My Sex My Way: Sex Ed Guide | Official Durex UK Store

Let’s start with understanding

Spending our formative years receiving sex education that focused on penetration and procreation has left some of us without all of the appropriate tools to make confident or safe decisions. It’s important to expand our understanding around sex, relationships and identity, both historically and today.

Exploring our identities

Here in the UK, it was illegal to talk about LGBTQ+ lives and relationships in schools until the early 21st Century, which means that many of us may have only recently begun to understand who we are and the language we use to describe our experiences.

Under the acronym LGBTQ+, we know that LGBTQ stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Queer. Whilst the ‘+’ stands for everyone that identifies outside cis-heteronormative standards. This includes people who are asexual, pansexual, non-binary, demisexual, as well as multiple other identities.

Sex, for me, goes beyond touching of parts that are considered sexual organs. It can include any intimate contact that me and my partners want to explore together.

Prishita They/Them @prishita_eloise

Labels can be fluid. You don’t have to fit into one label, and you can hold more than one identity.

Jess She/Her @thechroniciconic

Labels can also be restrictive. There’s a beauty and power in labelling yourself, but you don’t have to have one.

Olly They/He @d.iazepam

What they don’t tell you in school

A lot of what can happen in real life sex isn’t discussed. Although it has been a few years since we were at school, what they didn’t teach us there means we have some catching up to do. For example, most of us didn’t get the ins and outs of anal or oral sex, let alone how to do it safely. At times, experiences outside of heterosexual relationships can be overlooked and discussions of pleasure often ignored.

Understand more LGBTQ+ terms here.

What we mean when we say sex

On-screen and in the classroom, sex is typically demonstrated as heteronormative and cisgender. In reality, ‘sex’ can mean many different things depending on who you’re asking. From penetration, masturbation, anal, and oral, to making out, tantric or with extra props. You decide what it means to you.

Queer sex is real, pleasurable, and valid whether it’s with them, her, him, or yourself.

It doesn’t have to involve penetration. If you can get an STI from it, it’s sex.

Phil He/Him @idiosyncraticxl

Sex, for me, goes beyond touching of parts that are considered sexual organs. It can include any intimate contact that me and my partners want to explore together.

Prishita They/Them @prishita_eloise

We’re taught a relationship looks like a man, a woman, a house, a dog… We’re not taught (but should be) that it’s okay to have different relationship structures outside cis-het norms. But queerness has allowed me to explore relationships outside of these norms.

Phil He/Him @idiosyncraticxl

Queerness has allowed me to question all societal norms and interrogate how I really want to live my life; what really makes me happy. It has taught me that love is expansive and not a zero-sum game

Prishita They/Them @prishita_eloise

What do LGBTQ+ relationships look like?

Queerness can show us a range of human sexual experiences and relationship structures – and they’re all valid. Whilst monogamy is the preference for many, this isn’t the only option. Non-monogamy is the umbrella term for not exclusively dating or having sex with one person.

Polyamory and open relationships are non-monogamous approaches to relationships, which involve consensual relationships with more than one person.

Polyamorous relationships can take many different forms based on the relationship structure that suits you, whether there’s a name for it or not. Tip: there’s not just one way to do relationships.

Let’s talk labels

Labels can be great, affirming, confusing, unhelpful, all of the above, or something in between, but they don’t define us. Your identity and sexuality are personal. Only you get to decide whether to label it. And the labels we choose don’t have to stay the same throughout our lives. It’s okay to keep exploring your sexuality and identity – it can be fluid and evolve as you grow and understand more about who you are.