Sex Squads are dedicated to educating at-risk youth about sexual health, healthy relationships, and self-efficacy using arts-based peer education.
Sex Squads are dedicated to educating at-risk youth about sexual health, healthy relationships, and self-efficacy using arts-based peer education.
A Sex Squad (or Sex-Ed Squad) is a group of students who use humor, theater, and storytelling to open up urgent conversations on taboo topics surrounding sex. We aim to creatively and inclusively shift the stigmatized culture around sexual health that exists in our world today.
Explore videos Start Your Own Sex Squad
If you're a student interested in becoming a UCLA peer sexual health educator and live performance cast member, please fill out this application so we can keep in touch.
The UCLA Sex Squad is currently co-directed by Professor David Gere, Wilna Julmiste Taylor, Amanda Giuliano, Sriha Srinivasan, and Isaiah Baiseri.
To contact us, please reach out to Isaiah at ibaiseri@ucla.edu.
The first version of the Sex Squad formed in 2009 when South African arts-activist (artivist) Pieter-Dirk Uys brought his bold idea of using humor to fight HIV into a two-week workshop with students at UCLA. The students formed a group called the AIDS Performance Team, and were so inspired by Uys that they continued working on the material after he left, even taking it on tour to Los Angeles high schools.
The following year they kept building. They realized that, in order to have a comprehensive discussion about HIV, they needed to tackle a whole range of issues that affects sexual health: sexism, homophobia, access to care, protection, getting tested, and more. They decided to widen their scope, to address the whole of human sexual health, and the UCLA Sex Squad was born.
Every year at UCLA, a new group of students forms a Sex Squad. As a group, they choose the most significant topics on which to focus their art-making. The Squad spends the fall creating engaging and interactive skits, poems, songs, dances, and any form of performative art you can imagine! Once the show is created, they perform for LAUSD (Los Angeles Unified School District) schools as a part of a multiple component program called AMP! put on by the UCLA Art & Global Health Center in collaboration with LAUSD.
Inspired by the UCLA Sex Squad, Sex(-Ed) Squads have blossomed throughout Los Angeles Unified high schools and in colleges and universities in the United States South. High School Sex(-Ed) Squads work throughout the year with Art & Global Health Center staff and UCLA student mentors to create performance pieces, advocacy projects, and dialogue spaces for their peers to engage with new methods of sexual health pedagogy. These yearly efforts in arts activism culminate in our annual High School Sex Squad Festival, where we invite each of our partner school Squads to UCLA for a day of celebration, activism, and strategy. With this movement's roots in Los Angeles, Sex(-Ed) Squads have now branched into colleges and universities in the United States South, including Duke University, North Carolina Central University, UNC Durham, and UNC Asheville. Similar to their UCLA peers, students in these Squads use urgent sexual health topics in their communities as the basis for creating work, culminating in the creation of educational, entertaining videos to be shared with local high schools in their areas.
The movement continues to grow and expand as more students, educators, and community partners become activated by the Sex Squad model. To learn more about our approach, check out our Start Your Own Sex Squad guide.
Our collective action is guided by these values emphasizing the transformative power of art, humor, openness, collaboration, and inclusivity. Accordingly, we invite you all to channel your inner artivist to embody these principles, as well as add your own, to make the world a safer and sexier place.
AMP! (Arts-based, Multiple-component, Peer-education) is a creative approach to adolescent sexual health education using inclusive and affirming theatrical performances and workshops related to practicing safe(r) sex and healthy relationships, overcoming bullying, and affirming the infinite variations in human sexual identity. The program in Los Angeles is a collaboration between the UCLA Art & Global Health Center and the HIV/AIDS Prevention Unit of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), and has grown to include adaptations in the Southern United States, with the University of North Carolina, Duke University, North Carolina Central University, as well as internationally in Johannesburg, South Africa.
AMP! in Los Angeles is designed in a menu format, composed of multiple educative elements, each of which presents information in a different way: moving through movement, audio, and visual modalities. AMP! supplements and supports formal sexual health education in schools by providing:
Participating schools may pick several specific components, or adopt the complete framework, depending on preference and resource availability.
AMP! Evaluation & Research Studies can be found at artglobalhealth.org/research.
We plan to expand AMP! further through digital media. A study conducted in 2012-2013 demonstrated that a virtual version of AMP! was as effective as the live version. Inspired by these promising results, this website aims to compile all of our educational materials (videos and allied lesson plans) for health educators around the country to utilize in their classrooms. Our aim is to ensure these materials support pre-existing high school sexual health education, increasing student engagement, fun, and memorability. Ultimately, we aim to develop a comprehensive HIV and STI prevention model that can be adapted and used in high schools and universities around the world.
For more information regarding the efficacy of our arts-based education component, please see our research linked here. And of course, please contact us with any questions regarding these materials and their implementation into new classrooms.