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Sex Ed

Teachers
Melanie Hoff, Daemonum X , Venus Cuffs, Gabriella Garcia, Tina Horn, Ericka Hart, Ayanna Dozier, cosima bee concordia, Monica Mirabile
Organizers
Melanie Hoff, Neta Bomani, Bitter Kalli
Date
May 13, 2024 to May 31, 2024 (10 classes)
Time
6:30 - 9:30pm
Location
Creative Time (East Village, NYC) & Hex House (East Williamsburg, Brooklyn)
Cost
$0 Full scholarships for all learn more...
Deadline
Applications closed on March 18, 2024

Apply Now

Description

Sex Ed is a three-week intensive designed to create the sex education we never had, but always sought. Participants will unlearn the harmful social programming of sex education environments governed by a culture of control and extraction in a platonic space informed by cultural understandings of queerness, gender, class and race, and how our identities relate to sexual desires, preferences and kinks. At Sex Ed, we believe pleasure is knowledge and its study is sacred.
Sex Ed is a tuition free program thanks to the Art for Justice Fund, a sponsored project of the Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

Full Description

Sex Ed is an invitation to study the power and poetry of erotics and to imagine new ways of choreographing sexual energy into your life. Classes are designed to raise more questions than they answer.

Through a balanced, interwoven study of gender, fantasy, sexuality, queering consent, power play, surveillance and sex work, participants will engage in open discussion, movement workshops, drawing and dreaming exercises, resource sharing, and collective knowledge building. Anonymity of all participants will be protected without explicit consent given. Stigma surrounding sex is real and will be discussed.

Sex Ed studies the very systems that create barriers to safety, pleasure, and healing. The process of direct confrontation with these barriers can feel uncomfortable. We will work together to create boundaries that make it easier for everyone involved to feel as safe and comfortable as possible throughout the session. A special Community Agreement designed for Sex Ed will be activated on the first day of session to hold our space.

Through conversation, education, consent, and play, we hope to explore pleasure studies with you.

Community Services

Support Fund

In order to further reduce financial barriers to participation, we are offering support funds on a sliding scale ($0-400 per participant). This $1200 fund is intended to support the participation of Low Income/Working Class People of Color and Queer/Trans People.

Mental Health Support

Throughout the session there will be a mental health counselor available for participants to book individual counseling sessions with. There will always be two organizers present in every class to support participants and teachers with their learning.

Course of Study

Classes will be hosted by two incredible NYC venues, Creative Time and Hex House. Daily classes will take place in the evenings from 6:30-9:30pm with a break in the middle May 13-24. The third week will be an optional residency week hosted at Hex House with informal workshops led by guests and participants themselves. The session will culminate in a final showcase at a date to be determined in the near future.

Topics covered on the syllabus include:

  • Orientation and Opening Sex Chat
  • Cybernetics of Sex
  • Gender and transformation
  • Surveillance and Racial Reproductive Control
  • Systemic power dynamics
  • Queering Consent
  • The Anti-Black Origins of Sexual Violence
  • Embodying fantasy
  • Narrative structure and fetish symbolism
  • BDSM communication structures
  • Polyamory 101
  • ~More topics TBA~

Expectations

Participants will be expected to:

  • Attend every in-person class and participate in discussions about readings and current events with an open mind and critical eye respectful of participants varying cultural backgrounds, identities, and sexualities

Participants will NOT be expected to:

  • Share intimate details of pertaining to their personal sex and relationships without consent

Participants will be invited to:

  • Participate in a showcase open to the public

Is this session for me?

This session may be for you if you:

  • Identity as any gender and sexual orientation. This program is welcoming to all applying.
  • Are tired of learning about sex exclusively from partners, porn, and friends
  • Are committed to developing, deepening, and defining what an embodied sense of what consent means to you
  • Are interested in gaining the vocabulary, best practices, and community to explore your sexual desires and kinks more safely
  • Are angry about what you and your friends may have more easily avoided if pleasure and queer centered sex education were more accessible
  • Are interested in performing your sexuality and exploring erotic narrative arcs
  • Are curious what the world would be like if sex played a much different role in society—if sex was practiced differently without stigma and emphasized cultivating sexual pleasure
  • Believe that sex can be magic

The session may NOT be for you if you:

  • Are not able to attend all of the classes in the evenings of March 13-24
  • Are not open to talking about or seeing sexually explicit material
  • Do not have the capacity to have an intimate, potentially emotional, life changing and affirming experience
  • Are looking to find sexual or romantic dates or partners—this is a platonic space and those who break the community agreement will be asked to leave
  • Are not prepared to center the voices of marginalized and oppressed participants and teachers
  • Are transphobic, whorephobic, homophobic, fatphobic, slut-shaming, racist, ableist, or engage in any other discriminatory practices

COVID-19 Safety & Precautions

Participants will be required to provide proof of up-to-date vaccination status (including boosters) to attend. Participants, teachers and staff are expected to test twice a week and be masked during class. Before the first day of class and final showcase, all participants will be expected to show a negative result on a Covid test.

Meet the Teachers

organizer and teacher

Melanie Hoff

Melanie Hoff is an artist, organizer, and educator. At School for Poetic Computation and Hex House, they strive to cultivate spaces of learning and feeling that encourage honesty, poetry, and reconciliation for the ways we are shaped by intersecting systems of classification and power. Melanie engages hacking and performance to express the absurdities of these systems while revealing the encoded ways in which they influence how we choose to live and what choices have been made for us. They teach about sex, technology, and social cybernetics at the School for Poetic Computation, Yale University, New York University, and have shown work at the New Museum, the Queens Museum, and elsewhere.

any · website · twitter · instagram

teacher

Daemonum X

DaemonumX is a femme leatherdyke passionate about educating queer people on deviant sexualities and alternate relationship structures. She is a polyamory and BDSM coach offering accessible resources to the queer community. DaemonumX hosts several Leather and sex parties in Brooklyn, NY. Her words on BDSM and polyamory can be found in Them, Autostraddle, Logo, and via her zines Fist and Linked.

she/her · website · twitter · instagram

teacher

Venus Cuffs

Venus Cuffs, an esteemed Nightlife Producer, seamlessly merges her prowess in business, finance, and pleasure to craft unforgettable adult-centric experiences, such as dance parties, seated shows, salons, workshops, and tantalizing events like burlesque nights. As a magnetic Master of Ceremonies, Cuffs fosters a welcoming environment and nurtures community for all, including first-time attendees, seasoned regulars, the curious, and the professionals. Her high-profile nightclub events, bustling with vibrant dance parties and engaging performance-centered shows, invite attendees to connect with their deepest pleasure-seeking selves, championing safety and freedom. Cuffs promotes discovery in both event and educational class settings, spaces she has owned and operated for years. Skilled in all aspects of event curation, Cuffs constructs the ideal corporate-immersive experience for all comfort levels. Venus Cuffs, a nightlife "jack of all trades," eschews singularity in event curation, opting to infuse her distinctive brand into event spaces and esteemed venues across New York City. As a former Dominatrix, Venus Cuffs has established herself as a respected authority in specialized alternative cultures and lifestyles, sought-after as an expert consultant and contributor. As a dedicated full-time Nightlife Producer, Venus Cuffs is devoted to creating safe, inclusive, sexy, and fun spaces across platforms. To delve deeper into her acclaimed nightlife productions, follow her journey on Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok at @venuscuffs, and sign up for future events on ,venuscuffs.com,.

Any · twitter · instagram

teacher

Gabriella Garcia

Gabriella Garcia is a creative researcher with over a decade of experience of sharing stories about networked subcultures and technologically-enabled intimacy. She is the director of Decoding Stigma, where she works toward prioritizing erotic labor as a necessary ethics question for futurists. As part of NewINC’s Y10 cohort, she is evolving Decoding Stigma into a space that uses speculative fiction and magical realism to gather sex workers together over designing potential futures toward potential real-world solutions. Her expanded practice includes techno-feminist research, community-centered archiving, multimedia performance art, and poetic technology. She has presented work at the NYU Institute for Public Knowledge, Parsons Cloud Salon, Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, New Museum, Gray Area SF, Hacking//Hustling, Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, Decriminalized Future's Ladies of the Night School, and Museum of Sex.

s/h · website · twitter · instagram

teacher

Tina Horn

Tina Horn is a writer, educatrix, and media-maker. Her book of fetish cultural criticism based on her long-running indie podcast Why Are People Into That?! will be out in June 2024 from Hachette. Tina is the creator/writer of the sci-fi sex-rebel comic book series Safe Sex (Image), and the cult detective thriller Deprog; she was also the host/cowriter of the phone sex podcast Operator (Wondery). Her reporting on sexual subcultures has appeared in Rolling Stone, Playboy, Hazlitt, Glamour, Jezebel and elsewhere; she is the author of two nonfiction books and has contributed to numerous anthologies including We Too: Essays on Sex Work and Survival, which she also coedited. Tina has lectured on adult entertainment politics and queer BDSM identities at universities and community centers all over North America, and works as an on-set consultant for theater, film, and television including the dominatrix scenes of Pose. She is a LAMBDA Literary Fellow, an AVN nominee, the recipient of two Feminist Porn Awards, and holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing from Sarah Lawrence. You can follower her on Twitter and Instagram @TinaHornsAss and visit ,TinaHorn.net

she/her · website · twitter · instagram

teacher

Ericka Hart

Ericka Hart (pronouns: she/they) is a Black queer non-binary femme writer and award-winning sexuality educator with a Master’s of Education in Human Sexuality from Widener University. Ericka’s voice is rooted in leading edge thought around human sexual expression as inextricable to overall human health and its intersections with race, gender, chronic illness and disability. Both radical and relatable, she continues to push well beyond the threshold of sex positivity. They have taught sexuality education for elementary aged youth to adults across New York City for over 15 years, including for 4 years at Columbia University’s School of Social work and the CUNY School of Public Health at Hunter College. They are currently an adjunct faculty member at Widener University’s Center for Human Sexuality, a bratty switchy Sagittarius service bottom and misses Whitney more than you.

they/she · website · twitter · instagram

teacher

Ayanna Dozier

Ayanna Dozier is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker-artist and writer. Across performance, experimental film, writing, and photography, her work remixes personal memory to examine power, trauma, death, and sex within interpersonal relationships and by the state. She is currently an assistant professor of communication, with an emphasis on film, at the University Massachusetts, Amherst and is the author of Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope (2020). Her visual art is represented by Microscope Gallery.

She/Her/Hers · twitter · instagram

teacher

cosima bee concordia

cosima bee concordia is a femme leatherdyke based in Portland, Oregon who can generally be found around the internet as bimbo theory. In past lives she’s been a bookseller, an English teacher, a philosophy student, and a limp-wristed sissy, but these days she’s a writer of horror, essays, theory, and weird experimental fragments as well as a co-host for a show about religious eroticism, anti-fascism, and queer perversion called Drunk Church. Her whole thing is pushing the boundaries of body and self in both her intimacy and art, and for the past year post-covid she’s been settling into her chronically ill girl rot era.

she/her · twitter · instagram

teacher

Monica Mirabile

Monica Mirabile (B. Clearwater, Florida in 1988) is an artist, choreographer and facilitator living in NYC. Her work is multi- process: converging performance, installation and audio composition that explores how power, support and spirit operate within the body. Her choreographic productions as well as her workshops present performance as behavior, are often collaborative and have a focus on therapeutic practice. Mirabile is one half of the performance duo Fluct exhibiting performances nationally and internationally. She has choreographed and movement directed various musicians including SOPHIE, Mitski, Yaeji, Zsela & Maggie Rogers. She founded Otion Front Studio, a performance rehearsal space in Brooklyn, New York in 2014, Co-Founded 'This Is A Performance School' in 2023 and currently organizes the Open Movement program at Performance Space New York in the East Village.

· website · instagram

organizer

Neta Bomani

Neta Bomani is a learner and educator who is interested in understanding the practice of reading and parsing information as a collaborative process between human and non-human computers. Neta’s work combines social practices, workshops, archives, oral histories, computation, printmaking, zines, and publishing, to create artifacts that engage abolitionist, black feminist, and do-it-yourself philosophies. Neta received a graduate degree in Interactive Telecommunications from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. Neta has taught at the School for Poetic Computation, the New School, New York University, Princeton University, the University of Texas, and in the after school program at P.S. 15 Magnet School of the Arts in Brooklyn, NY. Neta has studied under American Artist, Fred Moten, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Mariame Kaba, Ruha Benjamin, Simone Browne, and many others who inform Neta’s work. Neta’s work has appeared at the Queens Museum, the Barnard Zine Library, The Kitchen, and the Met Library. Neta is one of seven co-directors at the School for Poetic Computation, and one of two co-directors at Sojourners for Justice Press, an imprint of Haymarket Books.

any pronouns · website · twitter · instagram

organizer

Bitter Kalli



How do I apply?

Apply Now

Applications open until Applications closed on March 18, 2024.

You can expect to hear back from us about the status of your application on . Please email us at admissions@sfpc.study with any questions you have.

How much does it cost to attend?

This class is free / pay-what-you-want through the support of external funding.

At SFPC we believe that no one should be denied an educational opportunity because of their inability to pay. Through the support of funders and community donors, we are able to subsidize tuition-free classes and provide scholarships for participants.

Our scholarships directly redistribute wealth to those who might otherwise be unable to participate in our program. Scholarships are a critical resource on our way towards creating a more comprehensive free or donation-based model in the future.

We know this future is possible through the generous help of current, former and future participants, community members, and friends of the school on WithFriends. Please become a member to help us become a beautiful school that can offer free and low cost classes and events in the future.

This class is made possible by a grant from Art for Justice Fund, a sponsored project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. Through this grant, we offer tuition-free classes that interrogate the role technology plays in the carceral system through the study of critical theory, computation, visual art and poetry.

Applicant FAQ

For more information about what we look for in applicants, scholarships, and other frequently asked questions, please visit our applicant FAQ.

Interested in more learning opportunities at the School for Poetic Computation? Join our newsletter to stay up to date on future sessions and events, and follow us on Instagram and Twitter. Support our programming through scholarships. Get in touch over email.