Storying sex, as an act, belies complex work behind what appears to be simple action: telling stories about sex. In terms of its rhetorical circulation, sex seemingly knows no bounds, retaining a near-limitless velocity in the various domains of everyday life in the public and private spheres. Indeed, as Jonathan Alexander (2008) notes, “Sex and sexuality, and the complex personal and political issues surrounding them, are a powerful part of our daily lives” (p. 1). With such a vast scope, the healthy dimension of sex likewise finds commensurate import in our lives, though as two queer men, we find lacking the discourses, practices, and rhetorics that comprise sexual health specifically for queer and trans people. Specifically, we have noticed the ways highly specialized groups of people (i.e., public health experts, physicians, among other medical professionals) continue to fumble the communicative work of both preventing new HIV infections and attending to the humanity and expertise of people living with HIV. This problem of what we call the academic-public interface animates the project of Storying Sex, and at the core of our work here, we are invested in spotlighting and centralizing the valuable perspectives on work, expertise, and play of community members via storying and public-facing platforms.

That said, as community-engaged and public-oriented scholars, we have deliberated over the velocity of public-facing platforms versus the modal and formal limitations (at least to us) inherent in traditional, print-based scholarship. Simply put, not enough people have easy access to peer-reviewed scholarship (even within the academy), and the ideas and research therein receive as much velocity as, perhaps, a citation in another equally gatekept piece of scholarship. Alternatively, we run into the problem of specialized groups conducting research on so-called risky groups of people, reading each other's' work, attending to rates, and numbers, and tradition, and then perpetuating a communicative violence by flattening the complexity of queer and trans identity and lifeways (especially for Black and Latinx folks), and then repeating the same mistakes because, at the end of the day, nothing has changed. To that end, we seek disruption within the array of methods, venues, and discourses that circulate in and around the varying domains of sexual health, priming the academic-public interface as a means of circumventing the problems we just outlined.