Teaching Sexuality

by LILIANA SEGURA

[posted online on August 17, 2005]

Students taking sex education in Maryland's Montgomery County public schools this fall won't be discussing homosexuality, not unless a student raises a hand to ask about it--and even then, the teacher will have to keep it brief. Nor will students be watching a new video called Protect Yourself!, which uses a cucumber to demonstrate how to put on a condom. (Copies of the video now gather dust in administrative offices in Rockville, Maryland.)

In fact, students taking sex ed in Montgomery County will not see any of the new material from a curriculum unveiled last fall that might have been an alternative educational model to others, developed in this age of abstinence-only funding and national legislation to ban gay marriage. According to the new curriculum, not only was homosexuality something you could talk about, being gay could be a legitimate sexual identity. Thus, adolescent experimentation ("sex play") with members of the same sex was "not uncommon." And if you were the son or daughter of a gay couple, that was OK, too: The curriculum included same-sex-parent households as one of nine on a list of "types of family." The permission-only curriculum--developed for eighth and tenth graders over three years by a twenty-seven-member Citizen's Advisory Committee that included people from Planned Parenthood, the Daughters of the American Revolution and numerous religious groups--might not have introduced groundbreaking ideas about sex and gender, but it was a leap forward for a county whose aging curriculum combined an emphasis on abstinence with an implicit "don't ask, don't tell" approach to homosexuality.