I mean, look at your sexuality.
I mean, literally, I guess you could.
Why did I not know that you were going to do that?
Did you just say I look gay?
Let's talk about sex. The birds and the bees. The horizontal tango, the four-legged Foxtrot.
Oh, what you want to know about is sexual intercourse.
I mean... you get it.
Talking about sex has been awkward for as long as I can remember and probably you can
remember.
Stop laughing at me.
And yet states all across America are swiftly passing legislation
to regulate the results of getting it on.
The laws regarding sex education are decided on state and local levels with no federal regulation.
Only 24 states require that sex education be taught in public schools.
Just 13 states require that it be medically accurate.
Six states still include "No Promo Homo" and "Don't Say Gay" laws.
And just two states prevent the promotion of religion.
How is God present in our classrooms and eventually our bedrooms?
And at what cost?
Birmingham, Alabama is a Bible Belt city
in an abstinence forward state that does not mandate sex education.
I was curious to see what the conversation around sex looked like in Alabama.
And upon arrival, I received a clear message.
The most restrictive abortion bill in the country just passed in Alabama.
Abortion would be criminalized in Alabama.
This is the most restrictive ban on abortions in the nation.
Last night the Alabama State Senate passed a bill effectively banning abortion at every
stage of pregnancy.
As of now the governor Kay Ivey, who is a Republican,
has not issued a comment.
You can't not educate people on something, not talk about something, and then effectively
punish them for the silence that you implemented.
No?
I always feel crazy in this show.
It was overwhelming to me that a local government that was not mandating sex education
was regulating the results of having sex.
I sat down with Dr. Samantha Hill at Children's of Alabama
to try and make sense of it all.
So in this state right now, what is sex ed?
What does that look like?
Unfortunately, one of the biggest drawbacks about the sexual education law here in Alabama
is that it's not enforced.
Our students here in the state of Alabama are not necessarily getting the same sexual education.
What are the risks and consequences if we just don't deal with sex education?
Continuing the silence that we have around sex education just increases the stigma.
Keeping it stigmatized only serves to further jeopardize
that person's health, as well as everybody they come in contact with.
Alabama ranks 11th in the country for highest teen pregnancy rates.
Of the teens having sex in Alabama, 80% have never been tested for HIV.
And more than 20% of newly diagnosed cases are found in heterosexuals.
The issue of sex education is not a conversation about gay or straight, but about human rights.
The literature shows that once you instill and incorporate a comprehensive sexual education
curriculum within your particular arena, so schools, the rates of STDs and pregnancies decline.
I mean, you could argue that
a great way to avoid getting pregnant is gay sex.
So-
Have they thought about that?
That's an interesting thought.
Don't get me wrong, we've made some great strides, but for the wonderful country that
we are, I don't think we've gone far enough at improving our young people's health in
this particular arena.
I had been warned that talking about sex in Alabama would be difficult, but I had to give
it the old college try, right?
Hi, my name is Grace.
I'm working on a documentary about sex education, and I'm wondering...
Yes.
Oh, OK.
So there is not a sex ed program at your school at all?
Hi, my name is Grace, and I'm working on a documentary about sex education.
Hi, my name is Grace.
My name is Grace.
Hi, my name is Grace.
Oh my gosh.
Hi, this is Grace, too.
Hello?
OK.
But today's Thursday.
OK.
OK cool.
Alright, and is...
All right, thank you.
Bye.
It became abundantly clear that there was almost no one in the state of Alabama that
wanted to talk to this ol' lesbian about sex.
Who's next?
Go figure.
In Alabama the law currently states that within the sex ed classroom,
an instructor must emphasize in a factual manner, from a public health perspective,
that homosexuality is not a lifestyle acceptable to the general public, and that
These laws are commonly referred to as "No Promo Homo" and "Don't Say Gay".
While the bill to remove this language nearly reached a House vote this year, the legislature
prioritized abortion bans.
In a state that has largely disregarded the conversation around sex and has overlooked
or condemned some within it, spaces like Magic City Acceptance Center exists
to provide LGBTQ youth with the tools needed to protect themselves.
There is glitter in the wall.
When we opened five years ago, we opened to serve LGBTQ youth ages 13 to 24.
And recognizing that young people didn't have access to safer sex ed that was inclusive,
that they didn't have access to testing.
The idea was to have a space where young people can go,
and feel comfortable, and have that access, and be able to talk about themselves.
I love that the kitchen is the first thing, kind of a little mini kitchen.
Very important.
I like the priorities here.
Because we're a youth center and I'm a mom about their art.
I will steal their art from them when they leave it behind and decorate the fridge.
Every time we welcome someone in, usually this is about the point that they tell me
that they're really nervous and that they've never been in a space like this before.
And I get to say, at this exact point every single person has given me the same speech
because no one has ever been in an LGBTQ youth space in Birmingham because this is it.
So you're all having an experience that's the same for everyone in that it's new.
Once a month, Magic City Acceptance Center hosts their unicorn pizza club, which is a
discussion forum that focuses on the
diverse aspects of LGBTQ sexual health and well-being.
I did have sex ed.
The problem is that I was not in a place with my own sexuality where when it was all about
straight stuff, I was just like, oh not for me, checked out.
In health class I was so confused about why boys had to wear boxers and girls wore panties
that I couldn't even understand what was going on, because I was just lost by the idea that
I couldn't wear boxers.
They're so comfy.
That's great.
Well, I did get one sex ed class out of the whole 18 years of me going to school.
I was getting my education from other people who really didn't know what they were talking about.
Or experience.
Or experience, yeah.
And that...
I paid the price with that.
So we are actually number 17 in the nation for the highest rates of newly diagnosed HIV infections.
So in this graphic, Birmingham has a higher rate of HIV infection than Los Angeles, where we came from.
Correct.
It is per capita.
Admittedly, as a gay woman, I ignorantly assumed the conversations around HIV and unwanted pregnancies
never related to people like me.
But that couldn't be further from the truth.
Studies have found that lesbian and bisexual women are at equal or greater risk
of unwanted pregnancies and terminations than their heterosexual counterparts.
By excluding the LGBTQ community from the sex-ed conversation, all students are getting only a
fraction of the story.
I am a Southern queer mom.
This is Taylor Winfrey, a Southern queer mom.
All of those things wrap up into this beautiful package of what I express to the world and
what I feel about myself.
Can you tell us a little bit
about the ideas presented to you in your sex education in Alabama?
Really the entirety of my sex education here was abstinence only and fear based.
And so it was like, okay don't have sex.
If you have sex, this is what's going to happen to you.
We were handed out these little business-card-sized things that we wrote our name on
and it said, "Dear Jesus," comma.
So we wrote our names, we signed at the bottom.
It was a pact between ourselves and God that we were going to remain pure
for our wedding nights.
My virginity was not mine.
It was men's. You know, my dad's, Jesus's, my spouse.
But it wasn't mine.
At the age of 19, Taylor found herself pregnant and questioning her options as well as her sexuality.
I was already having a hard time understanding how being gay fit into this white picket
fence narrative that I've been fed.
It let me off the hook for a while of dealing with my own sexual orientation.
Well, because I would imagine most people would just sort of have assumed that you were straight.
Exactly, yeah.
And a lot of it just had to do with this idea that is force-fed to you that the only right
way to be, and the only right way to raise a child, is with a husband.
I fought against that before I had Emily, this idea of letting go of the narrative.
It took a good three years after she was born for me to get to a place where I was able
to come out.
We hear this idea that if you just don't talk about the experience of a queer person, and
maybe if your kid is queer, if you just don't talk about it, then maybe it'll go away.
Yeah.
And I hope that we're getting to a point where we're like, no, we're still going to be here.
Yeah.
I've made it a huge part of my parenting to parent as
gender neutral as possible.
My kid is nine and is very vocal about being gender fluid.
Mamma, can I get on that?
She's on that.
You can ask her.
When we give kids these words and these ideas, they really resonate with them.
Because kids are very fluid in the way that they think and the way that they perceive the world.
People here are very quiet about sex education.
And yet when it comes to reproductive rights, very loud.
Very loud.
How do you make sense of that?
None of it makes sense to me.
I was at my kitchen table with a friend last night just trying to figure out what it means
for us...
Right.
As people who can get pregnant.
So we just got word that Governor Kay Ivey has signed the most restrictive
reproductive rights bill in the United States.
It is now the law of the land in Alabama.
It feels very timely that all of this is going down as we are here in Birmingham trying to
learn about reproductive health and sex ed.
I don't understand how we're having this conversation and we're not having the other one.
It feels like you're treating a symptom, you're not treating the problem.
And yet all across America, abstinence is being prioritized.
In fact, President Trump has allotted millions of dollars to sexual risk avoidance programs
which heavily emphasize abstinence.
I couldn't shake the feeling that I needed a greater understanding of what an abstinence
forward education looked like.
And while it seemed I wasn't going to be able to have this conversation in Alabama, I found
someone that was willing to make a house call.
Hi!
Thank you so much for coming.
Heather Ruesch is a wife, a mother, and a life issues speaker.
You know, when I say that abstinence
saves these kids from the hurts of casual sex, I say that from experience.
Much like Taylor, Heather found herself pregnant at the age of 19.
The birth of her daughter was the catalyst for the work she does today.
The CDC declared that we're in an epidemic with sexually transmitted infections in our country.
We're in an all time high and only getting higher, and we're dumping all of this money into prevention.
And where's the prevention? Nothing's woking.
Yeah.
I would love to see more abstinence-forward... It's sexual risk avoidance-forward curriculums
out there in education. The problem is you gotta have somebody teach them.
And that, I think, practically speaking is what we are running into everywhere across the country.
Nobody wants to be the one teaching this.
Why is that?
It's confrontational.
The reason why it's not being taught... I think it's hard to find people to teach it because of consequences
in teaching it, and also confrontation in teaching it.
And I think it's uncomfortable.
I am not opposed to abstinence being part of that discussion at all.
Too often with abstinence only, it's sort of excluding students who might not subscribe to that.
Would you be open to talking with people from the comprehensive side of things and seeing
if you could find commonalities?
Oh, absolutely.
Anybody teaching something that is this important should be teaching it for the benefit of the student.
It's just uncomfortable to talk about and we need to take that, we need to get rid of that.
Right.
And realize that we're the adults.
Yeah.
And we have a moral obligation and responsibility to our children to mentor them, to teach them well.
The lack of regulation and the stigma surrounding sex education has resulted in a stalemate
that is harmful to the mental, physical, and emotional health of American students.
We need to be talking about sex.
Education is a human right.
Let me just come over here and show y'all real quick.
We can't deny American students the right to understand their bodies
and the ways in which they can protect and accept themselves.
Thank you so much for watching Refinery29.
For more videos, click here.
And to subscribe, click here.