On Monday, June 22 the National Sexuality Resource Center sponsored a panel discussion of the film Still Black:A Portrait of Black Transmen after the film’s Frameline debut as a part of the NSRC’s Summer Institute on Race, Gender, and Sexuality. Panelists included JayR Rosemon from Dimensions Clinic; Zion Johnson founding member of the Lou Sullivan Society; Shawn Demmons, an MPH Candidate San Francisco State University and a Point Foundation Scholar; and Amy Sueyoshi, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies and Sexuality Studies at San Francisco State University.

Amy Sueyoshi agreed to share her comments from that panel in my blog. Her comments are a valuable resource for sexuality educators interested using Still Black in the classroom as a tool for teaching about sexuality, gender, and race.

This week the NSRC highlighted the California’s Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Proposition 8. However, there are a lot of other important stories happening this week that speak volumes about the state of sexuality in the United States. Here are a few issues we find important, and we hope you’ll read more about.

California’s impending budget cuts literally threaten the lives of Californian’s living with HIV/AIDS.  An East Bay facility that treats low-income people living with HIV/AIDS closed its doors this past week, and it’s likely that impeding budget cuts will threaten HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment through out the state.

Obama’s nomination of federal judge Sonia Sotomayor to replace Justice David Souter has the entire blog world speculating about her positions on numerous issues related to sexuality. RH Reality check reviews her record on abortion, and the Guardian and Pandagon.net...

This year members of the NSRC have had the amazing opportunity to attend numerous national conferences related to sexuality studies. We’ve heard from experts doing research and advocacy at every intersection of sexuality, health, and social justice. As newbie to the field these conferences afforded me the opportunity to chat with authors whose work I have studied and admired from afar, and I was often star-struck.

Meeting stars of sexuality studies is very excited, but it pales in comparison to my experience yesterday at the 4th annual SF State of Sexuality conference. The conference is a showcase of sexuality research produced by SFSU graduate students, and it was held in classroom one floor up from my office. Many of the participants are students in the Sexuality Studies department, and I knew each of them from my time in the department last year.

Despite my familiarity with each presenter I felt star-struck once again. In less than a year and with no funding each student produced research that changes the ways we should think about sexuality.  Presentations varied in topic from examining the way Black men negotiate racialized and sexualized stereotypes in creating online profiles to a film on sexuality, visibility, and disability.

The most striking...

Perhaps first things you learn as a sexuality researcher is to set aside your preconceptions. So as I prepared for my first Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality regional meeting in Pacific Grove, California, I tried to banish my preconceptions of what a conference on the science of sex would be like. I was pretty convinced it would be everything you don’t really want sex to be – dry, humorless, boring, and a little bit weird.

All of my preconceptions melted away on Friday night as I sat in a lecture hall at the Monterey Bay Aquarium watching Isabella Rossellini’s Green Porno with Steven Webster, PhD a founder of the aquarium. He was giving us a lecture on sex and marine life, and he (along with Isabella) introduced us to some of the ocean’s creatures with the most interesting gender and sexual variations. Highlights included male sea horses that get "pregnant", clown fish who are sequential hermaphrodites, and anglerfish whose males are essentially parasites living off of the bloodstream of females.

I woke up Monday morning as sunlight filtered through new spring leaves and fell on my window and the tiny chapel below my room. Springtime on the East Coast is striking to someone who lives in California and never witnesses such a verdant rebirth. Spring is often associated with youth and innocence, but in reality it is dramatic resurgence of life, reproduction, and vitality that is neither innocence or inexperienced. In fact Spring should be a celebration of sexuality and passion. After all, those flowers on the trees and the songs bird sing are all advertisements for sex.

Looking out my window still foggy from sleep and a little jet lagged, I started to think about sexuality and new beginnings.  I realized that the tranquil and blossoming landscape I was gazing upon is home to rebirth of sexuality research, after all I’m in Bloomington, Indiana home of Alfred Kinsey, the Kinsey Institute, and the Center for Sexual Health Promotion.

It’s my first time here, and it feels like a pilgrimage. Walking around a campus and a town that has not changed much since Kinsey worked here, I wonder if the abundance of Spring in this sleepy Indiana town inspired his sexuality research. While he may have lived during a moment in American history where human sexuality was silenced, the natural...

April 15 was tax day, and believe it or not, there are many ways that sex and sexuality relate to taxes.  Here are two that made the headlines:

Maryland gives tax breaks to gay couples who own a house together. While the law is well intentioned, it only helps gay couples who are wealthy enough to buy a home; leaving the single gay person or gay couples with the least economic resources with the greatest tax burden.

Staging a Boston Tea Party style protest against tax increases = clever. Calling the protest 'teabagging' without the slightest clue to the sexual implications of that word = desperate need of sexual literacy.

Notice the awesome double entendre in this MSNBC video piece.

Paying taxes wasn’t the only painful thing that happened this week. The entire sexuality world is mourning the lost of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick to breast cancer. But Richard Kim’s obituary for her in The Nation reminds us that we can celebrate her indelible contribution to queer theory and that her intellectual contributions will live on her books, most notably Epistemology of the Closet and Between Men.

Also, April is Sexual Assault Awareness...

The Iowa Supreme Court became the fourth state supreme court in the United States to overturn laws against same-sex marriages. The decision, which passed unanimously, means that gay couples in Iowa will be able to marry in 21 days.

The justices said in their decision, “We have a constitutional duty to ensure equal protection of the law...If gay and lesbian people must submit to different treatment without an exceedingly persuasive justification, they are deprived of the benefits of the principle of equal protection upon which the rule of law is founded.”

The justices acknowledge a possible backlash by marriage equality opponents based on their religious beliefs, and the justices included language addressing those concerns. They maintained that marriage is a civil contract and should not affect religious freedom of Iowans that object to marriage equality based on religious beliefs.

Marriage equality opponents will likely try to overturn the decision in the legislature and by popular vote. But according to The New York Times the attempt will take at least two years. Iowa's laws requires the state legislature to vote to reinstate the ban in two consecutive sessions before it can go to popular vote.

Be on the look out for a special season of June...

This week getting around the web was framed by April Fools Day. Whether we were reading stories that were actually jokes, or seemed like jokes, or we wished were jokes, foolishness abound. Here are some of the best…

Two stories that are actually jokes…

A renowned hoo ha doctor wins a Nobel Prize for Medical Advancements Down There.

Rick Warren comes out and throws a circuit party.

A story that is happily, not joke…Spanking brings couples together. 

A moral panic absurd enough to be a joke…Teenage “Sex Criminals” on Bilerico.

And finally an email from Focus on the Family about transgender rights which we wish was a joke.

Happy April!

When I think back on my favorite teachers, I realize they all share one trait in common – they listen. Summer Institute featured lecturer Cathy Cohen has made listening a radical methodology for studying sexual attitudes and behaviors, so know doubt she will be a great teacher who you won’t want to miss this summer at the Summer Institute on Race, Gender, and Sexuality! Dr. Cohen is perhaps most famous for her books The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics and Women Transforming Politics: An Alternative Reader, but her research illustrates that she will be an excellent teacher because she listens, and most importantly she listens to youth and young adults of color.

Dissatisfied with popular perceptions of Black youth and concerned by they way those perceptions were employed in outreach programs, Dr. Cohen tried something radical. She started the Black Youth Project and set out to listen to young adults, allowing them to express their own opinions. She wanted to understand young adults’ attitudes, their experiences, and learn how they understand the world around them.  By asking youtn of multiple racial identities about their beliefs she shattered myths about Black youth and empowered young adult voices to drown out the stereotypes.

As the deadline for the NSRC Summer Institute approaches, NSRC staff and interns are going to write about our featured Summer Institute lectures each week and tell you why you want to spend a portion of your summer in a classroom with these talented scholars. To kick off the series, I’m pulling out all of the stops and throwing down this ever-convincing gambit – if you love Oprah, you should come to the Summer Institute.

No, Oprah is not one of our featured scholars, but Lisa Diamond is and on Wednesday, March 25, 2009 she will be on The Oprah Winfrey Show discussing her research on women’s sexual fluidity. So if you want to know more about Oprah and what she is really like in person, the NSRC summer institute with Dr. Lisa Diamond is the place to be! But seriously, Oprah may have revolutionized daytime television, but she's got nothing on Lisa Diamond when it comes to revolutionizing the way we think about sexuality.

Students interested in identity, attraction, and sexuality must meet Dr. Diamond because she is doing some of the most innovative research in the field. Her book, Sexuality Fluidity, takes a critical look at gender, sexual attraction, and systems of categorizing sexual...

In preparation for the NSRC live blog on the state of transgender rights taking place on Monday, March 30th at 11 am PDT, this week’s edition of “We get around the web” highlights the best blogs and news stories related to transgender rights published this week.

Legislators in New Hampshire battle over non-discrimination bill aimed at protecting transgender individuals. While, Hijras in India are organizing to demand rights. And  a GLSEN  report on transgender students in the United States found that transgender students face more discrimination by their peers than lesbian, gay, and bisexual students, they also reported that transgender students are resisting discrimination by making their voices heard in classrooms. 

Racialicious re-posted three articles by TransGriot. One article examines the contradictions involving representations of transgender people in Japanese culture

Maybe it’s because it’s women’s history month or maybe it’s because they wanted to spite the lobbyist in DC for National Abstinence Lobbyist Day this week, but the new administration and newly elected Democrat controlled Congress made tremendous strides this week enacting legislation that will substantially improve women’s health (and everyone’s sexual health for that matter).

The omnibus spending bill that the Senate passed this week not only increased Title X funding and decreased funding for abstinence-only programs but it also put more money into international HIV prevention than ever before. And feminists throughout the US should celebrate because the omnibus bill also includes provisions for reducing the cost of birth control.

Not to be out done by the Senate, President Obama announced the White House Council on Women and Girls. Autumn...

Getting around the web this week, we found a lot of talk about stimulation, or rather, the stimulus package meant to stimulate our economy.

Everyone had something to say about the affect of the stimulus package on different communities. Nancy Folbre schooled politicians about the economic benefits of sound contraception policy in the New York Times. While Racewire took a look at how Latinos and African Americans could benefit from the stimulus funds and Feministing analyzed the gendered implications of funding certain sectors of our economy.   

RH Reality Check even offered an idea for appeasing fiscal conservatives concerned about wasteful spending; their solution, cut funding for failed abstinence only education programs.

But it wasn’t only the talk of money that got us going, the world of pop-culture and entertainment were rife with controversy…

The Frisky asked us to consider if America would warm up...

Here's what our staff is reading right now about sexuality...

Do Something! Politics and Advocacy

• The New York Times reports that New York may not pass gay marriage legislation as quickly as advocates might hope.
• Owen West gives the new Obama administration advice on how to effectively market a change to the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy toward gays and lesbians in the military.
• Feministing reports on conservatives’ attempts to use states’ budget crises to shut down gender and sexuality studies programs in state universities in Florida and Georgia.
• Rev. Dr. Susan K. Smith argues in Newseek that faith-based organizations that receive public funding should comply with equality opportunity employment policies and be held accountable for discrimination based on sexual orientation.
• RH Reality Check wants us to pay attention to lawmakers’ attempts to make