Teaching Sex

Teaching Sex

A Multicultural Lesbian Literary & Art Journal
Sinister Wisdom : We Teach Sex (To Everyone)
Call for Submissions
We--lesbians, queer women, nonbinary, and trans folks--teach sex education in official capacities, like classrooms, and in unofficial ones, like at bus stops and in basements. We teach sex to each other, in our own communities, and to others, outside our communities, as sex workers, sex educators, pleasure activists, pleasure coaches, sexperts, and sex novices alike.
Rather than how-to tutorials, this call seeks the stories of how we teach and learn about bodies and sex. As technology forces us to rethink the way we teach, learn, and consume information, it also challenges us to consider the idea of community through remoteness.
Finally, in a media landscape that still showcases the trauma of queer folks over their daily lives, we ask you to send us your love letters, your tales of triumph, and your poems about sexy resilience and resourcefulness.
We welcome queer identities of all stripes in this call.
Examples of what we’re looking for: creative writing about teaching your queer friends how to get themselves off, art about reclaiming sexuality through education/empowerment, stories of how the sex work hustle taught you more about your own sexuality (and taught you to teach others, too), etc etc.
Please submit fiction, non-fiction, poetry, interviews, and genre-non-specific work, up to 5k words, and a short contributor biography, between 25 and 125 words.
We are also seeking illustration and photographs, (.jpg or .tif files only, print resolution size at least 300 ppi).
Please do not send previously published work.
Questions about submissions? Please email LesbiansWhoTeach@gmail.com
Submission Deadline: Wednesday, September 22, 2021. The anticipated publication date for this issue is in 2023.
Guest Editors:
July Westhale is a nonbinary queer femme dyke. July is also an essayist, translator, and the award-winning author of Trailer Trash, and Via Negativa, which Publishers Weekly called "stunning" in a starred review. Her most recent work can be found in McSweeney’s, The National Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, CALYX, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and The Huffington Post, among others. She also has an inventively-named collection of salty chapbooks. When she’s not teaching, she works as a co-founding editor of PULP Magazine, a sex and sexuality justice media company dedicated to changing the world. www.julywesthale.com
Kristy Lin Billuni is a bisexual dyke, a writer of sexy, triumphant stories, and teacher of bold, free, turned-on writers. She has aroused thousands of writers in her day job as The Sexy Grammarian and has roots in the sex industry and queer political activism. A handful of theaters, community spaces, and cabaret stages, most recently The Eagle NYC, have produced her short plays. Her fiction and essays appear in several anthologies and journals, most prestigiously, Sinister Wisdom. She and her public-health-hero wife live in San Francisco. www.sexyg.co/portfolio
Sinister Wisdom publishes work by Lesbians. Sinister Wisdom takes the definition of lesbian from Cheryl Clarke. In her influential essay, "Lesbianism: An Act of Resistance" Clarke writes, "I, for one, identify a woman as a lesbian who says she is. Lesbianism is a recognition, an awakening, a reawakening of our passion for each (woman) other (woman) and for same (woman)." We are interested particularly in work that reflects the diversity of our experiences: as lesbians of color, multiracial lesbians, ethnic lesbians, Jewish lesbians, Arab lesbians, old lesbians, young lesbians, working class lesbians, poverty class lesbians, gender queer lesbians, butch lesbians, masculine of center lesbians, androgynous lesbians, femme lesbians, trans lesbians, disabled lesbians, and fat Lesbians. We welcome experimental work and will not print anything that is oppressive or demeaning to lesbians or women, or that perpetuates stereotypes. Sinister Wisdom keeps an open and critical dialogue on all the issues that affect our lives, joy, and survival. http://www.sinisterwisdom.org/
Sinister Wisdom appreciates Martha Nell Smith and the Dickinson Electronic Archives for providing website hosting and Shayne Brandon at the IATH at UVa for his invaluable technical assistance and expertise.

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2/8/22

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A British high school teacher who allegedly slept with a student on prom night was reportedly wearing an inappropriate outfit at the event, sparking concern among her colleagues.
Melissa Tweedie faces being struck off the Scottish teaching registry for the romp, which purportedly occurred after the 2017 Gleniffer High School prom. At the time, she was 23 and the pupil was 18 years old.
At a General Teaching Council for Scotland hearing last week, the school’s deputy head, Heather Prentice, recalled that Tweedie was scantily clad on the night she and other teachers attended the prom in a professional capacity.
“I do remember it [her outfit] was quite loose, short, low cut,” Prentice testified, according to the Sun. “She looked like she was going on a night out.”
The deputy principal also recalled that Tweedie was dancing with a group of “all-male pupils” at the event and was “reluctant” to leave with the other teachers when the formalities were over.
Instead, the young PE teacher went with some of the students to a nearby nightclub, where she is alleged to have downed shots with them.
“Can we for a minute act like I’m not a teacher?” Tweedie is purported to have said to the group.
The teacher later accompanied the group to a nearby hotel, before she and the 18-year-old student allegedly ended up alone together and began kissing.
“We went downstairs and had sex in my room. She stayed the night, and we both left at 8 a.m.,” the anonymous student testified.
“I feel really sorry for Miss Tweedie,” the student continued. “I had already handed in my leaver’s form [leaving school certificate]. In my eyes, it wasn’t a student event. This could have happened on a night out.”
Scottish police have found that no criminal activity took place. Tweedie is now said to be working in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, as a yoga instructor.

After Roe, teens are teaching themselves sex ed, because the adults won’t
washingtonpost.com © 1996-2022 The Washington Post
FRANKLIN, Tenn. — Sweating in the sun, two dozen teenagers spread themselves across picnic blankets in a grassy park and prepared to discuss the facts of life they never learned in school.
Behind them on a folding table, bouquets of pamphlets offered information teachers at school would never share — on the difference between medical and surgical abortions, and how to get them. Beside the pamphlets sat items adults at school would never give: pregnancy tests and six-packs of My Way Emergency Contraceptive.
Emma Rose Smith, 17, rose from the blankets, tucked her pale-blonde hair behind her ears and turned off the music on a small, black speaker. She faced the assembled high-schoolers, all members of her newfound group, Teens for Reproductive Rights , and began talking about the nonprofit Abortion Care Tennessee . Her words hitched at first, then tumbled in a rush.
“A little bit about them,” Emma Rose said, “is they’re an organization that funds people’s abortions if they can’t afford it. Also, by the way, there’s another organization that we can also talk about later, when we give you guys, like, resources, that actually does free mail-in abortion pills.”
Twelve days after the teens’ picnic, abortion would become illegal in Tennessee , a measure made possible by the Supreme Court’s June decision, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization , overturning Roe v. Wade. The students wouldn’t hear anything about it in school: State law does not require sex education, and it holds that schools in areas with high pregnancy rates must offer “family life education” focused on abstinence.
Post- Roe , the teens in the park had decided, this lack of education was no longer acceptable. They are part of a burgeoning movement of high-schoolers nationwide who, after Roe ’s fall, are stepping up to demand more comprehensive lessons on reproduction, contraception and abortion — and who, if the adults refuse, are teaching each other instead.
In Utah, high-schoolers rallied outside a courthouse in May to call for accurate education on sex and abortion. In Texas, a group of teens held a virtual protest on the gaming website Minecraft to urge the state to start giving middle-schoolers lessons on birth control . Over the summer, that group — Fort Bend Students United for Reproductive Freedom — began sharing mini-sex-education lessons to its Instagram account for the benefit of peers; recent posts include “ Endometrial Ablation ,” “ Pap smears ” and “ WHAT IS PCOS? ” (It is an initialism for polycystic ovary syndrome.)
And in Virginia, 15-year-old Rivka Vizcardo-Lichter is organizing demonstrations outside school board meetings to pressure the Fairfax County district to offer students information about reproductive health clinics, more detailed lessons on contraceptive methods other than abstinence (it already includes the basics, but she wants more) — and access to contraception.
“Teenagers are teenagers, and some teenagers are going to have sex,” she said. “They need to be educated on how to protect themselves from unwanted pregnancies and STIs [sexually transmitted infections] and sexual risk — especially if we’re removing the right to ... choose whether or not you’re having a baby.”
Twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia require that students receive sex education at school, according to a tracker maintained by the nonprofit Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) . Thirty states demand that schools emphasize the importance of abstinence, and 16 states mandate “abstinence-only” sex education.
What students actually learn in the classroom varies by district and even by teacher, said Laura Lindberg, a public health professor at Rutgers University who has studied sex education in the United States for three decades. But it is often “too little too late,” she said. Her research suggests that less than half of U.S. teens receive instruction on where to get birth control before having sex for the first time, and she noted that the teen birthrate in the United States — 16.7 births per 1,000 females in 2019 — is consistently among the highest in the developed world, though it has been declining in recent years .
In the Tennessee park, Emma Rose scrolled her thumb down her phone screen, squinting at the glare, to read off details of upcoming advocacy: An outdoor concert to raise money for abortion rights groups. A protest at the Tennessee Capitol on the day the state’s abortion ban takes effect.
Then she shared how she and the group’s three co-founders, Alyson Nordstrom, Lily Swain and Paige Buckley, all 17, see the future.
“We want to start getting groups structured in different parts of Tennessee,” Emma Rose said. Each spinoff chapter would be located at a different high school throughout the state.
Then those teens, too, could start teaching each other.
In some parts of the country, teens teaching teens sex ed is not a new idea.
That includes Park City, Utah, where Carly McAleer started high school four years ago having received a sex education that “basically amounted to scaring students with really grotesque photos” of sexually transmitted infections. Utah law requires sex education in all schools but prohibits “the advocacy or encouragement of the use of contraceptive methods or devices,” instead mandating that schools “stress the importance of abstinence.”
By sophomore year, Carly, who is now 18 and uses they/them pronouns, began searching for a way to become better informed — and discovered the Planned Parenthood Teen Council program. The initiative, begun in 1989 in Washington state, trains teens to teach other schoolchildren sex education, then partners with willing private schools, school districts or community groups to host peer-led lessons on topics ranging from consent to contraception, depending on state law and school policy. Since its founding, it has expanded to 15 states, and last year 300 teens volunteered on 31 councils, according to Nadya Santiago Schober of Planned Parenthood.
Carly applied, was accepted their junior year, and was soon walking into middle-school classrooms — feeling more than a bit nervous — to lead classes on STIs and healthy relationships. Carly found that most students, starved for information, were intensely curious.
And Carly came to love moments that demonstrated the difference they were making — for example when they asked students what kind of lubricant is okay to use with condoms, “the room went silent, and so I told them a silicone-based or water-based lubricant.”
The end of Roe appears to have driven more interest in the Teen Council program, which is poised to expand, Santiago Schober said: “We are seeing an increase in the size of our groups for the year ahead.” In Utah, said L-E Baldwin, a community health educator with that state’s Planned Parenthood chapter, “we have had interest from rural parts of the state in ways we have not previously.”
Lindberg, the Rutgers professor, said the upsurge in young people advocating for comprehensive sex education is admirable, if unsurprising in a generation known for its activism on climate change, gun control and reading freedom . She cautioned that it is important would-be student-teachers pick out correct information from the plethora of misinformation available online.
“Young people can now access information in places that a generation ago weren’t an option, whether that’s a YouTube video or a Tik Tok or something on Instagram,” she said. “But they have to be careful.”
And, she warned, anyone pushing for more sex education will face stiff opposition from mostly conservative parents and lawmakers who argue that it is inappropriate and will lead students to become promiscuous — despite a large body of research that shows providing sexual health information and services to students is not linked with increased sexual activity , and the fact that a majority of American adults across political lines support sex education in schools .
Since the 1980s, when sex education became widespread in America as a means to fight HIV infection, conservatives and the religious right have steadily chipped away at the availability of sex ed nationwide, Lindberg said. And they’re especially fired up now, post- Roe and amid raging education culture wars that have delivered new laws restricting what teachers can say about race, racism , sexuality, gender identity and LGBTQ issues . As Charles Herbster, an unsuccessful gubernatorial candidate in Nebraska, put it at a rally alongside former president Donald Trump in May: “We’re going to take sex education out of the schools and put it back in the homes where it belongs.” (Herbster did not answer requests for comment.)
An ascendant parents’ rights movement is also working to limit what students learn in school about sex — partly through measures that increase parental control over students’ in-class reading choices and outlaw sexually explicit texts. Tiffany Justice, co-founder of the national parent group Moms for Liberty , said in an interview that “comprehensive sex ed has no place in school.” She said school districts everywhere should convene groups of parents to determine what is “age appropriate” for children to learn.
She had a message for students advocating around sex ed: “The teenagers are being pushed by activist organizations, whose purpose is making children politically literate rather than actually literate so they can become social justice warriors. That’s what the union is trying to do,” she said, referring to teachers organizations, which Justice said are pushing communist doctrine on America’s children.
In Virginia, Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) — who won his office by campaigning on education issues — this spring signed a law that requires school districts to notify parents whenever sexually explicit material is included in lessons, and to offer students non-explicit alternatives if parents request them.
Rivka, the Fairfax County teen, believes this law imperils students’ access to sex education. She is all the more determined to persuade her school district to expand its sex-ed curriculum by teaching about more contraceptive options and reproductive health clinics, as well as offering students free contraception. Her sex-ed experience was “abstinence 100” percent of the time, she said.
Fairfax sex ed comprises “an abstinence-based ... curriculum, meaning that both abstinence and contraception are included in instruction,” district spokeswoman Julie Moult said in a statement. “Contraception is included in instruction in grades 8-12,” she added, pointing to teachings about “barrier, hormonal, and surgical contraceptive methods,” including condoms. Parents can remove their children from the program if they wish.
Moult said the district mentions Planned Parenthood as a resource for “students experiencing unintended pregnancy” in 10
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