Sexy Sex Ed Centerfolds with KRNL Lifestyle + Fashion Magazine
Kentucky Sexy Sex Educators are centerfolds! Kentucky’s Teen Vogue, KRNL Lifestyle + Fashion Magazine, featured us in their Spring 2021 issue. Four of our Kentucky educators: Caitlin Cummings, Ondine Quinn, Larah Helayne, and Shaylan Clark, had the opportunity to share what SSE means to them. The educators share personal stories about how using popular education has been a key method in ensuring a creative and informative environment for all bodies. Their stories and more will be featured in the KRNL 2021 Spring magazine!
LGBTQ Inclusive Sex Education
Finding My Yum Podcast Interviews Kirstyn Ooten
Sex Ed with DB Podcast Interviews Tanya Turner
Sex Ed with DB is a feminist podcast bringing you all the sex ed you never got through unique and entertaining storytelling. In this eighth episode of Sex Ed with DB, Season 4, DB talks with Tanya Turner. Tanya is an artist, organizer, and creator of the Appalachian sexual health project, Sexy Sex Ed. As co-host of political podcast, Trillbilly Workers Party, she reaches 50,000 listeners a month and is creating an animated comedy series about rural leftist organizing with MeansTV and Appalshop.
Meet The Queer Activist Teaching Sex Ed to LGBTQ Appalachian Youth
People have provided pro-bono help with logos and website mapping “the floodgates of queer fucking godliness have turned this into something wonderful.” The website has a streamline booking process and created a map of the reproductive sexual health work being done in Appalachia, both in major cities and small towns. “People have come out of the woodwork to help because almost all of us have a horror story from our sex education. And we’ve lived through it and want better for everyone.”
Appalachia’s “Queer Auntie” Wants to Bring LGBTQ Sex Ed to the Rural Region
NewNowNext
Shortly after STAY’s founding in 2008, Turner began offering ad-hock LGBTQ-inclusive sex-ed workshops at STAY gatherings through a program she coined “Sexy Sex Ed.” Over the years, the program developed and evolved, and today Sexy Sex Ed involves a large-scale network of LGBTQ-inclusive sex educators operating throughout the entire Appalachian region.
Last month, she trained 20 new sex educators who will take Sexy Sex Ed programming to folks living all across Appalachia and the South, a massive expansion from running the trainings previously on her own. This cohort of trainers will exponentially expand the reach of Sexy Sex Ed, providing young, LGBTQ people living in remote areas of Appalachia with the ability to both access information and cultivate community.
New Online Map Shows Sexual-Health Resources in Appalachia
WHITESBURG, Ky. -- The traveling sex-education workshop that teaches about consent and anatomy in rural Appalachia has created a unique new online map that shows the locations of reproductive-justice-related organizations and health-care providers in the region.
Tanya Turner, who founded the group Sexy Sex Ed, said resources in rural Appalachia often are not included on national maps, which tend to focus on urban areas.
"We mapped all of the sexual health care and reproductive justice that we knew about going on in Appalachia," she said.
Traveling ‘Sexy Sex Ed’ Workshop Aims to Educate Appalachian Youth
Public News Service
WHITESBURG, Ky. — Access to sex education is on the decline in rural areas, but one eastern Kentucky native aims to fill the knowledge gap with a traveling free sex education workshop called Sexy Sex Ed.
According to the Guttmacher Institute, in 2006, 71% of rural women were taught about birth control as an option to prevent pregnancy. That number shrunk to 48% by 2013. Tanya Turner, creator of the Sexy Sex Ed workshop said growing up in Bell County, she didn't receive any kind of instruction on sex or her own anatomy.
"I hope I'm not the only person teaching progressive, body-positive sex education in rural Appalachia, but all the stats show sex education in rural places is in on a huge decline,” Turner said.
Where Sex Education Lacks in Appalachian Schools, This Kentucky Program Is Attempting to Fill In
100 Days in Appalachia
“I just think the reality is that as 17-year-olds, we’re going to have sex no matter what. If we’re going to have sex, we might as well be able to do it safely.”
The need for comprehensive, medically-accurate and age-appropriate sex ed is real, especially in areas like Appalachian Kentucky where 47 percent of pregnancies are reported as unplanned, and the teen birth rate is 68 percent higher than the country overall.
Tanya Turner, creator of Sexy Sex Ed, is from Appalachia— specifically from Bell County, Kentucky,— and she said it was finding out about the need for sex ed in the region that moved her to begin work around reproductive justice in 2012.