Spotlight On: Al Vernacchio

April 21, 2016

Al Vernacchio is a nationally recognized sexuality educator, author, and speaker. Al will be a special guest speaker at Colorado Youth Matter's Raising the Bar Conference, October 14-15th, 2016.

1) As a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?

I’ve wanted to be a teacher since I was in first grade. I was fascinated with Sr. Edward Kathleen’s black roll book. Each morning she would open the book and to my amazement all our names were in it! She would call the roll and go down the list marking each student present or absent. Each morning when she called my name and put her mark in the book I felt like my existence has been noticed and validated. There was only a brief period of time when I didn’t want to be a teacher; that was in fourth grade when I wanted to be the Pope, but by fifth grade I was back to wanting to be a teacher.

2) What did your sex education look like growing up, and how does it affect your approach to your work now?

I went to Catholic school from kindergarten through college. I think that in itself will give you some idea of the kind of sex education I had, which was virtually none. My parents were also very uncomfortable talking about sex, and in my book I talk about their funny (at least funny now) attempts to talk to me about sex when I was a teenager. Any positive messages I got about human sexuality came from my own reading about sex as a young person and certainly my entire experience in graduate school.

3) What inspired you to work in the field of sexuality education?

It always sounds like a joke, but I got to sex through religion. I was raised Roman Catholic and as a young boy I was very devout. The church was the center of my life. I also figured out pretty early in my life that I was gay. In order to try to reconcile the two truths of my life - being Catholic and being gay - I threw myself into the study of theology. I didn’t know at the time that a person could study human sexuality. I got my bachelor’s degree in Theology with a concentration in sexual morality. In my first teaching job, at an all boys Catholic school, I was assigned to teach a unit on human sexuality. I was very comfortable talking about sexuality and teaching it to students who were so hungry for information and guidance. I learned of a Master’s Degree program in Human Sexuality Education, got that degree, and have been teaching comprehensive sexuality education ever since. I am still a very religious person (I’m a Quaker today rather than a Catholic), and I still love talking about how sexuality and spirituality can be allies rather than adversaries.

4) What is your favorite part of your job?

The best part of the job is being able to create a class community with students. I believe building solid relationships with learners is the first and most essential step to good education. I love the process of taking a classroom of individuals and helping them grow to trust, respect, depend upon, and learn from each other.

5) What is the most challenging part of your work, and how do you deal with it?

The most challenging thing about being a sexuality educator is confronting the barrage of sex-negative, fear-based, shame-inducing, and pleasure-phobic messages that kids get every day in our society. Those messages are everywhere: in the music they listen to, the TV and movies they watch, the magazines they read, the video games they play, and often they are the messages they get from their peers and sometimes even their families. My job is to help kids know there’s another way to think about sexuality - to see it as a force for good in the world, and something that can be used to promote justice. That’s the way I see it.

6) Your TED talk on changing the metaphors around sex is extremely popular. What inspired that talk?

There were two inspirations. The first was hearing the boys I taught using the baseball metaphor and not seeing the problems it had. The second was reading an article written in 1991 by an amazing sexuality educator named Deborah Roffman called “The Power of Language: Baseball as a Sexual Metaphor in American Culture”. I soon realized that it wasn’t enough to just say the baseball model was bad. I needed to offer an alternative model that people might use instead. I tried a lot of different models. I don’t remember exactly when I hit on pizza (it was in 1992 or 1993), but I knew as soon as I played with it that it was the answer I was looking for. I’ve been talking about pizza ever since.

7) What did your sex education look like growing up, and how does it affect your approach to your work now?

8) What do you see as the biggest challenge to youth sexual health and education in America right now?

I think it’s our nation’s inability to resolve our bipolar attitude towards sex. My friend Jeanmarie said something that I thought was so accurate I put it on the first page of my book. It’s that, “Americans are sexually repressed to the point of being sexually obsessed.” Too many kids grow up in a world that tells them sex, their bodies, and pleasure are dirty, wrong, and sinful yet also uses sex (and especially sexual aggression, coercion, and even violence) to sell everything from toothpaste to cars.

9) What advice about sex, sexuality, and/or sexual health do you wish someone had told you as a teenager/young person?

I was a really early bloomer; I had chest hair in eighth grade. Rather than feel proud I always felt incredibly insecure about my body and was terribly uncomfortable in it. I wish someone could have convinced me that I wasn’t the most hideous looking person on the planet. That feeling dogged me all through my young life. When I look back at photos of myself in my late teens and early 20s I think, “What a cutie!!” I would have had a lot more sex in college if someone could have gotten that message through to me.