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Abstract
Abstinence-only-until-marriage sexuality education has received increasing attention vis-à-vis policy, funding, and research. Despite large sums of federal money to develop, implement, and to some extent, assess abstinence-only education, virtually no studies have looked to assess the experiences of such a curriculum for gay and bisexual male youth. This qualitative study explores narratives from semi-structured interviews of eight self-identified gay and bisexual males who received an abstinence-only-until-marriage sexuality education. Their voices lend empirical evidence to the often cited but undocumented negative gay and bisexual male youth experiences with an abstinence-only sexuality education. These young men recount stories of silence, risk, hostility, and resiliency.
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Notes
1. Abstinence-only-until-marriage-sexuality education is also referred to as abstinence-only sexuality education or simply as abstinence-only. I will use these terms interchangeably throughout this paper.
2. All participant names are pseudonyms selected by the participants.
3. While the vast majority of abstinence-only-until-marriage curricula do not discuss the use of condoms for oral sex (CitationSIECUS, 2004a), many participants described curricula which varied from the prescribed federal definition. This points to the gap between policy and practice, an issue beyond the scope of this paper.