The AP agreed to use teenagers’ first or middle names for this article because of a common concern they expressed about backlash at school, at home and on social media for speaking about their peers’ sex lives and LGBTQ+ relations.

“There’s probably a lot of teenagers who are like, ‘No, I’ve never had sexual intercourse, but I’ve had other kinds of sex.’” “Honestly, that question is a little laughable,” says Kay, 18, who identifies as queer and attends a public high school near Lansing, Michigan. And while the vocabulary around sex is shifting, the main question on the CDC survey has been worded the same way since the government agency began its biannual study in 1991: Have you “ever had sexual intercourse?” “I have a feeling a lot more people are quote unquote having sex - just not necessarily between a man and a woman.”įor teens today, the conversation about sexuality is moving from a binary situation to a spectrum and so are the kinds of sex people are having. There are also “sneaky links” - when you hook up in secret and don’t tell your friends.

On her campus, short-term hookups - known as “situationships” - are typically low commitment and high risk from both health and emotional perspectives. She thought about it for 20 seconds, then listed a range of possibilities for heterosexual sex, oral sex and relations between same-sex or LGBTQ partners.