I attended the UCSF Student AIDS forum this past Saturday (apparently I am allergic to spare time--what is this thing you call a wee kend, you say?).

Anyway. The first break out session I attended was on HIV in prisons, which is a complicated & (at least for me) painful issue to contemplate. Beyond the general fucked up-edness of our prison system overall, the AIDS prevalence in prisons is more than 3x that of the general population.

Since prisons in our country are designed to break people instead of rehabilitate them, it is unsurprising that they completely fail to provide adequate conditions for the inmates, let alone proper medical care (see Plata v. Schwarzenegger).  Which means prisoners with HIV/AIDS are almost certainly not receiving the care they need--especially now with all the budget cuts.

In addition to the already saddening high prevalence & lack of medical care, there are many activities that happen among prisoners that increase risk of seroconversion.

One of these activities is sex.

But condoms are controversial in prisons, and rarely distributed...because this is a population where sex isnt supposed to happen& to distribute condoms would condone & promote sexual activity--sound familiar, SXS 805? In many jurisdictions sex is a punishable offense, I'll give you that--but when 30% of the population is doing it anyway with such a significant HIV/AIDS prevalence, it just seems...

When I first took my partner down to meet my parents, we were returning from a weekend getaway in Monterey. We went out to a nice dinner and then headed to their house to relax & socialize for a bit before continuing our journey back home to San Francisco. The conversation (inevitably) turned toward my childhood & whatever embarrassing pictures could be displayed or stories related.We ended up focusing on my early childhood years...

I was lucky to go to an awesome preschool. I don't have many concrete memories of it (I'm more of an emotional memory kind of kid--I remember how things *feel* rather than how they actually *were*), but I remember it being one of the happiest times of my life. Getting messy, learning new information about the world, hanging out with all my besties, climbing anything in front of me, having camp-outs, playing with animals, roughhousing...you get the idea.

One of the things the preschool did was have parents create scrapbooks for their kids--one of the coolest things ever, in my humble opinion. I mean, not only capturing pictures of me at that age, but my artwork & words put down verbatim--oh the things I said! And man, that tendency to tell stories? Definitely inborn. Also inborn? We chuckled at the part that described my personality: 'Shy, strong-willed, aggressive' (yep,...

It's a curious affair, this whole sex thing.

It seems to be, like so many things, an activity reserved for youth. Oh, those carefree days of vim, vigor, & virility! Those days when we were young & beautiful, lazing around in the summer sun, eating grapes & getting fanned by palm--hey wait a minute!

It is misguided to think that everyone loses not only the physical capacity but also the general drive to have sex as they age. It is true that some people may have less interest or less capacity, but this is not universally true, and seems to be decreasingly 'true' as time goes on--whether that be a general cultural shift, the aging of the 'free love' baby boomers, or the invention of a bevy of medications to overcome erectile dysfunction.

When I talk to medical students about the importance of sexual history-taking, I emphasize the fact that, as much as they might not like to think about it, the truth of the matter is that none of them (or almost none, given the wonders of technological advancement in reproductive options) would be there without sex. So yes, that means that your parents did it, your grandparents did it, and all their ancestors before them did it. And thank heavens they did, or you wouldn't be here today, making that squick face that so many people do when they think about this.

So why does it freak people out so much to think about it?

This concerns me a great deal, not only...

I am a science nerd who's not very good at science.

Let me clarify.

I love science. I love understanding how things work. I love getting dirty & having my hands deep in discovery. I love putting together all the pieces of seemingly disparate things and coming to a deeper cognizance and appreciation of how this whole crazy world is stitched together by dreams and fascia.

But I’m also very much a visual kinesthetic learner. If I can’t see it, feel it, do it, it doesn’t stick. When I half-seriously told my girlfriend recently that I wished I could go back & re-do all my science classes from K-12, she helped me clarify & said what I really wanted was to go to lab & do science experiments, dissections, physics model-building, etc. It doesn’t matter how many times I read it or how many flash cards I use, it won’t stick unless I can feel it. When I had the opportunity to ‘meet’ a cadaver earlier this year, it was incredibly intense—the body that had once been a person, the flesh that had been preserved so stringently, so long ago, that it now was just meat on bones. No face, all cut up. I held a heart in my hand. I felt the sinews of connective tissue. I held a slice of brain. It was amazing. This, plus whatever spark of magic that animates us, is all we are.

I bring all this up because I’ve been thinking a lot recently about

I've been reading a lot of information about the creation of adolescence, and how this grey area between childhood and adulthood has been constructed, particularly with regard to sexuality education. Being both a self-disclosed sex nerd and naval-gazer, it's caused me to be reflective about my own upbringing; my introduction to sex and sexuality; the narratives & identity construction that took place around those first young, dewy moments of lust; the paths that branched out from each additional experience and how they led me to where I am today. It doesn’t help that I’ve been terribly sick the past few days and, being stuck in bed, I finally submitted to starting to watch my girlfriend’s copy of the American version of Queer as Folk–what can I say, I watched the original in England & I’ve found that so many of these shows get lost in translation (*never* see a British production of Rent, let me tell you), so I resisted!

In any case, I’ve been reflecting on my experience and trying to place that knowledge into making connections between the readings on adolescent sexuality and sexuality education, and the readings I’ve been doing on program planning and community involvement—specifically around Roger Hart’s modification of Sherry Arnstein’s ‘