Condom Sense: A Real Life Education with About Face Youth Theatre

Carolyn grew up in small town in Ohio. During her freshman year of high school, the class went on a field trip to a skating rink. She explained with enthusiasm, “We were so excited to go anywhere, growing up in the middle of nowhere.” On that field trip, Carolyn and her closest girlfriends found a condom dispenser in the bathroom. She confessed to me, “We had never seen a condom before, let alone a condom dispenser.” They started buying a lot of condoms. Unfortunately, a teacher caught them and suspended them for it. Even in the context of small-town Ohio life, Carolyn knew there was something wrong with getting suspended for buying a condom. With nothing much to do, it was well known that kids in her town started having sex in the 7th and 8th grade.

In her senior year of high school, Carolyn started becoming aware of her sexuality. She had a crush on her best friend, Samantha. She used the Internet to discover what it all meant, and started to learn new terminology for what she was experiencing. Secretly, she started to consider herself a lesbian.

When the girls got their yearbooks, Carolyn remembered just how excited she was to sit with Samantha and reminisce about their time in high school together. Looking through the pictures, they started to count how many girls had gotten pregnant in their high school. They were shocked: Fifty girls had gotten pregnant in four years.

Later that year, right before graduation, Samantha called her to tell her something important. Carolyn had gotten into DePaul University and was leaving Ohio behind. She stated in her interview that her sexual identity propelled her to leave her small town, so that she could find other people like herself. Interestingly, she didn’t believe she would have gone to college had she not been in the predicament of being gay in a small town.

First day of About Face Youth Theatre’s rehearsal for “Fast Forward.” Photo by Tara Malik Click here to enlarge

On the phone, Samantha told her she needed to tell her something before she left. Carolyn mistook that to mean that maybe something good was about to be revealed about their relationship. But what Samantha was calling Carolyn to tell her was that she had been diagnosed with HIV. Carolyn hung on the phone, completely silent. Carolyn explained, “If she had said she had cancer, I would know what to say, but I didn’t know what HIV was. I knew it was bad and you couldn’t get rid of it and you were probably going to die, but that’s it.” Samantha told her that it was “from that guy at that party,” and she asked her if she remembered. Carolyn explained to me, “She had hooked up with him randomly. I gotta tell you, that was not unusual.”

When Carolyn came to Chicago to start college, she drifted away from Samantha. She started taking gender-studies courses, she came out, and she found herself attending workshops for About Face Youth Theatre, our oral-history theater program for LGBTQA (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered, Questioning and Allied) youth 14-21 years old. She had heard that the ensemble was writing a new play about HIV, and she wanted to learn as much as she could about this mysterious disease. She knew she was absolutely terrified of HIV, and that it had come into her life as a difficult surprise, but she couldn’t explain her level of fear concerning the disease. All she knew was that she had lost a friendship because of it.

In September 2006, About Face Youth Theatre embarked on a new project to combine sexual health and theater. We began with the simple, guiding question of how LGBTQA youth were being affected by HIV and AIDS. The About Face Youth Theatre ensemble is part of the third generation since the beginning of the epidemic and, as a company dedicated to advancing the national dialogue on sexuality and gender, we wanted to investigate the connection between their experiences with HIV and the beginning of the epidemic, as an effort to better understand why the LGBTQ community remains overly burdened with the subject of HIV and AIDS. In the beginning, we grappled for some understanding about why HIV and AIDS education does not exist as embedded curriculum in our nation’s schools while we are nearly 20 years into a pandemic, and why policies surrounding HIV/AIDS education are still floundering on the federal level.

The stories were somber and devastating. Dealing with the reality of 17-year-olds being diagnosed with HIV or AIDS was creating a hopeless picture inside our project. Also, there was this blanket of cultural fear inside the group. Students had received media messages about HIV and AIDS their entire lives. However, without comprehensive education about the disease, this exposure had created deep-seated, myth-based fears that grew into terror. In the beginning of our inquiry, many adults we spoke to had hypothesized that the young people were just not afraid of it because they had not witnessed the deaths from the earlier years. They imagined that because young people knew there were now life-saving medications, they were not afraid of getting HIV. In our collection of surveys from the young people who came through our workshops, this was not true. They were extremely fearful of the disease, with many having suffered nightmares in childhood about having HIV. And for the young men who identified as gay, there was an extended fear. Our project was created to turn this fear around, but how were we going to accomplish this? Talking about the history of the disease or discussing the relics of the earlier HIV/AIDS movement only seemed to reinforce the fear. We needed another approach.

Sex Education: The combination of drama and comedy

Quickly, we learned that for the sake of good drama and for the sake of creating a show that empowered us to face our serious predicament, we needed to pull our focus back and attempt to look at the entire picture of sex education in America. The lightness, the awkwardness and the humor of sex-education stories saved our project. Young people were now very attracted to the project, and the numbers of participants nearly doubled. By the end, over 150 youth participated in the project.

With such a focus on sex education, we were able to laugh at the absurdity of our country’s policies, and we would gain the energy needed to create a third wave of activism. In a true balancing act, the bizarre stories of sex education created an excellent dramatic engine for our new play, “Fast Forward.” Furthermore, as a theater dedicated to creating plays based on the true stories of LGBTQA youth, we discovered through the exchange of stories that the contemporary picture of sex education is highly discriminatory against queer, gay and trans identities. We wanted to break that story to our community through the creation of our play. Through our rehearsals, we began to trace the legacy of the policies promoted by politicians like President Ronald Reagan and N.C. Senator Jesse Helms, and the effects of their legislation on this generation. In the end, we were left with a startling and clairvoyant view of the American future.

Carolyn had participated from the very beginning of the project, but she did not tell her particular story about HIV for nearly two years into the project. Once we started talking about sex education, she felt comfortable enough to tell her story. She had shared that she indeed knew someone with HIV, but she had never presented it as a story. Once we switched focus, Carolyn recognized that she had a very significant story to tell and that it might be good for the script. Carolyn told me about her abstinence-only sex education and just how ironic it all felt. Fifty students in the four years at her high school had gotten pregnant. That was nearly a 1-in-4 ratio for the female population at her school. She clearly saw that students weren’t listening, and that abstinence-only was not a rational program for their lives. She knew the teachers knew this, parents knew this, but there was an unspoken rule that they were to ignore the truth and speak only of “virtuous” things, like marriage. Furthermore, she quickly understood that the conversation wasn’t for her because, as a lesbian, she couldn’t get married.

Carolyn’s story became the thesis of our work, the vertebrae of our play. An anticondom education system equals youth bewilderment about how to protect oneself against HIV and other diseases or pregnancy, which in turn equals pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections (STI) and HIV infections amongst youth. In the 29 years of this epidemic, we have but one tool to prevent the disease, and the political administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush have, with great effort and many dollars, stopped the education of condom use for young people. Late into our project, we introduced Representative Henry Waxman’s report on abstinence-only sex education to the ensemble. The report became our motivation to continue the work with great effort and to collaboratively create a new, comprehensive HIV education approach. The group became fevered with the connection of homophobia and abstinence-only sex education, and the management of HIV education.

About Face Theatre: The Program

With our partners Beyondmedia Education and Howard Brown Health Center we created two years of programming, which braided media-literacy workshops, sexual-health workshops, performance and theater training and anti-oppression/antiracist seminars on the subject of sex education for over 150 youth. Accidentally, we created an ideal model to address the mammoth problem of miseducation around sex, sexuality and gender that was federally supported during the dual terms of the Bush Administration. First, through storytelling and theater games, we were able to map our participants’ knowledge, cultural understandings and contexts in terms of sexual health education, beliefs and fear of HIV. Their stories provided a curriculum plan for our project, and an important beginning point. In our media-literacy workshops, Beyondmedia Education trained youth on cameras, and with the cameras they began to reach out to the community and conduct interviews based on the information they had been asked to share. This material would become footage for the new HIV education video. Furthermore, Beyondmedia conducted media-literacy workshops on the history of sex education and HIV. Students learned how to deconstruct media messaging and how to critically observe the myths we receive about HIV, AIDS and sexual health through television, newspapers and through sponsored sex-education curriculum. In addition, Howard Brown Health Center provided sex-positive and esteem-building workshops on sexual health and HIV/AIDS information. The information was medical and physiological, but it was also cultural and personal. For example, participants were asked to define sex. They were involved in small group discussions about the reasons why people have sex. They participated in “STI Jeopardy” and they took pre- and post-tests on their knowledge of HIV. All of it was taught from a place of empowerment, blocking the fear at every turn.

Zavier Hairston and cast in “Ideal Classroom.” Photo by Tara Malik Click here to enlarge

Additionally, About Face Theatre hired an HIV scholar to follow the project and impart the best knowledge on the cultural history of HIV and AIDS to participants. As our resident scholar, Jennie Brier from the University of Illinois at Chicago, provided youth with several workshops throughout the two years on the history of the disease, the history of corruption surrounding the disease and the history of activism and art since the 1980s. We hoped youth would tell their stories in connection with the bigger story. Additionally, we did not want the history of HIV and AIDS to become “othered.” In the middle of the project, we hosted an intergenerational retreat where youth and adults, ages 14-73, exchanged stories and created performances about their connection to the disease and to activist efforts. The HIV intergenerational retreat was created in an effort to bridge the gap between multiple generations and experiences on the subject of HIV and AIDS. The event provided a forum to speak about and connect to our personal histories, revisit our political gains as a community, and create a contemporary map of our concern and current work regarding HIV and AIDS.

Then, after two years in development, “Fast Forward,” an About Face Theatre production, premiered in the summer of 2008 at the Center on Halsted’s Hoover-Leppen Theatre. The cast consisted of 17 youth, some newly involved and some who had belonged to the project since the beginning. We structured the rehearsals with additional time for more sexual-health sessions taught by Howard Brown Health Center. Howard Brown began their three-part session with an antiracist and anti-oppression workshop to address the complex mirror that HIV provides our culture regarding its discriminatory practices in the distribution of resources and power. Then, the youth were provided a sexual-health workshop, including condom demonstrations and testing demonstrations.

Although we began our rehearsal process knowing we wanted to tell Carolyn’s story and many of the additional stories we collected, we decided to let the framework of “high school” and “sex ed” to be truly discovered in the rehearsal room. In the true spirit of About Face Youth Theatre, we devised “Fast Forward.”

We had many artistic successes inside the production. One of the greatest was including a story line borrowed from a cast member about being comfortably out in school, but every day the jocks would tell him that he was going to get AIDS. Over the course of the play, the young man teaches the jocks what it means to be gay and he convinces them to join the gay-straight alliance. True story. Additionally, to underscore students’ reports about how they felt they couldn’t speak up about sexual-health education on their campuses, we included, as part of the sound design, a censorship beep any time a student tried to talk about it during the play. This allowed audiences to laugh at this very important point about youth being involved in their own education. And inside Carolyn’s story, we decided to include a very magical moment to reflect her awe with the condom dispenser. When Carolyn and her friends start to buy a lot of condoms in her story, we decided we needed to show that in theatrical terms. A condom drop box was built, and hundreds of condoms rained down on the girls in a spectacular change of light. Because her teachers suspended her and her friends for buying condoms, in the production, we would allow theater to take back that moment and celebrate her excitement about the condom dispenser in a larger-than-life way. Furthermore, we made the decision to leave the condoms on the stage for the remainder of the play. This was our counter-statement to the lack of condom education Carolyn and her classmates received. With the knowledge that many youth would come to see the production, we wanted to celebrate the condom as an important health tool for them to use in their lives.

In our efforts to critique the system, but not all of the members of the system, we also interviewed teachers for the production. From that material, we learned that teachers felt untrained to teach sex and sexuality courses. Time and time again, they cited their own lack of sex education. From that material, we created a musical number called “The Lament of the Sex Educator,” in which a chorus of five teachers spoke/sang about their different stances and approaches to sex ed.

Finally, the play ended with a scene titled “The Ideal Classroom.” In this scene, the students take over their classroom, redecorate the room (including dressing the skeleton in a sequined dress), turn the music on, pull the censoring button out of the booth, and begin to proclaim what they would teach if they were in charge. It resulted in a hopeful ending. Interestingly, it was the hardest scene to find during our rehearsal process, and we were nearly in production when we finally wrote it.

The show was a great success, and we believe we were successful in our goal of changing the conversation about HIV for our audiences and participants. Throughout the rehearsal process, youth reported feeling “so relieved” to be a part of the show. In a post-show survey, 100 percent of the participants reported that they knew how to protect themselves now, and a 100 percent of the participants felt like they no longer were afraid to talk or learn about HIV or AIDS.

Condom Sense

As a team, we recognized that what we had designed should be repackaged into a curricular program for high schools. Now under the umbrella title “Condom Sense: A Real Life Education,” we have begun to roll out our new LGBTQ-inclusive, empowerment-based HIV education package, which includes an interactive HIV education booklet, a new HIV video with an interactive curriculum, and our touring production of  “Fast Forward” (which includes a visiting sexual-health educator for teacher trainings and student sessions). Funded by the MAC AIDS fund, we are now able to provide the video, “HIV: Hey, It’s Viral,” to every high school in Chicago Public Schools, and the funding also allows for About Face Theatre to tour to ten high schools in the CPS system, free of charge. During this rollout, we will begin to test our new program.

Edlyn “Sonny” Griffin in “Flawless.” Photo by Tara Malik Click here to enlarge

The LGBTQ community has been wrestling with the subject of HIV/AIDS for a long time now, and yet, from this experience, we learned that our return gaze on the subject was telling us something we did not understand. In our process of story collecting and building an ensemble, we learned that  our cast was making an argument for a stronger form of truth inside the classroom. Together, we learned that homophobia is still paralyzing our nation’s response to HIV, and we learned that HIV is damaging young people’s lives more than we thought. The subject has not disappeared; it is ubiquitous so we no longer see it. Many of us were there when the story of AIDS first broke, when our friends passed away in numbers that recall a war. In the years when they were dying in the greatest numbers — 1988, 89, 90, 91 and 92 — the young people in our cast were being born. This has been an important fact for us to remember because, quite literally, the young people in the ensemble are life replacing death and they are the conquering light of a new generation. How could we ignore their health, when this is what they represent to us?

With that said, the creation of this play and this program was an attempt to get out from under the fear and away from the dark picture, and to move forward with energy. The project was about bringing light and humor and insight to the tangled web of why Americans don’t want to talk about sex and sexuality with young people. At About Face Theatre, we hope abstinence-only education will be completely eliminated, and that comprehensive, empowerment-based sexual-health education will take its place. We hope our project has contributed, and will continue to contribute, to the about face necessary for the health and well being of our younger generations.

This essay is part of the Community Arts Convening & Research Project, 2009-10, funded by a Nathan Cummings Foundation grant to the Maryland Institute College of Art.  The essay was reviewed and selected by the project's Editorial Board: Stephani Woodson, Arizona State University; Amalia Mesa-Bains, California State University Monterey Bay; Paul Teruel, Columbia College Chicago; Marina Gutierrez, Cooper Union; Jan Cohen-Cruz, Imagining America; Ken Krafchek, Maryland Institute College of Art; Lori Hager, University of Oregon; and Sonia BasSheva Mañjon, Wesleyan University.

Paula Gilovich is a writer, theater artist and sexual-health activist and educator who lives and works in Brooklyn and Chicago. She is currently working on the next About Face Youth Theatre play, “Queertopia.” The production will premiere in summer of 2010 in Chicago.

Original CAN/API publication: December 2009