De-academizing sex

Recently, my interest in sex has turned largely, overwhelmingly prurient and my pursuit of knowledge about sex has become mostly carnal in nature. This is pretty awesome, since typically I am overly analytical and more about the thinking than the doing (in sex and other things). I’ve been feeling like - fuck, I’ve done my homework (too much of it, little overachiever that I am), its time I put those theories into practice. So, recently, my life has been chock full of humping and reflection about that humping, but without an intellectual discourse and framework to contend with. Okay, okay - those discourses are inside me, no way I can purge them. So let’s say that I’ve gained some distance from the formal expression of deconstructive discourse.

BUT.

Enter graduate school. As I stepped onto campus today, I realized - shit, this is happening. Grad school has to be a major priority.

And as I poured over the courses this evening, classes with “sexuality” or “gender” or “sexual health” kept grabbing my attention. But that’s not what I’m going to school for, so I have to restrain myself and stay the hell away from gender and sexuality. There are some marvelous queer organizations and sexual health advocacy groups on my campus, but their presence stirs a bit of panic in me.

When I was in college studying gender and sexuality and afterwards working professionally on history of sexuality projects, I was very vehement about the academicization of sex, the legitimization of sexuality studies in all forms (history, art, public health, sexology, etc). I believed - and still do - that sex is a legitimate field of study. When I first started on this path, I was adamant that the fact that I was academically interested in sex did not mean that I was a full-blown pervert, though sex was starting to revolutionize my private life as well. But, I held, one does not beget the other.

Now I’m terrified (though that seems like a pretty harsh word) that if I show even a glimmer of academic interest in sex or if hints of my extensive knowledge peek through, my cover will be blown. Intellectually I know that this is a paranoid vision of the possibilities. But yet…
Is this what being in the closet is like?