Among the eight leaders of Sex Week at Yale, it is safe to say that one can find most, if not all types of students of our campus. With different sex education backgrounds and sexual lifestyles they (probably) represent the sexually abstinent and the other end of the spectrum, wherever that is. WEEKEND interviewed Anna North ’13, Connie Cho ’13, Courtney Peters ’12 and Paul Holmes ’13 — half of the board — about the culmination of this year’s preparations for Sex Week, which kicks off today.

Q: Was there a point when you thought that Sex Week would not happen?

Courtney: We certainly had our gut wrenching moments when something we so strongly believed in was being seen in an unfavorable light and misrepresented. For me personally, it was a low point when the administration thought we could be potentially harmful. It’s not what we are about and we believe Sex Week is needed.

Anna: I think that at the same time, we had a clear goal of making Sex Week happen and the confidence that organizing it is important gave us additional motivation.

Q: What is the importance of having Sex Week on the Yale campus?

Paul: We have to ask ourselves how many of us growing up had someone they could ask anything. I think the answer of most of us makes it clear that there is a need for Sex Week on campus.

Courtney: It is a matter of free speech and the need for sex education. From conversations with peers, it is abundantly clear that parents are too embarrassed to talk about sex with their children. To avoid painfully awkward conversations they do not bring it up enough. Sometimes I fear that the administration wants to be politically correct and does not always want to provide a forum for conversations about sex. It is the responsibility to our peers to provide this kind of space for dialogue.

Q: Was there a speaker you reconsidered bringing to campus because of the current atmosphere regarding Title IX issues? How did you tailor the event to the needs of the Yale community?

Connie: There was a clear issue about the discussion of pornography at Sex Week. It became very apparent that no one was ready for a substantial discussion regarding pornography. While some people are personally comfortable with it, it is still not widely discussed on campus. The Marshall Committee Report pointed out that the presence of a pornography star during Sex Week was enough to cancel the event. Pornography is an important subject when it comes to talking about college students’ sexuality. So this time when approaching the topic, we made it explicitly clear that we are discussing the ethics of pornography We were clear about that in our publicity materials and while recruiting speakers. We decided we have to cover it in a basic manner because the public at large is not ready for a more in-depth discussion.

Anna: Another thing that we decided to put into our program this year are events that are more LGBT-relevant rather than only having them be LGBT-friendly. People are pretty fed up with the idea that they can be only “friendly.” They want information and something more beyond the assurance there will be no hate speech. We also made that clear to our speakers, which was hardly a problem considering how many of them work with LGBT communities. We also made our speakers aware that in the audience there are people who never engaged in any sexual activity and people of different levels of experience. We want to make sure that you can go to any of our events feeling safe and not leave the room feeling that anything you’re doing is wrong.

Q: One of the accusations is that you don’t make everybody feel comfortable in the discussion space you create. Did you address these issues in this year’s program?

Paul: We just had to really refocus our message. I think it is important for us to create a space for opinions and when someone of different religious or political views disagrees with us, we feel Sex Week has achieved its goal by being more about the conversation itself. Getting people to talk about WHY they disagree is crucial.

Connie: This year we have specifically carved out this space for events addressing the needs of the critics who felt they didn’t have space within Sex Week for themselves. We have partnerships and study breaks organized with many religious groups and institutions on campus like St. Thomas More, the Slifka Center and the Muslim students’ organization, to name a few.

Q: What do you guys think about True Love Week at Yale? Was there any dialogue between both groups?

Courtney: We found out about it at the time when the new board was being formed. We did not want to be reactionary and have an impulsive, knee-jerk reaction. We thought that a constructive discussion would be best for the Yale community.

Connie: From the beginning, we wanted to have a real conversation on what bothers them. Listening to their opinions was also part of the grassroots research we did to know what the Yale community expects from Sex Week.

Courtney: I feel that sometimes we are perceived almost as poisonous, bringing something toxic to the Petri dish of the Yale community. Our critics perceive us as either pro-sex, in any sense of the word or that we are anti-abstinence and that we cannot relate to it. To be honest some people would be shocked to hear about our personal lives.

Paul: Clearly sex and true love are not mutually exclusive, and anybody who looks at both phrases knows that.

Q: What events are you excited about excited about?

Courtney: Kick off Extravaganza!

Connie: Probably about our keynote speaker, Ann Olivarius ’77, who herself was a plaintiff in a Title IX case and the first woman to win a Rhodes scholarship.