A disturbing syllabus from a sexual education summer camp purportedly geared towards minors is making the rounds on social media and sparking outrage from concerned parents.
Sexy Sex Ed is a “sex ed collective” located in Kentucky which bills itself as “compel[ling] teenagers and people of all ages to discuss personal and political consent, sexual safety, and anatomy.” It has a particular focus on LGBTQ youth.
While it is only drawing in negative press this year, Sexy Sex Ed has been in operation since 2012, when it was created at the request of the Stay Together Appalachian Youth (STAY) Project, who, according to their website, “asked for more sex ed and gender conversations at their annual summer gathering.”
But the 2021 summer camp schedule is what has netizens up in arms, as the freshly-unearthed information shows the workshops would have been anything but appropriate for minors, with most of its classes having overtly sexual information.
An agenda for the virtual camp still available on the site details each day’s activities, including education on masturbation, “being a sex worker or hiring sex workers,””sexy trans sex ed” intended to provide information on “gender exploration and affirmation, BDSM, and more!” and a workshop on the “nuances” of having sex while under the influence of illicit drugs.
It is unclear if there were any age guidelines, restrictions, or safeguarding measures whatsoever for the classes, with none being stated anywhere on the website or in the summer camp schedule.
Since the information about its 2021 camp began to circulate online, Sexy Sex Ed has purged many pages from its website, including the profiles of its “educators,” but screenshots are available in website archives.
The organization was founded by Tanya Turner who, on her now-deleted profile, described herself as a “femme, fat, queer, magical pleasure worker, educator, & artist.”
Other educators who instructed in the 2021 camp include Caitlin Cummings, “a 23 year old radical queer mountain woman,” and Kirstyn Ooten, “a young, fat, differently-abled, queer community organizer and college student from southern West Virginia” who apparently works with children.
In a 2021 YouTube video posted on Means TV, summer camp organizer Tanya Turner states that she encourages “people of all ages” to masturbate, and says her nephews were masturbating “as soon as they could talk.”
A 2020 interview with Turner coins her as “Appalachia’s Queer Auntie” providing “queer positive” sex education to LGBTQ Appalachian youth. The article states the majority of Turner’s students are “queer kids,” and notes that on at least one occasion at Turner’s workshops, “over half of the kids in the room identified as trans.”
In another interview with Autostraddle, Turner describes teaching “baby queers” how to find themselves and outlines an instance in which she maintained contact with an underage student weeks after a class had ended, apparently being provided details on a sex toy the girl was using.
“A week [after the class] I heard from a girl, who was sixteen at the time, and she sent me a list of questions from her friends,” Turner says, continuing: “And two weeks later she sent me a picture of an electric toothbrush her friends bought her as a vibrator.”
Other videos available of Turner online show her instructing groups of what appear to be predominantly young teenage students.
Sponsor’s for Turner’s organization included RISE: Healthy For Life, a non-profit charity which describes itself as providing “inclusive sexuality education for Northeast Tennessee” that offers a number of youth-geared sex education services, and the STAY Project, which hosts “youth-led” activist endeavors.
On a 2021 state profile from the Sex Ed For Social Change website, Sexy Sex Ed was mentioned as providing “after school programming” for youth in public schools in Kentucky.
Since coming under fire for their previous year’s workshops list, Sexy Sex Ed has locked their Twitter and Instagram profiles and deleted some pages from their website. Tanya Turner has similarly locked all of her social media profiles.
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