Cultural anthropologist Gilbert Herdt focused on the role of local communities and their impacts on the lives of America’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer youth in a lecture in the EMU Fir Room on Thursday afternoon.
Herdt, a professor of human sexuality studies and anthropology at San Francisco State University, has been conducting research on sexuality for 30 years. He is the director of the National Sexuality Resource Center, and his research has taken him around the world.
While Herdt acknowledged an overall increase in sexual tolerance in contemporary society, he critiqued America’s shortcomings in sexual literacy. Many of these attacks were directed at the Bush administration.
“The government of the United States is not contributing to sexual literacy at all,” Herdt said. “Quite the contrary — they are making politically motivated attacks against sexual education from all issues ranging from abortion to the dissemination of safe sex information.”
According to Herdt, the Bush administration has continued its conservative attack on the LGBTQ population with a plan to impose a constitutional amendment outlawing gay marriage. Herdt said these actions help to create social oppression and inequality.
“How can homosexuals express themselves in a sex-negative, chauvinistic environment?” Herdt asked. “They can’t. There is no development. Only unexpressed desire, silence, shame, torment and a legacy of social oppression.”
Herdt said America leads the industrialized world in some undesirable categories.
“We are number one in unwanted abortions, unintended pregnancies, HIV rates and sexual violence,” he said. “This is due primarily to the lack of sexual education and dialogue in American culture.”
Theater arts major Wayne Bund agreed with Herdt’s assertions.
“As a homosexual in contemporary society, I have found my experience to be very in line with much of what Dr. Herdt was describing,” he said. “There is a tremendous amount of pressure not to speak up about differences of sexuality.”
Herdt’s main suggestion for the improvement of sexual literacy in the United States was to move the introduction of sexual education to first-grade classrooms.
“This has been done in the Netherlands, it has been done in France and it has produced very favorable results,” he said.
Event organizer Lynn Stephan said programs such as this are an integral part of sexual understanding.
“The University has attempted to sponsor these events annually in order to help raise more awareness about the state of sexuality in our society,” Stephan said.
Stephan said the lecture’s scheduling had nothing to do timing-wise with the national election.
“We did not ask Dr. Herdt to come here to raise any political sentiments or create controversy,” Stephan said. “This is merely to educate and inform people.”