A little perspective: When I was 8, the entertainment was a bank of 6 video games at the drug store across the street from the high school. In order to keep me and my friends from playing the video games, the pharmacist's son told us that they caused AIDS. This was plausible because eight year olds were not told anything about AIDS yet the news was so full of AIDS that at eight years old, we could identify a Kaposy's Sarcoma by name and by sight.

When I was seventeen, I had to bring a permission slip home to see a couple speakers in my Humanities class - a weird elective with only about 30 kids in it that allowed me to stack English credits to graduate a semester early. You see, we were going to have gay men show up to answer questions. And despite the fact that these gay men only spoke to our class, no less than three churches in town rallied their congregations to demand that our Humanities teachers be fired.

And it's not like the town was anti-science.

Sex ed for us, in 6th grade, was "girls have vaginas. Boys have penises. Put them together and you will get a disease." People in Santa Fe died of "gay plague." Charlie "Devil went down to Georgia" Daniels released songs about beating up queers at gay bars:

Now, we've got gay marriage legalized in 19 states. AIDS is something that happens to people, not divine retribution for sin. Girls are being vaccinated for HPV, morning after pills are widely available and sex ed is happening in 4th grade.

I'm a firm believer in sex ed. I'm a firm believer in openness and confidence. But I also think that laughing and pointing at the prudes who can't quite handle it as astonishingly easily as an intersex researcher at Northwestern isn't helpful. My mother taught human anatomy at alternative medical schools in Santa Fe. I went to my first lesbian wedding "ceremony" in 1985, back when Heritage USA was as big as Disneyland and Tom Hanks was fucking mermaids in Splash, not Antonio Banderas in Philadelphia. And my mother would always overshare about human sexuality when she was drunk. It didn't make me educated, it made me alienated from my peers.

We've come a long way, baby. There are christian parents out there right now having to reconcile between "heavy petting is a sometimes food" at school and "god hates fags" at grandma and grandpa's house. Slow and steady has been winning the battle and poking fun at the rear guard never ends well.