School sex education is failing LGBT people

We have a problem with sex education. This has been obvious for a while. People talk regularly about boys watching too much porn, girls thinking they have a cherry to pop, and mothers and fathers who wrap their children in bubble wrap until university when their newly-liberated child runs off and gets chlamydia.

But most people don’t think about how schools completely fail, in every sense, to talk about gay sex.

16-year-old me had a lot of research to do

Think about it. None of the 90’s style videos we all watched in secondary school health lessons ever spoke about anal sex, and frankly until recently I thought a dental dam was one of those things rugby players put in their mouths to protect the few teeth they have left.

Being LGBT in the UK is still really difficult: not only do you have to deal with having a complete identity crisis surrounding your sexuality, but then you have to take a dive into the unknown, scary waters of gay sex. This is a world involving hook-ups, condoms, HIV, PreP, Grindr, dental dams, anal sex, dildos, lube, drugs, STDs, tops, bottoms, femmes, and a bunch of other vital things which were never talked about at school.

Grindr taught me more than my Year 7 teacher

Exploring your sexuality for the first time is petrifying for even straight people, but, for LGBT people, having to navigate all of these unknowns whilst also feeling like you have a dirty little gay secret can be soul destroying.

Losing my virginity at 16 wasn’t a pleasant experience at all. So unpleasant that I didn’t have sex for years afterwards. Let me be clear, this was nobody’s fault, we just didn’t know what we were doing. In fact, neither of us really knew why gay guys even needed a condom. This meant that, when we put it on inside out, we simply took it off and turned it round – a move which could have 100 per cent lead to the transmission of an STD.

Looking back now, us gays can laugh at our own naivety but to be honest, we shouldn’t have been naive to start with: schools should have offered us the same guidance they at least attempt to offer straight people.

The problem is that sex education in schools often relies on teachers leading the discussion, and the vast majority of teachers are straight and generally quite old. Not only do straight people find talking about gay sex to be completely awkward, most of them have absolutely no idea how it even works (you can’t just stick it in there btw, it takes a degree of preparation).

I’m sure that if we could all jump back to our Year 7 sex education classes and ask the teacher about anal sex, she’d either make something useless up on the spot, or she’d collapse out of embarrassment.

Look, I get it. Gay sex is still a huge joke to most straight people, but getting HIV isn’t, having a crisis about your identity isn’t, and neither is a complete feeling of alienation and worry. For LGBT people like me, crappy sex education matters.