Scarleteen

Hi everyone, and Happy Pride! My name is Kier (she/they), I’m a volunteer here at Scarleteen, and I’m here to moderate a conversation with Heather! Heather is the founder of Scarleteen and a queer, agender person who has been a sex educator for more than 25 years. They are also disabled and chronically ill, ethically nonmonogamous and a relationship anarchist, post-menopausal and neurodivergent.

Let's get things rolling! Heather, can you talk a little about your work at Scarleteen, and if there's anything you're extra interested in being asked about?

Thanks, Kier! And sure! For one, it's not every day that you even meet someone who has been a sex educator for over a quarter century without any lapses, let alone who has done the vast majority of it independently and pretty much daily. So, I'm so here for veteran sex educator questions. I also love talking about doing this work with a couple generations between myself and who I'm most often working with, about aging and sex, how different ENM/poly looks now versus when I came up, about the challenges of taking care of yourself as an ill and/or disabled person working in a field that pays so little and provides few benefits, about how sex changes over decades of life, and so much more!

Me (Jacob): " asking you: Heather, can you tell us a bit more about what you do at Scarleteen, and are
there any topics which you're particularly passionate about at the moment and which you which you'd be happy to receive questions on?"

imagarden: "I have a question to start! How does being queer affect your work, and has it changed over time?"

Oh gosh, there's little I DON'T do! But these days, most of my time and energy goes to our creative and educational direction, all of our editorial content -- I'm our lone editor! -- design, budgeting, accounting and fundraising, partnerships and PR, project management and I still take part in our direct services as much as I can, the work that started all of this!

One big thing I love to talk about that always feels particularly relevant during Pride is to talk about dumping old, antiquated -- and often highly heteronormative and cisnormative, ableist, classist, racist, fatphobic, etc -- sex and relationship frameworks that don't work for us or that keep us in ways of thinking about all this that limit the quality of our experiences. For example, the idea that sex = genitals interlocking or being pressed together and ONLY that rather than sex = any of the vast number of ways we can and do actively express our sexualities, sexual desires and seek to explore our sexual curiosity.

Per imagraden's question: I love this question. It's hard for me to imagine how being queer DOESN'T impact my work here. I'm someone who knew I was when I was very, very young. While I didn't have any language for it then, by the time I was ten, I knew and it was part of some of my childhood feelings and relationships. So, the way that I have thought about sex, sexuality and relationships has pretty much always been through a queer lens: when I'd come upon information or frameworks that came through heteronormative ideas, I never thought they were right, I always thought they just were clearly not getting some very obvious and essential stuff. When I first started doing Scarleteen, my queerness was often something used to attack or attempt to discredit me by people outside our organization and its services. It -- and my gender identity -- still are, for sure, but not as universally as they were then, which is nice. It helps that the giant group of people we serve are just as queer or trans as not, so our community has earnestly made it feel safer for me to do this work as a queer and gender nonconforming person.

Audra_williams: Heather! Truly a legend. I'd love to hear who your relationship role models have been, and how that answer has changed over time. (Particularly in the context of how ENM norms have shifted during your dating life!)

For Audra!

Hey you! <3 You know, I honestly feel like I have been building most of those models myself throughout so much of my life, because so many of what's existed before me or even at the time just hasn't fit, but then, if we're really tailoring all of our relationships to fit us, won't that always be how it is? I can absolutely name some writers, artists and other activists, though, who I feel like gave me so much good stuff to work with: bell hooks is at the top of that list, for instance. Buddhist writers and thinkers Thich Nhat Hanh, Jack Kornfield, Allan Watts and Pema Chödron. The Boston Women's Health Collective. Carol Queen and Susie Bright. So, so much from the disability justice communities, writers and activists, because care work is so at the heart of all kinds of good, mutually beneficial relationships. Trauma writers like Judith Hermann. I am also -- you know this! -- a very keen and constant passive observer, so I pay a lot of attention to what friends and other people in my life say about their relationships, the good, the bad, the stuff that feels like it's working, the stuff that feels like it isn't.

(I will, of course, have made only the tiniest of lists here on the fly. There are so many people who have filled my cup on this!)

In terms of ENM norms, as a person who abhors hierarchies, I am so, so glad that the norm of hierarchal ENM has given way to a wide array of known possibilities. Relationship anarchy is such a better fit for my brain, my heart, and the fluid nature of my relationships and community, as are notions like kitchen table and garden party ENM.

Imagarden: You have written a LOT of books (two of which are sitting on my coffee table now!). How many have you written over the years, and do you have a favorite book that you’ve written for any reason?

Only two of my own solo, but another with Isabella Rotman, and a pile of forewords and anthologies, for sure! Honestly I haven't written as many as I'd like because the publishing industry is such a SLOG. You know, one thing that is sadly still pretty relevant and often gets lost in the shuffle is a chapbook s.e.smith and I did after the 2016 presidential election, with the help of a bunch of other folks: https://www.scarleteen.com/read/culture ... ed-america Honestly, I think writing that guide saved my heart after that election, and the hearts of a lot of us who worked on it. It all felt so hopeless and awful, being able to do something, and offer people something to help, went a very long way. I'm also still really proud of the quality of that work given it was created by a bunch of people in terrible shock.

I do really like the perimenopause book, What Fresh Hell Is This?, I wrote that was published in 2021. Based on everything me, my editor and my publisher know, it was the very first truly queer and gender-inclusive nonfiction menopause guide, and as far as I know, it remains that way. There is certainly more than a little bonkers-ness in there, because I not only wrote it while in the worst of my own menopause transition myself, but also during lockdown, but I personally find that realness liberating and refreshing. I also love how many great thinkers from my community I was able to include in there, and how much of the other kinds of inclusion these kinds of books are often missing are part of that book: disability inclusion, cultural inclusion, information that doesn't assume everyone is middle or high-income, that doesn't assume everyone is married or cohabitating, etc.

Imagarden: How has being neurodivergent impacted working as a sex educator? Do you have any advice for fellow neurodivergent sex educators getting used to things like setting boundaries, self-care, etc.?

I love this question! I'm both lucky and unlucky in that for most of the years I have done this work, I have not only been my own boss, I have built a workplace from the ground up that was, in a lot of ways, custom-built for my brain. (There's a whole separate part of this conversation about how much of a fit that has been for OTHER folks who have worked here, mind, but I also think it's part of why more of our team than not usually is neurodivergent.) This has been a lot harder for me when I have come into the work into a framework or way of doing it that was pre-built: you can often make adaptations, for sure, but depending on who you are working for, the flexibility to do that can vary a whole lot. I have certainly done work for a few places where there wasn't any real flexibility in this regard (read: things like a ton of paperwork just because, pre-written scripts, very specific and inflexible hours), and that's sucked, especially when I have gotten so used to being able to chart my own course, by and large. The good news about that starts with some bad news: there are still very, very few paying gigs for sex educators that are just out there for the getting. Most of us who want to work in this field, especially full-time, will be making our own work, our own jobs, our own workplaces. The good news about that is that means we CAN build them to work best with our brains. For instance, I am someone who generally has more hyperfocus than I do distractibility. So, being able to work online, where I can not have to be surrounded by people in my actual physical space, can allow me to go all the way into what I am doing and be in it uninterrupted for hours.

I do want to add that until relatively recently, nearly all sex ed work was DIY work, and what people did and how they did it was really about who THEY were, their life experiences, their own geekdoms, and the way doing it worked for them. I think that's a really important tradition to hold on to for a lot of reasons, including that it makes doing the work a lot more accessible for a lot more people, we neurospicy folks very much included.

Imagarden: I guess this is a strange question but I am curious: When dealing with so many heteronormative and cisnormative messages in the world, how have you learned to deal with the big emotions, or that “blood boiling” feeling afterward pushing back?

Competitive-Stock744: Relationship anarchy is also something that has fit nicely into my natural inclinations and understandings of relationships, but I am also someone new to close relationships (it takes me a while to form relationships, and I haven’t always been in spaces where I’ve found people I could feel safe with) so I am curious how it has affected your life, your work at Scarleteen, and the way you think about relationships, over time. Also I wanted to say thank you for creating a space like Scarleteen, I grew up in an area which did not have very comprehensive or inclusive sex ed and Scarleteen has been a big help on my journey)

Oh gosh, you're welcome! I appreciate that thanks a lot. I'm so proud of the work we've all done here and its value to so many people, and I love hearing about the specific ways it's helped someone.

This is a good question! Let me think quickly through it! I'm long-winded, so summaries can take more effort for me sometimes than pages and pages of words.

It's always been very common for me, ever since I was first expressing myself sexually, for my sexual relationships not to fit very well into the usual romantic/sexual or sex-only box. So many of my closest friendships and chosen family are with people who started out as lovers, or became so later but didn't stay that way, or were not sexual for even decades and only much later became so. Way back when in the 90s, an era of a lot of casual sex for me, I made a rule for myself around it that was this: I wasn't going to have sex with anyone who I wouldn't pick up the phone for if they called me in crisis at any point in their lives. That, for me, is pretty emblematic of the way I think about a lot of any kind of intimacy: that even intimacy that might feel fleeting at the time has the capacity not to be, or to be revisited, and also that pretty much EVERY way we can connect to another person is sacred and special. At the same time, I also think of all relationships as fluid by default, which means I see myself and others as ideally being able to flex when any of our needs or circumstances or feelings change. This has resulted in, really, a bounty of rich connections for me, and I think it also allows me to bring my whole heart into my work, too. I think of the connections that I make in working with people here, or writing things people will hopefully connect with, as having a specialness and sacredness, and of having a connection that requires and nurtures care. Does that all make sense?

I also think my work benefits a lot from my not thinking any one kind of relationship is somehow the most important, the most intimate, or the most special, both in how I do the work I do with people, but also in people coming to me and the work I do and feeling all of their diverse and different relationships valued.

Imagarden: Where is the best place in the world to grow up, with regards to sex education and coming into your sexuality? - Or a place you've visited that felt like it had a healthy culture around sex? Too, what do you think *makes* a space healthy around sex?

Cool question! I'm not sure there is one of those, not universally, anyway, because we all don't need or want the same things (which is a big part of why we have such a vast amount of content at Scarleteen and why we offer direct services for people to bring their own questions and needs and get answers tailored to them). I can think of a lot of places that are terrible places to grow up when it comes to thins pretty universally, and that's easier than trying to think of universally good ones. I mean, yes, the sexual ethos and education in the Netherlands is pretty great compared to a lot of other places, anyone in the field knows this. But is it as great for, say a Black, transfeminine immigrant with disability who has an array of partners as it is for a white, cishet, able, middle-class Dutch citizen with one partner? Doubtful. So, in a lot of ways I think what makes a space healthy around sex isn't just generally healthy attitudes about sex and accurate, progressive information, it's that that space changes and flexes and adapts and expands to fit the vast diversity of humans and our sexualities.