Bianca Laureano, 37, is a sex educator and the co-founder of the Women of Color Sexual Health Network (WOCSHN). A self-identified black Puerto Rican, she is working to increase the visibility of women of color in the small and somewhat insular world of sex education in the U.S.

I've been a sexologist and sex educator for 19 years now. I started out right when I graduated high school and I realized that the conversations at the time around communities of color, specifically around Latino and Caribbean communities, were rooted in unplanned teenage pregnancy. I was not one of the people who experienced an unplanned pregnancy. Hearing those news stories, I said to myself, What's going on? I'm not hearing my story represented. How are all these researchers making decisions about our sex lives without talking to us and including us? How are all these researchers not even speaking our language? I went to study sexuality and family health, and that led to a growing interest specifically in Caribbean and Latino sexuality.

My parents migrated to the U.S. from Puerto Rico in the late '60s or early '70s. And they were big hippies. My father's an artist and he got a grant to go to American University in Washington, D.C., but when it came to talking about topics like bodies and sexual pleasure and reproductive health, I didn't get any of those conversations with family members. My parents had books like Our Bodies, Our Selves and The Joy of Sex. So I kind of self-educated through reading. Our parents never sat us down and said, "These are your bodies, this is what happens." The conversations were very heterosexist. We were expected to partner with men, get married, have babies. When I began menstruating, I hid my menstrual cycle for a week until there was a pool party that I wanted to go to and I had to out myself. Today I have a better relationship with my parents around sexuality. I'm really open with my mom and she's open to talking to things now that we're adults.

When I was in college, my parents were really worried that I would not find a job because they had never heard of sex educators or sexologists. I think now that I'm employed, they're kind of relieved that I'm in the field I've always wanted to be in. But people haven't really reached out to us in the way people have reached out to other educators. At NYU, I went to grad school with some really now-popular sexuality educators and writers. Almost everybody I graduated with, they have book deals, they have columns that are regular in online and print media, and I was the one person of color who was in the program at the time and I haven't had any of those offers come to me. I feel like that's also something that's present in the field right now. There's a disconnect about the expertise that we have. As sexologists of color, we can talk about so many different topics. We don't always have to talk about race. We can still talk about dating and other general topics like pleasure and masturbation.

We were at the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors, and Therapists conference, and there were only, like, 17 people of color who attended this national conference. We all kind of found each other and were drawn to each other. The presentations were very much devoid of any needs of communities of color, or communities that were migrant or immigrant communities, communities that just had various intersecting challenges. So we started our organization [WOCSHN] then and there because we wanted to increase our representation and support.

So I'm one of the founding members of WOCSHN along with Mariotta Gary-Smith and Trina Scott. Basically we want to create a membership organization that is seen nationally as an organization to support women of color and provide travel scholarships and professional development support, as well as support for certifications, which are expensive.

For my real job, I'm working at an organization called Scenarios USA. We create films and curriculum around young people's needs. A lot of the films the young people create are about sexual orientation, about decision-making, and specifically on unintended pregnancies. Even before I started working with them, I was using their content in my sexuality education classroom. This year, they have films that focus on young black trans teenagers and sexual orientation among black youth.

I think there are a lot of stereotypes about cultures and communities of color, and the assumption that we have a very rigid or static view of sex and pleasure, and that's not really accurate. One of the most recent and public examples would be the WOCSHN organizational response to a book called . Every single contributor is a white person and most of them are in the U.S. It's just a misrepresentation and this has happened for decades. But it is a conversation that allowed us to talk about the systemic types of white supremacy in place in our field and that people perpetuate, which make it difficult for us to be seen as potential contributors. We wrote a really beautiful, long, and eloquent response to the white supremacy in the field, using the book as an example. The response of the authors was, "You're bullying us, how dare you call us racist, I don't like the tone," your basic racism 101 derailing argument. [Ed.note: Some of the original responses to this letter seem to have been deleted.] We were like, we're engaging with you because we care about the field and we know that you can do better. So that kind of propelled us into where we're at now.

My focus has always primarily been on Latino and black communities. It was really easy to get in and do workshops or have informal conversations and sessions around sexuality topics. There's some mistrust of the medical field. You have people who are choosing not to go see medical professionals whether they're mental health professionals to help them with addiction or trauma around sexual violence or rape, but also people who just aren't going to see urologists or gynecologists or getting annual medical health care. We're seeing an increase in black women who are dying of cervical cancer caused by HPV.

I would imagine that being a white educator and speaking to a group of black women in a church setting in the South, they're not going to receive the information the same way as [if the presenter was] another black woman who shares the same religious beliefs as them and might be able to connect the information to different types of texts or experiences that resonate with that population. I think that being an insider in the group and having people trust you in a very particular way is important. I'm someone who doesn't have children. Every time I talk to parents, one of the first questions they ask me is, "Are you a parent?" When I tell them no, they question whether I know what I'm talking about. I can imagine that would happen to other educators as well. I think also topics around outreach, whether it be testing for HIV or encouraging people to get screened for various types of infections and diseases, that there is going to be a disconnect for people who are outsiders. We also have anti-immigrant rhetoric in the U.S., period. That definitely impacts people's perception.

When it comes to sexual pleasure — and this is one of the arguments that the authors of that book said — the color of our skin doesn't impact whether or not we experience pleasure. And our argument was, "Heck, yeah, it does because some of us are murdered before we even get to experience sexual pleasure. Some of us are detained and assaulted and raped and incarcerated." So there's that idea, definitely rooted in this safe, white middle class space of, "I get access to the resources that I need and they're accessible at the level I'm able to read at." And that's just not the reality for many under-resourced communities. It's an error to think that our skin color doesn't impact [how we feel pleasure].

I also think about how there's shame around pleasure. This is something many people experience regardless of race, but there's shame specifically for women of color because we're either hyper-sexualized or seen as very virginal and pure. So that binary puts us in a position that we have to be forced to choose. We don't want to be name-called and isolated as a "slut," or stay married to a man and perpetuate the misogyny that men are supposed to know and teach women and women aren't supposed to know anything. If I ask you to tell me what you think a Latina looks like, people have a very specific image. It's very much rooted in a specific idea. That to me is a problem. We want people to imagine us with variety versus only having one or two stories that we create in our minds about who we are and what we do.

I'm pretty optimistic right now. I've chosen to focus in my professional work specifically on communities of color where I know I'm embraced and supported and have the connections that I need. But I also recognize that nationally there are people in our communities that definitely want a different type of connection. They want a broader, larger connection of educators to reach out to. And I also recognize that we can learn from people who are different from ourselves.

Doing WOCSHN work for so long and people just ignoring us for so long, it's been really hard. You feel invisible, and like the work you're doing doesn't matter. And then to all of a sudden have people say, "We know you're here, we like you, we want to talk to you, we respect what you're doing" — it's overwhelming. Right now I'm very optimistic.

"Sex Work" is a weekly series that profiles women who have careers in sex-related industries — from porn stars to sex researchers and everyone in between. Check back every Tuesday for the latest interview.

Cheryl Wischhover writes about beauty, health, fitness and fashion. Follow her on Twitter.

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