While “Sex Week” was finishing its final events, a protest in its honor was also being conducted.
Called “March In, Sit Out,” the march and protest were held to condemn the way Chancellor Jimmy Cheek and President Joe DiPietro have handled the funding of “Sex Week.” Likewise, the canceling of UT Memphis’ “Saving Ourselves” symposium was also part of the protest’s motivation. “Saving Ourselves” focused on HIV/STI in the African-American LGBTQ community.
Pulling resources from the event has since been declared “a mistake” by the UT Health Science Center, who first rescinded the invitation to host the symposium.
The protest was coordinated by Kayla Frye, freshman in global studies. What started out as shock upon hearing of “Sex Week’s” defunding only festered during Spring Break. It then transformed into action once she heard about other sexual health events getting defunded.
“I started asking around, ‘Who would want to do a small protest?'” Frye recalled, “and then, well, I’ll make a (Facebook) page about it. We’ll be really dramatic about it. … It was supposed to be about 30 to 40 people.”
Word spread on the Internet, and soon more than 2,000 students had been invited. A little more than 150 confirmed that they would attend, although in the end around 40 showed up.
When it appeared that so many people were going to be participating, Frye reached out to others for assistance. She soon learned that anger about “Sex Week” was not limited to UT Knoxville alone, and found support from areas such as UT Chattanooga, UT Memphis, MTSU and ETSU. Some students from UT Chattanooga even attended the protest.
Frye said that the two main goals are getting apologies and a new commitment to sex education from the UT administration.
“Ideally,” Frye said, “we’d want them to come out with a public apology to the Red Door Foundation (coordinators of the “Saving Ourselves” event) … to the ‘Sex Week’ organizers … and we want them to come out with a renewed and a very strong and very active commitment to bringing more sex education and sexual health events to campus.
Starting at 4 p.m. on Friday, the protest consisted of a march from the Alumni Memorial Building Amphitheater and then going from Volunteer Boulevard to Cumberland Avenue, to Melrose Place and Circle Park. After the march, the protesters returned to the amphitheater for speeches and statements from the individual protesters.
Chants and protest signs were present throughout the march, including signs saying, “Chancellor Cheek, pulling out doesn’t work,” and “Stacey Campfield: Public (education) Enemy No. 1.”
One of the protesters was a UT alumna, Tory Mills. She said that she joined the protest to show support in promoting sexual education on campus.
“I think that for so long around the campus you see these hush-hush conversations about sex and a lot of people have misinformation,” Mills said. “So the ability to have open conversations and realize that this is about pubic health and not just about intercourse … there’s a lot more to it.”
And for Frye, even though the protest came to an end, the dialogue about sexual health at the university is not over. She hopes that more discussions with the administration will continue so that what happened to “Sex Week” won’t happen again in the future.
“We don’t want them back down on this and think just because the march is over, ‘Sex Week’ is over, it’s not an issue anymore,” Frye said. “Because this happened once, maybe we don’t get ‘Sex Week’ next year. … Maybe we don’t get any sex education events because it’s too controversial.”
