those assigned female at birth) and boys (those assigned male at birth) were separated into different rooms. “Girls” were informed about the girl things and “boys” were informed about the boy things. What topics were deemed “girl things” and “boy things?” I got the period talk and the how-to-not-get-raped talk and boys got a different thing. Is it possible that all of us might have needed all of that information: resources about gender and sexual identities, reproductive health and safer sex (because completely safe sex is a myth), normalizing menstruation, addressing sexual taboos, and discussing sexual assault and rape, which is prevalent for BIPOC, queer, and trans kids? [2]
I have to admit that I was shocked to learn that such a progressive sex education curriculum called O.W.L. (Our Whole Lives) has been written by the Unitarian Universalist Association.[3] When paging through their textbook for 5th grade, I found a page that blew my mind: on the spread about sexual orientations, there was ONE PARAGRAPH for each orientation- equal voice to each, rather than 95% air time for cisgender heterosexual monogamous folks and a scrappy 5% for the rest of us. This radical shift angered a parent who claimed that “normal” families were being pushed to the margins.
When folks on the top of the pyramid are nudged to acknowledge the imbalance of power, it can be shocking for them. It’s called equality and, if you’ve never been taught to listen or share, it’s really scary.
For today, I wear the skin of a nice, straight, white woman. I enjoy my own privilege - the privilege to pass. But my queerness undergoes a little ego death whenever I’m in hiding. My closet is convincing because I am married to a man and have dutifully reproduced. But in my 20s, a queer evolution opened my universe. At that time, I planned to propose to my long-time partner, Joanna. We were the epitome of the lesbian trope- had moved in with each other (not quite on the first date) and quickly became inseparable. Learning how to give a woman pleasure not only brought me incredible joy but also helped me understand my body and access my own pleasure. Without the power dynamics between cis-gendered male bodies and my female body, I felt ultimately safe, and therefore ultimately free. I learned how to give and take. I began to play with both the dominant and submissive parts of my nature. I loved being the pursuer rather than the pursued. The idea of asking my partner to marry me was exhilarating. What if I got to choose, instead of waiting to be the one who was lucky enough to be chosen?
While I dreamed of asking Joanna to marry me, I began to get hives whenever I thought about “forever.” About infinite monogamy. I found myself being attracted to other people and felt incredible shame. I thought my attraction to others meant Joanna must not really be “the one” - that I was being unfaithful. At the time, I identified as bisexual (I had not yet encountered the more gender-diverse term “pansexual”). While I felt like a guilty, selfish, slut for my multiple attractions, I knew that committing to just one partner, or just one gender, would amputate part of my sexual identity. And I still feel that way today. I didn’t know that wanting to love many people could be a strength. Indeed, it is one of the traits that enriches my life and makes me a great teacher. I love people. Joanna couldn’t bear the thought of exploring ethical non monogamy (ENM). As a recovering Catholic, she was still deeply normed to the cult of the nuclear family. And so, heartbreakingly, we parted ways.
When it came to my continuing sex education, the lesson I learned from Joanna was that love is not a failure when it doesn’t last forever. The amount of time you love someone is not a measure of the relationship’s worth. If I could share this lesson, I would tell my students that all love changes us.
All partners are teachers, regardless of how long we have the gift of loving them.
I did eventually pop the question to my next partner; a cisgendered man. On our first date, I told him I was queer, that I didn’t believe in “the one”, and I still loved all my previous partners. We both agreed that monogamous marriage and forever were myths. Popular culture taught me that since I was the woman, I should be the object of desire, never the initiator. But my gender-egalitarian, lesbian relationship gifted me control of my desire, commitment, and timeline with any partner, regardless of gender. And I was ready. So I asked. We opened our relationship a year after we married.
My husband is a proud feminist. He embraced my queerness and encouraged me to experiment with different partners, even when it triggered his fears. Soon, we were both falling in love with other partners, which proved to be terrifying. But together we learned to embrace taboo feelings like jealousy and face the sense of scarcity that pervades romantic narratives. As Dan Savage explained to the New York Times, [4] the sexual revolution is raging, but our communication skills and emotional intelligence are just beginning to evolve. What if sex education included the practice of asking for what we want and how to truly listen in return? If children learned about radical honesty and healing conflict? In such a revolution, we could begin to navigate the world of complexity that gender and sexual freedom provides us.
My next gender and sexual revolutions occurred when I decided to get pregnant. Never have I felt more female than during my pregnancy. Pregnant sex was extremely wet and full of crying. Thus my invention of the “cry-gasm,” ™ when crying is at least as good as an orgasm, or slightly better, and often occurs during sex. Rather than being the death of sex, pregnancy unlocked an insatiable sex drive that continues into my forties. I wish I could tell my insecure teenage self that my embattled body would evolve and bring me more love and pleasure than I could have imagined. After my body had begun to knit itself back together, I began my most recent sexual revolution, one that reunited me with my queer self – even as a new mother in a heteronormative marriage. My next partner was a father, queer, and identified himself on the trans-spectrum.[5] And he loved my lactating breasts. I thank the term “don’t yuck my yum” for my growing embrace of his sexual expression. From the margins, we say: “Your kink may not be my kink, but your kink is okay.”
We could benefit from a classroom discussion of the medical and education systems’ mission to define what is “normal”. Recently, one of my students was hospitalized for self-harming in response to their crippling gender dysphoria. They are not alone. Emergency visits for teens’ mental health issues increased 25% in the past 10 years, often stemming from identity struggles. Rates of suicide for teens increased 40% beginning in 2009.[6] This is no surprise. Homosexual and transgender identities remained classified as a mental illness in the US until 1980, and were only removed from the UN’s International Classification of Diseases in 1990. [7] Students deserve to love their bodies and explore their pleasure without being shamed.
If only our children could hear: you are whole. Your gender and sexuality are not diseases.
Though I stand at the head of the classroom, my students are frequently my greatest teachers. And if my students are courageous enough to fight for visibility, that means I could be, too. How can I normalize gender and sexual identities if I’m afraid to be seen? I can try; for the sake of my blended, queer, poly family: my partners, co-mom, daughter, son, and their two dads. We all deserve to come out of the closet, and not look back. Regardless of institutional sexual education, sexuality and gender identities will continue to evolve. All of our sexual revolutions are a life-long, continual becoming.
Image by Hayley Neegaard
Footnotes:
[1] Planned Parenthood, “Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs),” accessed July 30, 2024, https://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/stds-hiv-safer-sex.
[2] National Sexual Violence Resource Center. “Sexual Assault Statistics.” NSVRC. Accessed July 30, 2024. https://www.nsvrc.org/statistics
[3] Their website claims, “Honest, accurate information about sexuality changes lives. It dismantles stereotypes and assumptions, builds self-acceptance and self-esteem, fosters healthy relationships, improves decision making, and has the potential to save lives. For these reasons and more, we are proud to offer Our Whole Lives (OWL), a comprehensive, lifespan sexuality education curricula for use in both secular settings and faith communities.” I couldn’t agree more. Unitarian Universalist Association, Our Whole Lives: Lifespan Sexuality Education, https://www.uua.org/re/owl (accessed August 25, 2024).
[4] Dan Savage, “Dan Savage on Polyamory, Chosen Family and Better Sex,” The New York Times, January 10, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/10/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-dan-savage.html.
[5] Trans Student Educational Resources. “The Gender Unicorn.” Trans Student Educational Resources, 2015. Accessed July 30, 2024. https://transstudent.org/gender/
[6] Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, 2022 National Healthcare Quality and Disparities Report (Rockville, MD: National Library of Medicine, 2022), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK587174/
[7] Jack Drescher, “Out of DSM: Depathologizing Homosexuality,” National Institutes of Health, December 2015, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4695779/
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