Before I was a project manager extraordinaire, I talked about sex and drugs for a living.
I started out in high school (with a local LGBTQ youth group) talking about coming out. About crouching under my desk while I whispered to my best friend over the phone that I thought I might like girls. About being afraid to tell my sister because I thought she wouldn’t love me anymore. All the heart-string pulling stuff.
We had two peer speakers’ groups – we’d go to local schools and community groups and tell our stories about being queer and teach HIV prevention. I quickly moved from the group of kids who talked about coming out to running the program, and my shtick changed from all-about-me to all about how to not get HIV or an STD.
When you can’t make it sexy, make it funny.
Even though those hour-long talks were all about sex, most kids (and grown-ups) don’t find safer sex even a little bit sexy. But compare a condom to football gear and you can pretty much get any teenager’s attention. (Both reduce the risk of getting injured – one from a blow to the head the other STDs and other icky stuff…)
Gear up.
Funny works. But so do demos. Most schools aren’t thrilled with a dildo in the classroom, and the banana thing is boring. But don’t try to tell me the condom doesn’t fit on your penis when I can blow one up over my head.
Nothing like a little lube in your hair to really make it shine.
Know your shit.
Eventually I leveraged all of this sex and drugs talk into a career as the condom lady. In the ten years that I worked in HIV prevention, I gave hundreds of presentations on everything from safer sex to clean needle use to teaching parents how to talk about sex (with their kids and each other…)
I knew my stuff. I was good at what I did. And still, when I’m in Rhode Island, I’ll occasionally have someone approach me with – Hey, aren’t you the condom lady? You came to my school!
It wasn’t about knowing something about everything. It was about knowing everything about one specific thing.
