Written By: Aditya Sharma
This article may contain spoilers.
Growing up as a gay kid in the Bay Area, Alex Liu was fighting to understand his sexual identity. “Until I was 18 I was deathly afraid, so terrified of this part of myself that I did not understand. I don’t want anyone else to have to experience that,” he told me. It wasn’t until he was a student at UC Berkeley and he met his soon-to-be producing partner Leonardo Neri that he started to ask why he wasn’t better equipped to process and interpret his own sexuality.
“In college we were so baffled by why it took us until our 20s until we got something that could be considerd good sex ed, and by good I mean honest, truthful, medically acturrate. Not even getting into the idea of how you process your sexuality and incorporate it into a healthy lifestyle,” Liu said. That internal conflict became the impetus for Liu and Neri’s documentary “A Sexplanation,” in which Liu uses his own life as a vehicle to unpack the layers of contemporary ideas of sexual identity and make a call to action for comprehensive sex education.
I had the chance to speak with Liu and Neri about the relationship between sex and media, sex education in the AAPI community, and their discoveries traveling the country on a quest to understand sex.
To understand the ways we educate ourselves and each other about sex, we need to understand the mediums by which we consume it. For many, the thing that comes to mind immediately when you think of depictions of sex is pornography. And while the film offers a nuanced discussion of porn, Liu also makes a point to emphasize that it’s not just porn that plays a role in shaping our understanding of sex, for good or for ill.
One of the experts featured in the film is Stanford professor Lisa Medoff, who “… had this great quote we had to cut from the film but she basically said ‘If you think porn is problematic, what do you think about romantic comedies?’ Or Disney movies or whatever it is, that puts all this emphasis on what a ‘good’ sexual relationship looks like,” said Liu. “I think it’s fun to watch Bridgerton and see a stylized version of sex, but it’s not real life. There are many, many, ways to be sexual and many ways that it fits and is healthy.”
That being the case, in “A Sexplanation,” Liu and Neri make a point of eliminating the aesthetic space built around depictions of sex in popular media. One clear example of this is a conversation Liu has with his parents about his own sexual education as a kid and their relationship to sex as older adults. Admittedly, the conversation is initially a little hard to watch. Especially if you’re a child of immigrants, Asian or otherwise, it’s impossible to resist the urge to imagine a discussion like this with your own parents. As the conversation continues though, that feeling quickly fades, and I found myself surprised at the level of openness Liu and his parents brought to the dialogue.
“It was important to us to show in the film that, even though I might have in many ways stereotypical Asian parents, that you can have these conversations, that they are possible in these types of families,” Liu said. That is what makes the exchange particularly impactful: the fact that it defies convention. It is a demonstration that misunderstanding and miscommunication does not have to be the standard between immigrant parents and their children. Understandably, a lot of the immigrant stories we hear are just about the challenges, but “A Sexplanation” provides a necessary counterexample, showcasing what can happen in a family with strong communication.
“I think we have to give our parents credit. Hopefully they are willing to meet you where you’re at. And under the premise of wanting to have a human connection with them, ultimately the conversations we were having were about strengthening those bonds,” Neri said. Liu’s conversation with his parents was more than just a way to broach a touchy subject, it was also a way for two generations, and in some ways two different cultures, to meet and understand each other’s differences.
That idea of using sex as a means to find mutual understanding is one that carries throughout the film. Being from the Bay Area and educated in New York, Liu and Neri’s experience of sex as part of a community is very unique. That is why in “A Sexplanation” Liu meets with people from across the political spectrum to talk about sex and sex education.
One of the most telling interviews in the film is one with a Jesuit priest. Going into it, the audience is primed to expect a hostile exchange, particularly because Liu, as a gay man, was openly critical of the church and the role it played in his life. Much like his conversation with his parents, however, it quickly becomes clear that the hostility we’re trained to expect is broken down if it was ever there at all. “If you think of it as us versus them, that’s not a great way to start a conversation. But if you frame [it] as ‘I’m just interested in hearing what you think about sex and I’ll tell you what I think and we’ll hear each other out,’ I think you’ll be surprised that we can agree to disagree and have a constructive conversation,” said Liu.
“A Sexplanation” made its New York City premiere at the 44th Asian American International Film Festival.