Erotica Night Focuses on LGBTQ and BIPOC inclusivity

Allyson Bennett, News Editor

Green House hosted its annual Erotica Night, an event to teach the Union Community about safe sex practices in conjunction with PPGen and Union Pride. For this year’s event, organizers planned the event to be more inclusive towards the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) and Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) communities than in previous years. 

“The goal of the event is to de-stigmatize sex. It is basically a sex ed oriented event that legitimately talks about sex and does not use it as a guilt tripping thing, but rather brings about a positive light to sex with experimentation and learning about various facts,” Katie Boermeester ‘24, an organizer of the event and the co-chair of Green House, said. “Whether you’re male, female, intersex, no matter what gender you are, no matter your sexuality. This is meant to be an open and welcoming environment where everybody can learn and everyone can experience.”

This year’s event had trivia questions on topics that ranged from: “How many women have never had an orgasm?” (answer: 1 in 6) to “If you are LGBTQ identifying, what are the chances your identical twin would also identify as LGBTQ?” (answer: 20-50%). Unlike in previous years, this year’s event also discussed orgasm equity and the book Becoming Cliterate: Why Orgasm Equity Matters by Laurie Mintz. Orgasm equity refers to the orgasm gap, the issue where women orgasm significantly less than men in heterosexual relationships. 

Organizers of the event, Boermeester, Talia Marc ‘24, Professor Mary Guerrant, and Amanda Tommell-Sandy, the Assistant Director for Health Promotion, wanted this year’s program to be LGBTQ and BIPOC inclusive. “In previous years, it was very heteronormative in regards to a man going after a woman… That being said, my method for making sure that we are inclusive towards the LGBTQ community and the BIPOC community is in regards to the sex toys we buy alongside with trivia questions,” Boermeester said. “We basically queered up the trivia questions by collaborating with Union Pride.” Organizers also purchased LGBTQ inclusive sex toys. 

“Involving BIPOC inclusivity, that was mostly supplementation to trivia questions as well. Focusing on black queer women, black men, Asian, you name it,” Boermeester said. 

The event also included a variety of group activities, such as pinning a “kiss” on a celebrity, undressing a doll, and a lap dance contest. The most popular event was the erotic poetry event, where organizers provided erotic poems for attendees to read in pairs. Unlike previous years, attendees also had the flexibility to choose the pronouns they used to describe characters in the poems. 

In addition to the sex toys and condoms provided at the event, Union’s Wicker Wellness Center also provides “contraception and emergency contraception, health education, pregnancy testing, routine pap smears, and STD testing and treatment,” according to the website. Condoms can also be found in the wellness center or various dispensaries on campus.