At my school, we hardly received a decent sexual education. The meagre things we were taught – were all about reproduction. You know the story; when a man and a woman love each-other very much etc. At one point they had a group of people come in to teach us all about the many many joys of celibacy (I know, I know)
This was at a catholic school however, and I can’t say the same of all schools, some of you might have been wonderfully informed about the delicious details of sex.
Even so, I found that when indeed we did speak about sex in school, it was all about sex between a man and a woman (Quite often married).
There was nothing that I could remember about intercourse that takes place between two men, or even two women for that matter.
Believe it or not, when the celibacy buffs asked my classmates why people had sex, the only answer they got was: “To make babies”.
I mean, really!?
While this did provide us with the most basic knowledge of the mechanics of sex, there was little else for us to go on. It was almost as if the teachers were just sticking their fingers in their ears and singing.
There was little explained about STIs, condoms, rape or unplanned pregnancies (Though being gay, I can’t say I cared about the fourth).
This leads me onto another point; young gay people are not just realising that they’re gay at the age of 22.
People are coming out young and they’re so ill informed about sex, it’s staggering. Luckily, I had older friends, and was rather well informed by them, and so I knew about using condoms, avoiding STIs and where to go if indeed I did think I’d contracted something from someone, however, this is sadly not always the case.
For reasons unexplained, there was next to nothing told to us on the reasons for sex, such as love, lust, revenge on an ex or just plain old self esteem issues. It seems that young people were just having sex purely because their friends claimed they were all doing it. There was very little said on how we value ourselves and whether we were only having sex because we wanted to prove that we were likeable, which I think is quite upsetting.
In a society that allows young people to be exposed to sexual images in the time it takes to click a mouse, and where persons on television and magazines are almost exclusively all bronze, buff gods and goddesses, is it truly wise to not teach young people to value themselves as an individual as well as in relationships?
Thankfully, I had the nouse to look for this information myself, and grew to love and accept myself as an individual and have sex for the right reasons. Sadly though, many young gay men and women are not so well informed, and they can often go on to contract diseases, get raped, and in extreme cases die because of needless ignorance.
Sexually transmitted diseases are not about to just go away, and nor will gay people. It is about time some changes were made to arm young gay people against the dangers of unsafe sex, and some care given to them so that they learn to love themselves before they consider engaging in intercourse. While the good people in the labs are working night and day to better be able to deal with disease, I think it’s high time the classroom started talking about gay sex.
Opinions expressed in this article may not reflect those of THEGAYUK, it’s management or editorial teams. If you’d like to comment or write a comment, opinion or blog piece, please click here.
Opinions expressed in this article may not reflect those of THEGAYUK, its management or editorial teams. If you'd like to comment or write a comment, opinion or blog piece, please click here.
