That We Should All Turn [Out] Healthy?
A critical inquiry into the project of preparing Junction City High School Students for ‘healthy’ lives in the ‘real’ world [June, 2004]
Over three decades ago, Gayle Rubin opened her essay “Thinking Sex” — now the sine qua non of sexuality, queer, gender, and women’s studies — by exhorting her reader: The time has come to think about sex.(1)
Disengaging herself from the other approaches to the topic of sex, Rubin puts forth the bold and original project of reexamining and questioning the ways that sex, sexuality, and all of their expressions and variations have been understood, interpreted, framed and even regulated over time.
She implores that we shift our thinking from the traditional framings of sex in terms of “sin, disease, neurosis, pathology, decadence, pollution, or the declines and fall of empires” to instead understand sex in terms of “social analysis and historical understanding.” The more fruitful categories that she suggests include such phenomena as “populations, neighborhoods, settlement patterns, migration, urban conflict, epidemiology, and police technology.” Finally, Rubin claims that by approaching sex in these novel ways, “a more realistic politics of sex becomes possible.”(2)
Building on Rubin’s pioneering work, this project is based on the belief that the time has come to think about sex education. At this moment in history, the issues of gay marriage, LGBTQ rights in the workplace, and sex education policy and funding are ever-present.
Though, at first glance, the first two issues may seem somewhat unrelated to the latter issue of sex education, my project will show that they are in fact complicatedly related to one another. The ways that each of these issues get framed, understood, experienced, and decided all have the same undercurrent running beneath their seemingly placid and partisan surfaces.
And just as Rubin had to disengage from the former framings of sex, in order for this project’s importance to be realized, I must also disengage from the terms of sex education as they have come to be used and delve beneath these superficies. In fact, the mere focus on sex education is what is truly keeping at bay the more subtle and perilous project that is going on in classrooms across the country.
Although I have confined my investigation to a single high school in a semi-rural town, I am willing to wager that the kind of health education that is present at Junction City High School is in fact the same kind of general education that students countrywide are receiving, which includes, but is not centered on, education about sex.
Also at this moment, the winds of change seem to be suggesting a reality that previous generations could not even conceive of: a gay/queer lifespan. That is, no longer is just the act of gay sex or a queer experience — from cross-dressing to sex reassignment surgery to polyamory or fantasizing about someone of the same sex — the defining or limiting understanding of what it means to exist outside the boundaries of normative heterosexuality.
In short, it is more than a single act and it goes beyond a mere experience. This historical moment allows for a most exciting project: cracking open the narrative of healthiness and normalcy as it is presented in sex and health education curricula nationwide. But my project does not bite off this entire potentiality. Rather, it starts small and in the local site of the town in which I went to high school.
This microlevel framing and approach adds even further timeliness and urgency to my investigation. One year ago this May (2004), a close high school friend committed suicide. He had graduated early from Junction City High School and spent time at the University of Tennessee and then at the University of Arizona, where he ended his life after 3 semesters. His educational migrations serve to just scratch the surface of what most would say, in retrospect, was a reality of general instability plagued with unhappiness, cynicism and an overall detachment from life that he lived.
But what came to light after his death would both shock and silence a community, and eventually disappear altogether. A few weeks before taking his own life, he disclosed to a few close friends that he was attracted to another male student. He wanted to make it clear, however, that he was still attracted to women and, moreover, did not consider himself gay or living a gay lifestyle. He went so far as to say that he did not want to be thought of as a flaming fag or a fashion designer the way that other gay men were seen by society.
I do not for a minute want to boil his unhappiness or suicide down to some generic and textbook psychological case of “internalized self hate” because of a homosexual desire. What I do want to question is how someone can go through life with only a single view, a single apprehension, and a limited language to understand what it means to have intense feelings for someone of the same sex. Where is this picked up? Taught? Learned?
As Rubin so poignantly notes in her aforementioned essay, in this day and age (hers and ours alike) we would not think of teaching a racial hierarchy or promote a single religion, or endorse only one kind of cuisine. And yet, when it comes to viewing sexuality and gender we have the most monolithic and singular ideas. Thus, when it comes to presenting and teaching about sex, sexuality, gender, and all their related sub-experiences (e.g., coupledom, marriage, child bearing and raising, etc.) the health education program at Junction City high school does just that. They rank. They singly promote. They unilaterally endorse.
There just are no viable presentations of non-heterosexual experiences, identities, life courses, and even a language with which to understand such things anywhere in society, and especially not in the very classes that purport to deal with the issue of sex and sexuality in order to produce a healthy individual. It is no wonder that there is so much tension around the gay marriage debate — our country already has chosen its single expression of life and has since been codifying and propagating it through every avenue possible. Further, it is no wonder that my friend chose to end his life. He truly saw no other options for living.
The time has come to think about the implicit messages being codified, reified, amplified, reinforced, and propagated via the model of heteronormativity promoted in schools. The coupling of our country’s current zeitgeist surrounding LGBTQ issues and my friend’s suicide makes this project real, its implications tangible, and the effects of what is taught and learned realizable. How might our country be addressing the issue of gay marriage differently if there were other viable and respectable models of non-heterosexual personhood available? What would my friend’s life have been like had he experienced a wellness model that included non-heterosexual life narratives? I encourage you, the reader, to keep these questions in the back of your mind as you read through the data, analysis, and conclusion of my project. The time has come. The time is now.
(1) Rubin, Gayle, “Thinking Sex,” in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, Carole S. Vance, ed. (Routeledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), p. 267.
(2) Ibid., p. 277.
About the author:
Leslie Bradshaw is professionally known for building new businesses, products, and revenue streams by unlocking and unleashing people’s full potential.
What may be less known to some is Leslie’s background and lifelong commitment as a learner, bridge, activist, and ally in LGBTQIA+ movement.
Full personhood, joy, acceptance, and wellbeing is her aim—ending oppressive heteronormative structures is her game.
Context: In June 2004, I completed the above-introduced thesis as an undergraduate of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at The University of Chicago.
Degree: AB “Artium Baccalaureus”.
Awards: Highest Honors and Phi Beta Kappa.
Full Thesis available upon request.
