Renewed commitments in a time of vigilance: sexuality education in the USA^*

^*This is the introduction to a Virtual Special Issue of Sex Education journal(‘Renewed Commitments in a Time of Vigilance: Sexuality Education in the USA’) located at http://explore.tandfonline.com/content/pgas/sexuality-education-in-the-usa

Abstract

Over the past 20 years, the USA has seen more than its fair share of controversy with respect to education about sexuality, sex and intimate relationships. Attention has focused on content (abstinence-only vs. comprehensive instruction), delivery (by teachers, parents, health professionals or community educators) and context (within school and beyond). In recognition of this fact, Sex Education invited the development of a virtual special issue comprising a sample of its most impactful papers on these and related topics. The 2016 Presidential election results and recent legislative action in the USA point to the importance of thinking broadly about teaching and learning about sexuality inside and outside of schools and of considering sexuality as it intersects with categories of difference, privilege and penalty, including ability, age, immigration, race, gender and class. This paper, developed as an introduction to the virtual special issue, opens with a discussion of the journal’s contributions to the ongoing discussion of pleasure and desire in sexuality education. From there, we turn to the question of what is possible given the material and ideological conditions of schooling and then to opportunities for teachers and learners outside the conventional classroom. We follow with a discussion of the place of intersectional analyses in sexuality education research, and conclude with some thoughts on sexuality education research at this political moment.

Keywords:

• Intersectionality
• school-based instruction
• sex education
• sexuality education
• relationships education
• USA

The intellectual and political context of this virtual special issue of Sex Education journal has shifted over the time we have been working on it together. Initially, our task was to respond to an invitation from Sex Education’s editor-in-chief, Peter Aggleton, to assemble a collection of articles of special interest to readers researching and writing about sexuality education in the USA. Our selections would focus, first, on substantive issues raised over the decade and half of the journal’s existence and, second, on questions that might shape the next fifteen years of scholarship and practice. We had reached a pivotal moment in the USA’s history: abstinence-only funding had lost its stranglehold on sexuality education; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) youth and teachers enjoyed some protection in the everyday worlds of policy-making and instruction; and analyses that explore sexuality as it intersects with race, gender, class and other systems of privilege and oppression were increasingly the norm. In this world – a strikingly different one than the 2001 world in which Sex Education commenced publication – what research questions were possible and compelling?

And then, in the midst of our work on this special issue, Donald Trump and Mike Pence won the electoral vote to become U.S. President- and Vice-President-Elect on a ticket that opposes same-sex marriage rights and endorses conversion therapy for Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual people. One month later, the North Carolina Senate refused to overturn its ‘bathroom bill’ (House Bill 2 or ‘HB 2’), which broadly restricts legal protections for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Queer (LGBTQ) people and specifically requires transgender people to use public bathrooms that match the gender indicated on their birth certificates. As Claire Greslé-Favier predicted in Sex Education soon after Barack Obama’s inauguration, eight years of that Democratic administration allowed educators, researchers and policy-makers to ‘progressively push towards more rights-based, pleasure positive approaches to sex education’ (2010, 420). However, the progressive push was not complete, and the 2016 election results and legislative action threaten the gains of that push and temper the sense of political possibility.

Nevertheless, we have resisted the impulse to be doom-laden and catastrophic in this review of the insights and questions raised about sexuality education research and practice in the USA within the pages of Sex Education. Indeed, we began the work of assembling this special issue sceptical about any claim that the Obama administration had been all good news for sexuality education in the USA, and we remain concerned that young people – particularly disadvantaged and marginalised young people – do not have reliable access to quality instruction. Our own work suggests that feminist, queer and anti-racist sexuality education remain elusive (Fields 2008; Garcia 2012) and that LGBTQ students and teachers still navigate heteronormative ideas and institutions that compromise their safety and value as members of school communities (Fields et al. 2014; Garcia 2009). Our priorities as sexuality education researchers remain the same – to think broadly about teaching and learning inside and outside of schools and to consider sexuality as it intersects with other categories of difference, privilege and penalty, including ability, age, immigration, race, gender and class. What has changed is our vigilance about assaults on those priorities.

The current and emerging political climate heralds only the most recent institutional challenges and political shifts for sexuality education. Despite the ongoing precarity of public funding, institutional commitments and community support in the USA, educators and researchers have preserved a sense of possibility. Pleasure and desire have been central to that optimistic thread and organising ideas in sexuality education research since Michelle Fine’s article on the ‘missing discourse of desire’ appeared in 1988. Fine insisted that, in failing to address sexual desire and pleasure, schools and educators were failing to provide an education that would ‘release females from a position of receptivity, enable an analysis of the dialectics of victimization and pleasure, and … pose female adolescents as subjects of sexuality, initiators as well as negotiators’ (1988, 33).

And so we begin this introduction to the virtual special issue with Fine and her successors in the ongoing discussion of pleasure and desire in sexuality education. From there we turn to the question of what is possible given the material and ideological conditions of schooling and then to the opportunities for teachers and learners outside the conventional classroom. We follow with a discussion of the place of intersectional analyses in sexuality education research. We conclude with some thoughts on sexuality education research at this political moment.

One final note concerns our strategy for selecting articles to appear in this virtual special issue. The articles we feature are among the many provocative and admirable contributions to Sex Education’s pages. We have not chosen articles because they are ‘the best’ or because they necessarily represent a dominant thread in the journal. Rather, we selected articles because they raised questions we consider fundamental to sexuality education research in the USA. We began our selection process by reviewing lists of Sex Education’s most read and cited articles. We leaned toward articles written about or from the USA, but we found that many articles ostensibly about other national contexts also have important implications for sexuality education in the USA. This review yielded a preliminary list of themes, and with that list in mind we reviewed the table of contents of the journal’s 16 volumes. Additional articles caught our attention in this process – perhaps less read or cited but no less provocative and insightful. We then whittled that list down to the 25 articles featured in the table of contents below. Some omissions are notable and perhaps inevitable: we have not focused on articles that represent methodological or pedagogical innovation, for example. Instead, our aim has been to assemble a virtual special issue that reflects and supports the most critical and creative thinking about sexuality education in the USA – a special issue that offers a set of tools as our field considers next steps in what is likely to be a challenging time.

Pleasure and desire

Fine’s 1988 analysis of the ‘missing discourse of desire’ launched decades of feminist studies of sexuality education and women and girls’ sexuality, establishing an empirical, theoretical and practical agenda that extends well beyond the USA. The synthesis Hirst (2013) offers reflects a broad academic consensus ‘on the importance of pleasure and positive sexual relationships education to improving sexual health, rights and equality’ (432). Practitioners who have not had easy access to academic literature are a primary audience for Hirst, who posits pleasure as fundamental to useful sexuality education that, for example, promotes condom use, helps protect against sexual coercion, and supports a widening of sexual possibilities.

Not surprisingly, critique has followed the consensus Hirst describes for her readers. Louisa Allen and Moira Carmody observe that feminists studying ‘pleasure and desire in sexuality education have reached a critical pause [that] is about critically reflecting on what has been achieved through the call for inclusion of a missing discourse of desire and pleasure’ (2012, 456). As sexuality educators and researchers advance an agenda after the gains of the Obama administration, the critical perspectives that emerge from this pause will be pivotal: how can sexuality education insist on the disruptive potential of pleasure and desire without romanticising or simplifying its political potential? For Allen and Carmody, critical reflection means insisting on pleasure’s generative potential and resisting the impulse – likely a tempting one in years to come – to tie pleasure too neatly to feminist (and other) pedagogical and political aims. Mary Lou Rasmussen (2012) offers a more fundamental reflection and critique of feminist and progressive thinking about pleasure and sexuality education. Rasmussen worries that pleasure has become a habit of thought among those advocating comprehensive and progressive sexuality education.

Rasmussen’s cautions about such habits may be especially significant if a Trump administration indeed brings the curtailing of sexual and reproductive justice and a progressive vision of sexuality education becomes increasingly precarious. Pleasure is routinely linked with progress and freedom in sexuality education research, as Rasmussen notes, and this link functions for many as a sign that educators, students and researchers have wrested themselves free of conventional morality. This fantasy of standing outside hegemonic ideas allows comprehensive sexuality educators and progressive researchers to leave unmarked and uninterrogated the morality that runs through their secular arguments. Allen and Carmody’s analysis suggests this elision prevents even pleasure’s adherents from realising its disruptive potential. Pleasure opens up possibilities precisely because it is detached from normative temporality, identities, apparatuses and aims. Pleasure is unpredictable and non-linear as it creates spaces of bodily, ethical and political possibility – not necessarily transformative (leading reliably to sexual liberation), but nonetheless generative (marking spaces outside of normative imaginings).

In turning readers’ attention to pleasure’s appearance in contemporary sexuality education curricula, Lamb, Lustig, and Graling (2013) mark another shift since Fine’s 1988 publication. Pleasure is no longer a ‘missing discourse’; instead, it appears in abstinence-only and comprehensive curricula, frequently tied to discussions of averting sexual risk, physical suffering and emotional distress. While researchers and educators may be heartened that discussions of pleasure allow conversations of gendered and sexual victimisation, Lamb, Lustig and Graling caution that pleasure routinely appears in sexuality education curricula in the context of danger and outside of any relational context, as well as the ethical issues that arise there. Talk of pleasure was not enough under Obama, and it certainly will not be enough under Trump. Educators must link pleasure to mutuality and care for oneself and others. Perhaps in mutuality educators and researchers will find a political and educational vision that recognises ongoing victimisation, resists normative responses to violence and refuses to defuse the disruptive potential of pleasure and desire.

Continued investment in school-based instruction

Despite ongoing controversy and resistance to sexuality education that extends beyond conventional understandings of intimacy and sexuality, researchers and educators remain invested in schools as a site of sexuality education. Schools promise (even if they do not always deliver) equitable access to trained educators, quality instruction and other resources. Providing sexuality education also allows schools – and public schools in particular – to fulfil a democratic promise of promoting community well-being, whether through providing health interventions or through facilitating dialogue among diverse constituents. Schools also ensure educator contact with youth – those usually considered most in need of sexuality education. School-based sexuality education also brings challenges, however: decades of research have established the role it plays in the social control and reproduction of social inequalities (see, for example, Fields 2008; Garcia 2009; Kendall 2013; Santelli et al. 2006). Schools’ vulnerability to shifting public funding and priorities – under any US federal administration – makes their role in sexuality education ever precarious (Irvine 2004).

The fraught commitment to school-based instruction weaves through the issues of Sex Education, and the articles we selected for this special issue reflect a tension that threads through that commitment – a tension between, on the one hand, a commitment to implementing some version of comprehensive sexuality education in schools and, on the other, an impatience with sexuality education practice, policy and research. Lesko (2010) argues that, despite the vitriol of ‘sex ed’ debates, abstinence-only and comprehensive sexuality education share troubling assumptions about knowledge, schooling, sexuality and youth. Both enact a ‘“pan-optimism” – a belief that their prescription for sexual knowledge will produce sociality, happiness and orderliness’ (Lesko 2010, 290 [quoting Berlant and Edelman 2009]). Lesko argues for sexuality education and research to ‘mov[e] away from instrumentalist messages to locate sexual knowledge within history, society, and individuals’ lives and meanings’ (2009, 293).

Such movement would require scholars and educators to ‘accept and acknowledge vulnerabilities in knowing’ (2009, 294), perhaps inviting less ardent positions in favour of one curriculum or another. But those ardent positions may be difficult to relinquish. Eisenberg et al. (2012), a team of adolescent health researchers and a community-based educator, acknowledge Lesko’s insight but quickly then cite evidence that comprehensive instruction is better for youth and then explore how best to ensure its delivery. What will be the place of Lesko’s critique of pan-optimism if educators and researchers become even more instrumental in their advocacy of particular sexuality education curricula? How can sexuality education research guard against the dulling demands of strategy?

Rogow and Haberland (2005) may offer one way out of this tension. They are steadfast in the argument that sexuality education should be a school-based effort; the question is where inside the school the instruction should occur. In a move that seems novel, even twelve years after their article first appeared in Sex Education, Rogow and Haberland want sexuality education to become part of social studies classes. According to Rogow and Haberland, this sort of curricular re-location would facilitate that exploration of sex and sexuality’s connections to broader issues of gender and injustice. The resonance with Lamb, Lustig and Graling’s vision of ethics education is clear.

Gougeon (2009) and Illes (2012) similarly continue to locate sexuality education inside schools and classrooms; their innovation lies in casting sexuality education as an enterprise of citizenship. Drawing on the work of Evans (2013), Plummer (2003), and others, Illes defines citizenship as a matter of recognition and participation – issues of special concern as presidential candidates call for walls to be built between the USA and Mexico, eligibility tests for Muslim immigrants, and allege voter fraud. Highlighting an expansive understanding of citizenship, Illes argues for a vision of sexuality education that, first, recognises young people as rightfully sexual beings and, second, cultivates the self-efficacy and awareness necessary to young people’s ability to participate meaningfully in a discourse of sexual desire. Gougeon’s article extends citizenship to young people with intellectual disabilities, insisting that these students are entitled to the tools and privacy necessary to sexual learning and exploration. Including these students in school-based instruction is important because they would then have access not only to formal instruction but also to the crucial but usually ‘ignored curriculum’ young people offer one another about sexuality. Such access would recognise young people with intellectual disabilities as citizens of the worlds their peers inhabit and enfranchise them for full membership and participation in those worlds.

DePalma (2013) recounts discussions of LGBT sexuality and gender that a transgender guest facilitated among primary school students and teachers. Unanticipated and frank conversations about heteronormative and trans bodies, identities and relationships prompted insight into sex and gender as socially assigned and performed. Educators learned to commit to ‘a process of learning to “hold the question” rather than providing children with clear answers’ – a potentially transformative practice that DePalma recognises may ‘run against the very grain of institutional schooling, which seems in general oriented towards clarification and simplification’ (2013, 11). DePalma’s ‘trans-ing curriculum’ (2013, 13) recognises and values the ‘vulnerabilities in knowing’ that Lesko points to, but even this article remains committed to school-based instruction, suggesting that educators and researchers need to continue interrogating the conditions of schooling and habitual ways of knowing that characterise education in the USA – even as debates over sexuality education shift and perhaps regress.

Beyond the classroom

Sexuality education is not limited to the classroom, and these extracurricular spaces may be especially valuable when schools are unreliable sites for teaching and learning. The articles we feature in this section invite readers to consider other sites in which people share and gain knowledge about sexuality and sexual health. Willoughby and Jackson (2013) and Hilpert et al. (2012) examine the role of technology. Willoughby and Jackson (2013) concentrate on the harnessing of new technologies, specifically the mobile phone, to increase young people’s access to medically accurate information about sexual health. Their research suggests that text messaging may be a more appealing source of information than other media, due to the portability of cell phones, the privacy of text messages and the quick access to information and interpersonal communication about sensitive topics. Hilpert et al. (2012) explore how young adults problem-solve using Internet searches to learn about HPV. Their research suggests we cannot just assume that young people will gain new sexuality and sexual health knowledge simply because it is available to them. They urge readers to consider how the new information is filtered through young people’s existing knowledge base and morality. That filter may have implications for whether they can absorb and implement new information.

Sexuality education in the form of entertainment and art also holds great promise. Harris and Farrington (2014) walk readers through a youth-driven enterprise and performance that queer youth developed outside of the school in response to being either defined as ‘at-risk’ or simply excluded. Leaving the classroom allowed youth to think outside of the box as they broadened the scope, reach and constituents of sexuality education. According to Harris and Farrington, arts-based approaches queer lessons and the classroom and casting young people as leaders in their sexuality education builds the radical potential of queer youth performance. McKee (2012) also identifies potential in arts and entertainment media. His position is one not generally found among the work and practice of those caring for, providing services to, or studying young people. For some in this community, entertainment media is suspect: a source of inappropriate or inaccurate information. However, as McKee points out, like it or not, young people turn to TV, movies, magazines and popular music for information about sexual pleasure and other topics not otherwise available in their school-based sexuality education. McKee encourages sexuality educators to consider collaborating with those in the entertainment industry to develop ways to provide sexuality education that young people are already seeking and want to consume.

Parent-child communication is one of the most recognised sites of sexuality education outside the classroom – and, for many children, young people and adults, also one of the most challenging. Walker (2004) culls through the relevant literature to identify practical ways to integrate parents in school-based sexuality education, offering concrete strategies for facilitating their involvement and securing resources that address what to say to their children, when to say it and how to approach it in their day-to-day lives. Walker reminds readers that sexuality education is a lifelong learning process for the adults in young people’s lives. Ironically, much of adults’ learning may come through their efforts to teach their children. Martin and Torres (2014) explore parent-child sexual socialisation as a dynamic process. Their study of interactions between pre-school children and their parents reveals children’s agency in their own sexual socialisation. Children and parents collaborate in the construction of sexual knowledge: both parties introduce and ask questions, and both limit what is covered in these sexuality education dialogues.

Ultimately, shifting the focus away from school-based instruction helps to highlight the ways sexuality education spans the life course, multiple institutional settings and various interactional contexts. Christopher Fisher et al. (2010) advance understandings of adults and sexuality education by turning readers’ attention away from not only young people but also family and parenting. They argue that adults can and should be the recipients of sexuality education, focusing on in-home sex-toy parties for adult women as potentially significant sites of sexuality education. These parties present opportunities that extend well beyond the selling of products; indeed, gatherings create teachable moments in which participants gain knowledge and skills, including strategies for expressing their needs and desires to sexual partners. Perhaps most compelling about the work of Fisher and his co-authors is the attention to an often overlooked and stigmatised site of teaching and learning about sexuality – for adults, in the midst of commerce, in a space on the border between private and public spheres.

Intersectionality

Looking back on sixteen years of Sex Education and anticipating many more to come, we are most excited by research that explores sexuality, intimacy and education as they intersect with categories of difference. Feminist scholars, including Collins (1990) and Crenshaw (1991), have articulated the value of applying an intersectional lens to understanding and confronting privilege and penalty in analyses of social life. Our own work has benefitted immensely from this lens, and we are convinced that such a perspective is crucial to remaining creative and vigilant in sexuality education. The articles we feature in this section illustrate that sexuality education is never just about sexuality and that generative practice and research considers the connections among teaching, learning and existing social hierarchies.

Race/ethnicity is one such hierarchy, and it has significant implications for the diverse needs of families when it comes to sexuality education. Pluhar and Kuriloff (2004) and Murray et al. (2014) consider some of the specificities of parent-child communication in African American and Latinx¹ families. Pluhar and Kuriloff contribute needed insight into communication between African American mothers and their daughters, identifying communication styles and emotions – for example, empathy or anger – that emerge in their interactions. These styles and emotions shape how how young women absorb their mothers’ lessons about sexuality. Murray and colleagues (2014) shed additional light on the ways African American and Latina mothers’ sexual socialisation of their children converge and diverge. For example, both groups of mothers reported engaging in direct communication about sexuality with their children. However, unlike African American mothers, some Latina mothers expressed uncertainty about ‘how much detail’ about sexuality to provide to their children. An understanding of the nuances of intergenerational communication about sexuality in African American and Latinx communities is critical to developing timely and culturally relevant sexuality education, especially in light of their overrepresentation in HIV and STI statistics. And in what Meschke and Dettmer (2012) describe as the first study to examine Hmong parent-adolescent sexual communication, readers gain further understanding of sexual health communication between parents and daughters in immigrant families. The particularities of each group’s migration experience – including those shaped by war and trauma, like the Hmong – inform not only differences between groups but also communication within groups. Taken together, these three articles point to the value of naming race/ethnicity in studies of sexuality education. They also point to the continued importance of pushing beyond description to develop informed analyses.

Rimalower and Caty (2009) address inequality in their review of the literature on the issues faced by same-sex parents. The experiences and needs of the families of same-sex parents are shaped by intersecting processes, such as state definitions and legal recognition of families and the labour parents carry out in order to prepare their children for how they and their family structure may be received by teachers, administrators and peers. The topics Rimalower and Caty cover – for example, heterosexism, gender identity and sexual identity and same-sex families’ involvement in formal schooling – are not the usual concerns of to school-based sexuality educators and researchers. Rimalower and Caty’s example invites researchers and educators to also look beyond the school to produce intersectionally-informed analyses and programming for students.

Intersectionality can also help researchers and educators notice and make sense of the assumptions and definitions at the heart of school-based sexuality education. Published over 10 years ago, Bay-Cheng’s (2003) article on ‘The Trouble of Teen Sex’ is still relevant to conversations about school-based sexuality education, especially in the light of the recent sociopolitical developments in this country. Bay-Cheng asserts that we can gain a deeper appreciation for school-based sexuality education in the USA if we also understand it as a ‘fundamental force in the very definition of adolescent sexuality’ (62). She asserts that sexuality education’s ‘tacit reliance on sexist, classist and racist notions of sexuality’ contribute to oppressive understandings of adolescent sexuality in education and research (71). Greslé-Favier (2013) suggests that adolescence itself is a site of inequality, arguing that abstinence-only programmes are an act of discrimination against children. Greslé-Favier uses the concept ‘childism’ to analyse how age emerges as a hierarchical social category deployed in national and international policies intended to ‘protect’ children.

Recent Sex Education articles have deployed intersectionality in an effort to disrupt these oppressive conditions. Kimmel et al. (2013) analyse the interactions of social locations and their impact on the access to and the content of sexuality education for African American youth. Utilising community-based participatory research, Kimmel and colleagues’ (2013) article is one of a few to ask urban African American youth about their sexuality education experiences both inside and outside of school and to solicit their recommendations for improving sexuality education. Whitten and Sethna (2014) refuse to let inequality prevail as they make the case for the overlap between anti-racism and sexuality education. They caution against a sexuality education that is ‘raceless’ and call for sexuality education that is attentive to the historic and contemporary manifestations of colonisation, racialisation and assimilation, including attempts to control of Black and Latina bodies through forced sterilisation and Black and Latinx communities’ experiences with HIV/AIDS. Educators, students, researchers and policy-makers can ask much more of sexuality education: teaching and learning about sexuality can become an opportunity to develop critical analytic skills necessary to confronting racialised and racist structures and their intersections with other oppressive social structures.

Conclusion

The themes and articles we highlight in this special issue of Sex Education are not exhaustive, but they do represent ideas vital to the current state of sexuality education practice and theory. As we take stock of the empirical and theoretical work in this area of research, we must also reflect on where we want to be fifteen years from now. How we can build on what we already know and generate new questions and knowledge relevant to everyone involved in and impacted by sexuality education in the USA? Questions about pleasure and desire, teaching and learning about sexuality education, the range of sites in which sexuality education does and can occur, and their connections to intersectional identities and experiences consistently shape our work in the classroom, in the field, and at our desks. They may feel even more urgent in the contemporary US political context. How do we carry on in this moment–propelled by urgency, steady in our commitments, and vigilant against assaults on rights, well-being and justice?

One research direction with tremendous potential is the intersectional approach. Despite widespread recognition of the need for intersectional analyses, few studies actually engage with or apply intersectionality as a theoretical or methodological framework to investigate sexuality education. We must figure out ways to not only document the relevance of social locations and identities but also explain how they interact with one another and the implications of those intersections for sexuality education. This historical moment demands a deeper commitment to advancing intersectional analyses because the political project of ‘making America great again’ under Trump’s administration is based on privileges and penalties that are tied to various systems of oppression. Those deemed ‘undeserving’ of privileges or treatment as full human beings have typically been those who are at the bottom of the social hierarchies that structure our society. Current issues, such as decreased funding for public education, limitations on women’s sexual and reproductive rights, the threat of sexual assault on college and university campuses, the disproportionate impact of HIV on young people of colour, and anti-transgender legislation, to name a few, are all related to sexuality education and they cannot be effectively challenged without an appreciation for the complex interplay of various social hierarchies.

Another line of intersectional inquiry we can pursue is more research on LGBTQ people and groups. An intersectional analysis highlights heteronormative thinking and practice, illuminating other experiences and processes still in need of empirical investigation. For instance, we need to go beyond pointing to the persistence of heteronormativity in sexuality education. We also need to consider concrete strategies for interrupting that inequality, exploring its connections to other inequalities and recognising how both heteronormativity and LGBTQ sexuality and gender circulate throughout sexuality education debates, research and practice.

Both of these directions will require new cooperation among scholars across different national contexts, disciplines and fields. This political moment necessitates conversations and collaborations across lines that often seem daunting, if not insurmountable: between adults and youth; communities of colour and white communities; rural and urban locations; researchers and practitioners; and, teachers and students. We look forward to examining the lines we habitually draw and maintain, considering their implications, and exploring new developments in sexuality research and their application in Sex Education.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Michelle Parra for her support early in our work on this special issue and to Jen Gilbert for feedback on an earlier draft of this introduction. Special thanks to Peter Aggleton for his invitation to assemble this special issue and his long-time support of scholarship on sexuality education.

Notes

^* This is the introduction to a Virtual Special Issue of Sex Education journal(‘Renewed Commitments in a Time of Vigilance: Sexuality Education in the USA’) located at http://explore.tandfonline.com/content/pgas/sexuality-education-in-the-usa

1. The term Latinx is used to acknowledge the gender, as well as sexual diversity, represented among this group.  While the terms Latina/o and Latin@ are not masculine-centred, they still reflect a gender binary. Latinx is more inclusive of all possible gender and sexual identities.