This is a guest entry from The Gaytheist Gospel Hour as part of the blog carnival to support Scarleteen.

Preface: I was recently asked to participate in a blogathon to support Scarleteen, an online sex education forum for teens. I was flattered. I was humbled. I was a little queasy and had to breathe in a bag for a minute or 12. I decided to contribute the story of how I survived homophobic bullying thanks a single library book. I’m living proof that progressive sex education (no matter how small-scale) makes an enormous difference in the lives of the very young. It’s my hope that all who read my sarcastic, satirically-tinged autobiographical account will consider making an enormous difference by supporting Scarleteen.

"In this life, things are much harder than in the afterworld/ In this life, you’re on your own!" —Prince

High school is a laugh riot. It’s a jolly funhouse where the unpopular and the unusual are punished for their crimes against conformity with a topsy-turvy ridicule. Here, overweight boys have “due dates”, homely girls are proposed marriage by homecoming kings, underwear waistbands are wedgied into easy carrying handles for Special Ed students, and exchange students, (regardless of country of origin) are addressed in mock Chinese. In this swarming mosh pit of ha!rassment, powered by sweaty insecurity and raw, smelly fear, homophobia stands as the indisputable height of hilarity. At least that’s how I remember it.

“Gay” was the Golden God of Comedy at my Iowa high school back in 1985. It was the sun that shined down on an otherwise unfunny and frighteningly confusing world and made it all worthy of a ridicule most amusing. Anything could be “gay”, and therefore hilarious: a pack of Lit’l Smokies dog-piled on a cafeteria tray, “True” by Spandau Ballet, the color green and all who wore it on Thursday. Behaviors were “gay”, too: raising one’s hand in class, missing a foul shot during a gym class basket ball game, wearing one’s backpack over both shoulders as opposed to the heterosexually-mandated right shoulder. The entire marching band was apparently gay, and so were the Choir and the Drama Club. But they called themselves the Glee Club and The Thespians, so weren’t they just asking for it?

The Golden Gay God of Comedy was capricious. His ways were mysterious. Amazingly, not even heterosexuality provided an adequate defense against The Gay. Prince was a perfect example. Anyone who’d heard his Purple Rain album, (and only the Amish and the deaf hadn’t) had witnessed Prince’s very vigorous love of the ladies. Its most notorious track, “Darling Nikki”, was an epic ode to boy/girl frottage practically tailored to the heterosexual fumblings of the typical teenager, yet the man who had composed and performed it? Gay, gay, gay. It could be argued that, like the Glees and the Thespians, Prince had in his own way “asked for it.” He did, after all, wear high heels and make up, but so did Vince Neil of Motley Crue. Yet nobody called Vince Neil gay. And thus was the delightful cruelty of the Golden Gay God of Comedy.

When I moved from Ohio to this Iowa High School, I found myself a permanent inhabitant within the crosshairs of the Golden Gay God of Comedy. My favorite paisley shirt was gay. My red hair was gay. My glasses were gay. My inability to put a ball in a hoop was gay. I was president of the Student Librarians, a post I’d accepted with the purposeful solemnity worthy of the Gayest of the Gay. As fate would have it, I really was gay, which put a weirdly embarrassing spin on my relationship to the Golden Gay God of Comedy. How unfair, yet undeniably dead-on he was! He had called a duck a duck, and what could I do but quack “You got me there, bub!”?

I paid dearly for my hilarious gayness, and my own personal bill collector was comedian Chuck “Smith.” Who at my Iowa High School could deny his uproarious stylings? The spectacle of the redheaded new girl in the weird shirt with spit in her hair, getting groped by a “lezzie!”-squealing Chuck, filled the hallways with deafening laughter. Such rollicking high jinks!

Since the story I’m telling is sarcastic, satirically-tinged autobiography, I’m going to skip over the part where I cried when I got home and was afraid to go to school and hated the entire world for what had happened to me. In fact, I became physically ill while reliving 1985 in the writing the first draft of this story. Because there is no crying allowed in sarcastic, satirically-tinged autobiography, I’ll jump right over the abundantly obvious fact that what happened to me was very, very painful and will now mercifully deliver us all to the part where I decided to turn things around and fight hilarity with hilarity.

The fact of the matter was: I was much funnier than Chuck. Even though I was too inward and awkward at the time to let anyone else know it, I knew it. It galled me to be on the outside of the joke, looking in at its heart and soul, which was ironically enough, my own victimization. The Golden Gay God of Comedy may have ruled the school with his nonsensical and pitiless jurisprudence, but it was plain to me that he had a very sub-par servant in Chuck “Smith”. I mean, really: calling a lesbian a lesbian? It was the most uninspired put-down, ever. The personal disappointment was bad enough, but how was I expected to hold my head up amongst the pregnant fat boys or the portable special ed students?

Which brings me to the book One Teenager in Ten: Writings by Gay and Lesbian Youth. Published in 1983 by Alyson Press and edited by Ann Heron, the book was packed to bursting with the testimonies of people like me. One Teenager In Ten had unceremoniously arrived at the Library of my Iowa High School one spring day, innocuously packed in a cardboard box along with over a dozen paperbacks of sundry and disparate subject matter. As was my duty as the President of the Student Librarians and the Gayest of the Gay, I had glued the pocket in the front cover myself, and never dared to ask where it came from or who had ordered it. I snuck it home without committing my name to the check-out card and read it in one night.

The very existence of this book was an enormous comfort, because it was tangible proof that even though I was by myself in my Iowa High School, I was by no means alone. The book also gave me a sense of perspective. As bad as I had it, there were others who had it even worse. They would escape their own Chuck “Smiths” at the end of a school day, only to be harassed by their own families and members of their churches. Some had been institutionalized. Others had attempted suicide. For the first time in my life, I counted myself lucky to be the beloved daughter of 2 unrepentant hell-bound atheists for reasons other than not having to wear a dress for Easter. But as valuable as a source of solace One Teenager In Ten was, the book actually turned out to be an even better blunt instrument of pure comedy vengeance.

On the night that I had temporarily stolen One Teenager In Ten from the library, the Golden Gay God of Comedy came to me in a dream. He took the form of a paisley-clad Prince, tottering in the sauciest pair of F Me Pumps I had ever seen in my life. He wagged a sassy, lace-encased finger at me. “You’ve abused your post as The Gayest of the Gay,” he scolded in a surprisingly deep voice, “A crime most uncool and worst of all–unfunny.” He regarded me with those Bambi eyes ablaze within their Mabelline confines, so I knew he meant business. “Someone needs that book much more than you do,” Prince admonished me, and punctuated his disapproval with a nut-cracker split on the foggy floor below us. He sprung up before me, did a cyclone-spin, swept the curtain of curls out of his right eye, and said, “Someone named Chuck ‘Smith’!” He departed into the clouds with a chirping little shriek. I believe it went something like this: “Owwww—ahh!” which I took to mean “Don’t get caught!”

So the next day, I kept the book and returned the card to the library. I’d never seen Chuck’s handwriting, so the Golden Gay God of Comedy had guided my hand in the forgery of his signature: the plodding jumble of widely-spaced upper and lowercase letters you might find on a “No Girls Allowed” sign. I stamped the due date on the card and filed it away accordingly. And I waited.

Which brings me to Study Hall. Located at the left corner of the right-hand serif perched at the top of the U-style-layout of my Iowa High School, the Study Hall was ensconced in the end-of-the-line Gay Ghetto also inhabited by the Library and the Band Room. The white ceramic bricks that comprised the entire school were never whiter or shinier than in the Study Hall. Like teeth. Were we trapped inside the mouth of the school, I would often wonder. We were made to sit at desks set in skittish rows, and expected to ignore the lumpy loudness of the biggest hits of last year emanating from the Band Room next door while we ostensibly caught up on our studies. The clock on the wall was perpetually set on Anchorage time, and every minute was a shiny white eternity. It was the perfect setting in which to contemplate suicide. And receive overdue notices.

They were delivered from the Library next door, every Wednesday, and handed out to the offenders trapped in the Study Hall. The overdue notices looked harmless enough: innocent white pieces of paper, lovingly cut into slips. But the dot matrix derision they harbored left a stinging welt. “You have betrayed the trust invested in you by the Library, as well as the entire intellectual community of this Iowa High School,” the notices announced, “and therefore all will know your shame!” That was how I took it, anyway. Nobody else seemed to mind much. I had Study Hall with Chuck (naturally) and I would sit in the back of the room, watch as he writhed in boredom over his unopened books, and instead of suicide, I would think about One Teenager In Ten. And I would quake with suppressed laughter. It was an excruciatingly delicious wait for Wednesday. No matter what happened to me in the hallway or what would be thrown at me in Study Hall, I had something to laugh at and something to live for: Wednesday.

The only thing that trumped waiting for Wednesday was, well, Wednesday itself. The look of utter bafflement on Chuck’s face upon being presented with that first overdue notice is perhaps the most cherished memory of my youth. A cow confronted with a curling iron, a chimp with a chess set, a trout with Tommy Tune tickets– none of them had anything on Chuck’s goggle-eyed bewilderment. Stunned, he hesitated for a moment before accepting the notice. He blinked as if to shake it off, and regarded the slip of paper with the puzzled disgust one might exhibit upon being bestowed with a piece of freshly-wiped toilet paper.

The notice in and of itself was clearly an effrontery. Chuck would never do anything as gay as set foot in the Library, let alone check out an actual book. That stuff was strictly for fags. He protested loudly to no one in particular but to everyone all at once: “This is STUPID! I don’t go to the stupid Library!” He let out a gasp of exasperation and rolled his eyes.

And then he read it.

A funny thing happened next. No, make that a fucking hilarious thing: Chuck lept from his seat with such violence, I had to look twice to make sure it was still just a desk, and not the lap of Liberace. As his empty desk spun into the next row, nearly hitting a cheerleader, the Band Fags next door presciently pumped out a cumbersome cover of Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy.” The Study Hall monitor shouted his name over the blaring tuba breakdown and demanded he return to his seat, but there was no stopping Chuck from storming the Library to defend his heterosexuality. But it was all in vain, as his name was clearly committed to the checkout card, in all its childish glory.

And thus, the Golden Gay God of Comedy was at last properly served. For several weeks afterward, I basked in a sunlight that rendered an otherwise unfunny, and frighteningly confusing world somehow worthy of a ridicule most amusing.

Afterword: I’ve grown up to inhabit a world that is in many ways both better and worse than the one in which I grew up. It’s a world in which same sex couples can wed (coming to a state near you!) and gay soldiers can serve their country with their heads held high (at least for now!). It’s a world in which, a gay-centric show like “Glee” not only exists, but thrives commercially, a world where an out lesbian is poised to take the daytime talk throne currently held by Oprah Winfrey. All of these things were just unthinkable back in 1985. Yet it’s also a world in which young gay people commit suicide to escape homophobic bullying. I survived 1985 thanks to One Teenager In Ten and a mean streak. The mean streak I was born with, but One Teenager In Ten came courtesy of my Iowa High School. It was just one book, one miniscule instance of forward thought and inclusion on the part of my school board, but the difference it made in my life cannot be understated. It afforded me the strength to stand up for myself and survive to adulthood. I can’t help but wonder how many lives could have been saved if that one miniscule instance of forward-thought and inclusion had mushroomed beyond that book in that tiny Iowa high school. I’m of the belief that the inclusion of the gay perspective in sex education would help eliminate the confusion and irrational fear experienced by both gay and straight students. Homophobic bullying and its tragic aftermath are the results of a fearful and narrow-minded educational culture. I truly believe the Chuck “Smith”s of the world would be better served by a book like One Teenager In Ten instead of overdue notices, which in a way, they have been receiving pretty much all along.

American educational reform, it seems, is powered by an arthritic hamster running on a primitive wheel made of third-world wicker. Thanks to the machinations of the Religious Right, it will very likely be a cold day in Satan’s codpiece before we’ll see true reform in our lifetimes. In the meantime, there is Scarleteen. Scarleteen is an online sexuality resource for young people, providing free, inclusive, comprehensive and positive sex education, information and one-on-one support to millions. Running strictly on private donations, Scarleteen does so much for so many with so little. It may have even saved a few lives along the way.

Please consider supporting this amazing resource with your donation.

This is an entry from Arianna at Fearfree, one of the many wonderful guest posts in the month-long blog carnival to help support Scarleteen!

I throw around the words “fear” and “silence” often when it comes to sex ed. They’re loaded terms, perhaps, but these words best describe my experiences with sex education: my emotional reaction and everyone else’s approach, respectively. These words describe what I feel is not often expressed in the sex education debate.

True, it’s hard to use the “Little Mary Sue is scared” argument to a bunch of adult policymakers who believe that a child will “get over” whatever scare tactics they might use in sex education. I have indeed heard it argued that it is okay to use fear in sex education because, well, incurable STIs are out there right now. You can see the logic: if children grow out of believing in the boogeyman, then certainly they will grow out of being told that condoms have pores that let HIV through, right? At least by the time that they are married, they’ll grow out of it, right?

The problem with this is that these particular things are not so easy to simply grow out of. The boogeyman is irrational. HIV/AIDS and pregnancy are legitimately real, which is why contraception and latex exists. At the same time, we know that this issue has to do with more than just teen pregnancy and some HPV outbreaks. We can’t ignore sexual shaming. When this shaming happens, fear follows. When people are not just a little apprehensive, but downright afraid or misinformed, they have to go through a lot of unnecessary suffering to get to a sexually healthy place.

At this point in my life, I am much better off than many of my friends, who have been sexually assaulted or engaged in sexual activity of questionable consent because the idea that they could negotiate what they wanted was never expressed to them. I didn’t have to deal with pregnancy scares or STI issues in high school. I’ve never had to deal with an STI, period. I haven’t had many relationships, but I have had no major crises within them, just a lot of learning and personal growth with truly good people. Yet with all that good fortune, all that crisis averted, I still struggled because of silent shaming. My struggle, as I describe here, was incredibly lonely and painful–there was just no one to turn to.

I found Scarleteen around 2007, at a time in my life when I was asking a lot of questions about the rights and wrongs of my own sexuality, doubting myself, seeing my drive as an evil and angry thing. I felt like I had a monster inside me, telling me what was supposedly “right” while also bringing me a lot of self-loathing. Arousal meant having to get rid of something, as opposed to doing something that might bring me some joy.

Sex education, as I have said before, seems to be either an abstinence-fest or a condom giveaway. I admit that my view may be skewed, but I don’t have to guess to know that sex in its most comprehensive sense isn’t discussed among us, as a general rule. To me, withholding information, not facing the issues, and saying as little as possible about something, is the same thing as silence.

Seriously! Let’s face the issues. Let’s talk about the difficulties and yes, the pleasures of sexuality. Let’s have real talk, not just the talk we assume those between the ages of 13 and 17 can handle. I say this as a person who is still young, still hanging on. I beg, I plead to older adults, please listen! Please don’t shame us! Please find good, real answers to our questions, at a place like Scarleteen, or a place in your hearts, or another place that accentuates the sex positive!

I can’t know whether anyone has had quite my experience, trembling in fear, confusion, and distress about sexual matters, even without involvement in anything resembling partnered sexuality. But I know that I couldn’t possibly be alone in my old fears. Who is out there? What youth is there who has suffered like me? I haven’t yet “grown out” of my old fears and self-hatred, but think–that self-hatred never had to happen.

Scarleteen steps in to answer my pleas. Scarleteen is sex-positive, open-minded, truly comprehensive. Scarleteen isn’t there to make young people with questions and apprehensions phobic, like I have been. I have asked tough questions on the message boards, read columns, searched for permanent articles, and I have been welcomed, recognized, as a normal and good person.

Thank you, Scarleteen. You have supported a young woman in overcoming her fears, her phobia. In all my grappling, you were there to let me know that there was someone in the world who was not assuming that she would not, could not, could never be a sexual being. Even when my fear kept me from asking questions, you were that presence, that comforting hand, letting it be okay to be myself.

It has been incredibly important and valuable to me, and I know I can’t be the only one who feels that way.

Speaking of Scarleteen, this post is a part of the Scarleteen Blog Carnival, supporting its annual fundraising drive efforts! Scarleteen is a truly invaluable sex education resource for teens and young adults, and it has managed to stay afloat for years with the help of charitable donations from individuals and small organizations. Every little bit helps, so if you want to support and sustain sex-positive sex ed, I definitely recommend making a donation. Do it here!

This is a guest entry from The Beautiful Kind as part of the month-long blogathon to support and raise awareness for Scarleteen.

I was a teenager in the 80's, but before that I was a kid who got molested.

When I was 8 or 9, my teenage adopted brother asked me, "Do you want me to show you something fun?"

I said sure, not realizing his idea of "fun" was sex with a child. He did things like sneak into the bathroom while I was taking a bath and give me a handful of pencils, instructing me to get as many inside me as I could so that I would be prepared for his penis.

When the family watched movies in the dark living room, he would sit in a chair and stare intensely at me instead of the movie, his hands in his pockets, stroking himself. He had big plans for me.

But before he could turn me into his own personal sex toy, I told my parents about it, and they freaked. It took a while for them to protect me due to the complicated family legal system, but in the meantime they put me in therapy. I didn't know WHY I was in therapy; I thought I was being punished. Every week I would sit in the therapist's office in awkward silence. She sat there holding a clipboard, silent as well. I would endure this for an hour, then my mom would give me a candy bar and the therapist a check for $100.

Needless to say, therapy didn't help.

Fast forward to me as a sexually damaged weirdo teenager. I was 15, about to turn 16, and a 24-year-old guy I met at a party was harassing me for sex. I told him I wasn't ready. He assured me I was. He told me sex was no big deal. "So why do you want to do it so bad?" I asked him, irritated.

For a month he kept the pressure on, calling me several times a day. I didn't know what to do. I asked my friends for advice. Some told me he was a creep. Some told me I should do it.

Finally, he wore me down and I decided to get it over with. If he wanted my virginity that bad, fine.

My parents dropped me off at his dad's house and we had sex on the hardwood floor. It was weird. He tried telling me if he squeezed the base of his penis while we had sex, he wouldn't get me pregnant, but I had enough sense to insist on him using a condom.

Still, I wasn't emotionally ready for sex and the experience freaked me out. I was POSITIVE I was pregnant. I couldn't tell my parents, so I internalized my awful feelings and acted out. I got in a fight with my parents, a big screaming match, and I yelled, "I wanna kill you!!!"

I went to bed and fell asleep, escaping from the horrible situation I was in. My parents didn't understand, and I was PREGNANT, dammit. My life was ruined. What had I done?!

The next thing I knew, I was being woken by my parents. They were handcuffing me.

"What are you doing?!" I cried, disoriented and jerked from sleep by the clicking of cold steel cuffs on my wrists.

"You are a danger to yourself and others, so we're taking you to the hospital," my mother told me, standing behind my father the jailer.

"What? No I'm not! I didn't mean it! I was just mad! Please don't do this!" I panicked.

It was too late - I was on my way to lockdown. I tried jumping out of the car, but that's hard to do when you're handcuffed (why did my parents HAVE handcuffs, anyway? Freaks!)

I spent my 16th birthday in the mental hospital. They gave me a pregnancy test (I wasn't pregnant), and forced me to work out to Jane Fonda video tapes and play volleyball. I had a terrible head cold and couldn't taste any of the Easter candy my parents brought me. I thought life was bad before, god it could be so much worse! You should have heard the horror stories the other teens in group therapy shared.

After a week they released me, and I was right back into the clutches of that creepy older guy, who carried on with his mission to have sex with me without a condom. After a month or so I got bored with him and dumped him for a boy my age, continuing to learn as best I could while fumbling around in the dark, hiding from my parents, angry at the world.

I graduated high school in 1991. Scarleteen wasn't around until 1998. I didn't have a resource like this as a teenager. I wish I did. It took me years to heal from my past traumatic experiences. I'm happy to spread the word about this amazing resource for teens so others can learn about sex in a healthy way on their own terms.

Scarleteen is an independent, grassroots sexuality education and support organization and website that is visited by around three-quarters of a million diverse people each month worldwide, most between the ages of 15 and 25.

That includes my daughter. Right now she is 10, but she'll be a teenager before long, and I want her to have Scarleteen as a resource. So please donate today and keep Scarleteen strong!