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Edition 33 2020
STIs Words Emma Horner Artwork Hannah Coleman
I
n 2001, my year 8 class had our first round of sex ed. Our teacher for this subject was an aging priest named Father Stuart. Following the mandatory explanations of the biology behind sexual reproduction, we were shown how to fit a condom to a banana, and then alerted to all of the ways in which we could get pregnant or contract an STI from having good old-fashioned penis in vagina sex without using barrier protection. Despite the presence of God in our school, statistically speaking there was still a high possibility that some of us in the room would turn out to be gay, so Father Stuart reluctantly and very awkwardly acknowledged that sometimes men would engage in sex acts with one another, but made sure to thoroughly demonise the practice and remind everyone of the absolute inevitability of contracting HIV following this deviant behaviour. It’s no surprise that during early 2000s sex education, there was still no mention of how to have a healthy, respectful sex life or sex for pleasure or safe sex outside of the realm of heteronormativity—at least not in my experience. Now, I may have only been thirteen but I was pretty certain that I was going to be having sex with women instead of men. This hadn’t been discussed at all, so in the part where you could write your anonymous question on a piece of paper, I asked “How would two women have sex, and can they get STIs?” As Father Stuart read my question out loud, my heart raced with both anticipation and shame, as people looked around the room trying to figure out who the lesbian was. With a tone of cruel, haughty indifference that I had never heard the Father use before, he snorted and said “I have no idea,” eliciting sniggers from the class as he tossed my question into the bin. The following year, we got another shot at sex ed. Fantastic. Our teacher this year reassured us that although she was the daughter of the college headmaster, extremely religious and also one hundred per cent a virgin (meaning that many students in the room, in fact, had more experience with sex than she did), she was going to do her best to answer any and all of our questions. “Fuck this,” I thought and didn’t even bother asking any questions—no shade if you are waiting for marriage, I’m just saying that as a virgin, you might not be the best candidate to teach sex ed. The delegitimisation of my sexuality indicated to me that what I would be doing—the relationships and the sex that I would be having—were not as valid or real as those of my heterosexual peers, and therefore did not carry the same real risks. Now, there’s a whole bunch to unpack there, which I will save for my therapist, but the point I’m making is that I left that classroom with no concept of what sexual health meant for me. My late teens and early twenties were a time of abundant sexual
