Ready to reclaim, heal, and celebrate your sexuality through pleasure, power and play? A new event may be for you.
It’s true that gay, lesbian, bisexual and queer folks are forced to face our sexuality in myriad more ways than heterosexuals, since the whole world is assumed to BE heterosexual and they can just move through it with all of those assumptions and the world supporting who they are.
Since our sexuality is the point of difference, we have many more opportunities to examine and explore what it means to us. While this may be true, it seems to be a perpetual myth that just because you are queer, lesbian, gay, or bisexual, that you’ve explored your sexuality and have it all locked in.
One of the magical things about queer communities is the level in which we will address, talk about, teach about and explore sexuality. In fact, it seems that the number of L/G/B/T/Q sex educators is far higher than the general population. We are naturally drawn to work with people on sexuality since so many of us have had our own journeys and revelations about who we are as sexual people.
In my 20+ years teaching about sexuality, I can say that queer folks have just as much of a need—if not more—for adult sex education as heterosexuals do. Sometimes it is for that very reason: we are working to love, accept and embrace our identities, desires, and attractions that might be different from the dominant norms. So queer folks will show up in the sexual empowerment work I do because there is clearly a payoff in it.
In this way, there is a different battle for heterosexuals who can be stuck in the assumptions not only that the world is heterosexual until proven otherwise, but also in the idea that “sex should come naturally” and you don’t need to “learn how to do sex.” (I hear some version of these ideas all the time.)
Last year, at my Fire Woman Retreat, where we spend three days in a trans-inclusive women’s community exploring, healing, celebrating and honoring our sexuality and raising our collective sexual empowerment, in our closing Fire Ritual, we asked people to step forward if they are lesbian, bisexual, or queer, and then added, exploring/questioning their sexuality. Even to my surprise, a near sweep of about 95% of the participants stepped forward.
The truth is that we ALL need sex education and virtually no one got the sex education we needed as a young person to prepare us for an adult sexual life. Given how important our sexuality is, and given how many myths abound, it behooves us to put some energy into it. Isn’t it strange that we will put energy into nearly every other skill we want to learn, be it learning to mountain climb, learning to cook, or developing a vocation, and yet, most people put little, if any, energy into being sexually empowered, being a good lover and sexual self-acceptance and fulfillment.
What typically happens is that women find themselves freshly divorced or firmly dissatisfied in their 30s, 40s, 50s or beyond, and it’s at that time when they will seek out support. What if we treated sexuality the way we treat our physical and emotional health, our academic pursuits or our dreams as artists or business owners and we invested in it? Everything would change and many people would not end up so unfulfilled later in life.
As lesbian, bisexual and queer women, we do lead the charge. That makes my job extra fun and powerful, as I am committed to the upliftment of women and queer folks always. And no matter who we are, we ALL need sex education. As someone who has been studying sexuality for over 2 decades, I continue to learn new things all the time. That is the beauty of sexuality. There is always more.
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