Happy Halloween! Although I don’t really get to celebrate Halloween this year because I’m stuck in class all night long, I’ve always enjoyed this holiday because on no other night do I get to watch a pirate, Gumby and a chicken argue about the best way to get uptown at 1:00am.

Since I can’t actually dress up, I was thinking about what sex toy I would want to dress up as if I could do as one. At first I thought about the glass dildos because they are one of my absolute favorite toys. The costume would be pretty easy if I could just find a striped shirt and pants.

The I thought that if I did that I’d probably just look like a candy cane – glass dildos are hard to really represent as someone with a human-being shape. Then, inspiration struck. I could be the Cone. It would take a bit of work and I wouldn’t be able to walk around or fit through doors or on to the subway. And, people might think I was just a big Hershey’s Kiss. But being the Cone would be an awesome Halloween costume. If I could only make it vibrate…
What sex toy would you dress up as? I have other ideas for how I could do The Rabbit Habbit, the Little Flirt, and the Sonic Ring Kit. But that’s as far as I’ve gotten.

Maybe next year I can convince the Babeland staff to dress up as their favorite sex toy for Halloween. It would certainly be worth stopping into the store for that one.

While at Babeland recently, I was reminded of the power Babeland has to shift people’s ideas around sex – just by providing and open, non-judgmental, informative environment in which to learn.

Three young men came in on a quiet Monday night. One of them had a list of things to get and the other two were clearly just along for the ride but maybe didn’t know what they were getting themselves into. One of the young men yelled out in the empty store, “where are all the freaks at?”. This immediately put me on edge as I prefer for the people who shop at Babeland not to be called “freaks” (go figure). I tried to explain this to him and he immediately got defensive. When I could tell he basically understood (but probably thought I was a little crazy for caring), I backed off.

For the next 20 minutes they wandered around the store looking at everything and occasionally asking questions. I answered as best I could. It involved a mixture of debunking myths and putting forward sex positive viewpoints while trying not to sound judgmental which can be a tricky line to walk. Even if the questions that people ask can sometimes be offensive, if they mean well, then I will usually try my best to answer while attempting to provide them with new ways to think about their offensive question. It can be exhausting and after 20 minutes, I was starting to feel the strain of having to think of the absolute best way to say that, no, anal sex wasn’t just for “homos”, etc.
Eventually, two of the friends purchased things and left the store and the only person left was my “where are all the freaks at” guy. He stood for a moment and slowly surveyed the store from the porn and BDSM to the anal toys, dildos and vibrators. Then he said, “man, I really need to step up my game”.

I wanted to hug him. In just 20 minutes we had gone from a place where his masculinity felt threatened by being in the store, to his realization that there’s a whole new world of sexual fun and activities out there and Babeland exists to help him explore that. All of my original discomfort vanished in the wake of that transformation.

I see this in people to a much smaller degree all of the time – usually it’s the difference in how someone walks and interacts with the toys for their first minutes in the store versus what they’re like 10 minutes later. This was a much more extreme and obvious example but it made me smile for the rest of the night. It’s amazing what the power of sex positivity can do.

I am a sex educator. I’ve been doing this work for over 5 years now and through it all, I’ve talked with people about masturbation, anal sex, orgasm, using fingers, vibrators, strap-ons, G-spots and much more. STIs sometimes come into the equation but when people are shopping for sex toys, often those questions don’t come up. When they do, the conversation tends to be very general: use condoms, gloves, dental dams; protect against fluids; minimize skin-to-skin contact to protect against HPV and Herpes.

HIV is something that almost never comes up. I have a few guesses as to why. First, the populations that are most vulnerable to HIV are not the main group of people that come into Babeland. Second, the panic has subsided for the most part. I think most people never consider that they could be HIV positive or even at risk and the majority of people don’t know their status. Third, although people disclose amazing amounts of personal information when talking to sex educators, unless HIV was a particular concern with a toy, there would probably not be a reason to disclose their status.

What I mean to say by all of this is that it’s been quite awhile since I’ve dealt with HIV concerns on a fairly regular basis. It popped back into my life recently in an incredibly real way.

I recently got a part-time job doing HIV/STI counseling and testing with high risk youth. Even among high risk youth a positive diagnosis is a fairly rare thing. It was my first day of counseling on my own after observing others and I was nervous but using all of my sex educator skills to try and get as much information as possible and give the best advice I could.

The second person I counseled was a young man who seemed like he was doing all of the right things – he used condoms all of the time, he had only had a few partners and seemed relatively knowledgeable about how to protect himself. I felt like we’d had a great talk and I gave him the rapid HIV test and sent him on his way. Twenty minutes later as I was packing up to go, my supervisor pointed out to me that the test had been strongly reactive. We couldn’t say for sure, but this person most likely was HIV positive.

I was stunned. What had I missed? What had I done wrong? Why was I so surprised? I knew that there was a possibility that eventually someone I would test would be positive. I just didn’t expect it to be so soon. And maybe, I didn’t really expect it at all. At that moment, everything really hit home for me – what this young person would be dealing with, how I would feel if I were to find out I was positive, just how scaring testing can be. This moment drove home for me the importance of never assuming that you can tell or that even a sexual history will give you a good idea of someone’s status. Testing is the only way to know for sure. Do you know your status?