LET’S TALK ABOUT SEX
By Iván Morales
Sex. Condoms. Lube. That’s it, you got your sexual health
education. If you’re lucky, you hear about HIV and STIs, but those don’t affect everyone, right? Wrong. Your parents at one point covered your eyes at mere television kisses, your peers tell you more than the textbooks, and everything else around you tells you the oohs and aahs about sex. You think you’re informed enough to make the best decisions. If this were true, then why does the LGBTQ+ community feel excluded from sex health education, making this population the most susceptible to venereal diseases?
“I don’t want anyone to have to go through what I had to go through, which was learning from experience because when you get older, you look back [and] realize ‘I didn’t know that I could have run into this issue or problem,’” said Elsayed. Much like Elsayed, members of the LGBTQ+ community often engage in sexual experiences without having the proper knowledge of safe practices, which can be dangerous. In 2018, there was 37,968 new HIV diagnosis. Nearing the end of 2018, the CDC estimated 1.2 million individuals were living with
“DIGITAL SPACES HAVE BECOME SITES OF LEARNED BEHAVIOR, GUIDANCE, AND THE DISSEMINATION OF CRITICAL INFORMATION REGARDING SEX.” With state legislation setting the stage for curriculum on sex education, LGBTQ+ communities are still feeling the waves of isolation within the educational spaces of middle school and high school health courses; leaving them to their personal experience as a means of attaining sexual education, which may reflect the high number of venereal diseases within this community. Digital spaces have become sites of learned behavior, guidance, and the dissemination of critical information regarding sex. For many, the subject matter of sex is still very much taboo and shameful. Jorge Diaz, 41, the Client Navigation and Support Director at Bienestar Human Services, once felt highly stigmatized for being HIV positive. According to Diaz, the topic of sex education within the LGBTQ+ community needs to move beyond prevention to a place that speaks on gender, sexualities, different stigmas and how families come into play with this education. According to the Human Rights Campaign, in the U.S. a large population of LGBTQ+ youth goes through an educational system that inadequately recognizes their existence. This curriculum fails to include their identities within the pages of health education, especially in the face of sexual discourse. The National Alliance on Mental Health reports that a large percentage of LGBTQ+ individuals have faced rejection from their families and peers which impacts their mental health. This may explain some of the reasons why this community is largely affected by sexual health disparities. How does a person of the LGBTQ+ community attain adequate sex health education, then? Kody Elsayed, 23, a graduate student at NYU, had to learn sex education via first-hand experience. He recalled his time in high school health class, where teachers and students did not take the information seriously. These experiences helped him decide to promote sexual health education on his TikTok platform. 22
HIV. While this disease is stereotypically known to only exist within marginalized groups, specifically LGBTQ+ communities, it should be known that 24% of the new cases in 2018 were from heterosexual identifying individuals. According to the Human Rights Campaign, in 2013 gay and bisexual men only made up about 2% of the entire U.S. population, yet accounted for 55% of people living with HIV. Also, HIV criminalization statutes — laws that can criminalize individuals accused of not sharing their HIV status with partners — may be influencing these high numbers, as individuals are less likely to get tested or treated for HIV for the stigma placed on them. Under the California Healthy Youth Act (AB 329), California schools are required to teach an all-inclusive sexual health curriculum, as well as HIV prevention. Each school district has the liberty to choose which instructional resources will be used to teach from. Under AB 329, LGBTQ+ inclusivity must be merged with sex education lessons, throughout the entirety of the curriculum; therefore, any isolation of LGBTQ+ sexual health education can be liable for discrimination. However, under this legislation, parents can opt their students out of sex education lessons and material under sexual health, which touches on gender and sexual orientation. “We are not informing people in a way that’s easy to digest and makes the conversations lighthearted and fun, but also informative because, at the end of the day, this is information that we all need, and how else will we learn it if we are not circulating it,” Elsayed said. Elsayed, who took an entire year to plan out his platform on TikTok, introspectively arrived at the topic of his content because of his own experience with sex education. Elsayed aimed to provide easily digestible conversations to make the topic of sex lighthearted and informative.
