By Luis Ortiz
Chicago, IL

When I moved to the United States from Mexico, one of the things that surprised me the most was the locker rooms. In 2011, I came to Chicago from my home in Mexico City for a vacation with my family. After a week, my father went home, and I was told by my mother that we would not be returning with him. I had to learn to adapt to the United States as an immigrant and learn a new reality that would not include my father and his family.

To add to my personal confusion, I discovered something important in the locker room: I was attracted to guys. My dad raised me Catholic, which led me to believe that I was destined to go to hell. When I told my family, they were not pleased: my mother, a fundamentalist non-denominational Christian, took it very badly. We became distant, and we had several arguments that made my life very bitter. During the summer before freshman year of high school, I contemplated the idea of suicide or running away, but I never attempted to do anything about it.  Continue reading →

By Jadelyn Flores-Sierra
New Brunswick, NJ

You are only worth your virginity; once you lose it, no man will respect you,” my mother reminds me yet again. Though the phrase is familiar, I make it a point to look her in the eyes, and the longer I hold the stare, the more I am able to see centuries of female oppression that existed long before my mother was born.

The very idea that I am worth much more than one act in my life is not the result of some epiphany made during health education. Though that class didn’t teach me to respect myself—that was something I had to learn on my own—I was lucky to receive a health education that taught me about different forms of contraceptives. However, not all students in the United States have access to knowledge about safe sex. Sexual education, for some students, is reduced to abstinence-only. The danger in abstinence-only education is not only ignorance but also, and more significantly, the creation of a population at increased risk of sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies.  Continue reading →