Sex is Yours Podcast Feature
Sex Is Yours Podcast by Anne Marie Gunn
Denise Sherer Jacobson, April 29, 2026
When I was a child and growing up through puberty, no one in my family ever talked to me about sex. It was the 1950s and early 60s, and I mainly learned about sex by hearing it being talked about by non disabled kids in my high school, or by reading romance novels. In that time period, there was a lot sexual repression. There were things “nice” girls just didn’t do, or weren’t supposed to know about. As disabled children, we weren’t expected to have any kind of personal, sexual relationship or families of our own. After to going to Camp Jened and being romantically involved with a guy, I realized how little I knew about how to have an intimate relationship.
As I entered adulthood it took me a long time to figure out how to escape the narrow thinking I’d been surrounded by, and to understand my own desire and pleasure. I knew I wasn’t the only one who felt that way as a person with a disability. In my early 20s I consciously decided to have an affair. That decision coincided with the beginning of society’s sexual revolution, but that sexual revolution didn’t want to include people like me. The affair was a fiasco that landed me in the hospital with an STD, that the doctors didn’t ask me about or test me for, just assuming I had appendicitis. It was only when I had surgery for an unnecessary appendectomy that they saw the real infection and finally treated me. There were complications and I almost died, because they couldn’t ask me a simple question about my sexual history. They denied I had a sexual history until it almost killed me.
That episode became the motivation for me to not only become more knowledgeable about my own sexuality, but to educate my larger community of individuals with disabilities. In the process of my own education, I became more self aware of my own sexuality. It also helped boost my self image and self esteem.
In denying people’s sexuality, we also deny people’s humanity. I believe that the more honest and open we can be about our feelings, whether sexual or emotional, we help people with disabilities feel that they have value. When we acknowledge people are also sexual beings, we affirm that they have the same autonomy, rights, and desires as everyone else.
By writing and speaking about sexuality, I am facilitating the idea that people with disabilities not only have the right to information, care, and social recognition, but that this is a process of gaining their own empowerment and being able to see themselves as full human beings. But I don’t want to just focus on the disabled community. I want to reach out to the non-disabled world so they can have their “a-ha” moment and be more accepting of the actual diversity of all our experiences and the intersectionality of our lives.
These are all themes that I explore in my second book, about my first summer at Camp Jened as a sixteen-year-old. You can find out more about the forthcoming book and my other work at www.deniseshererjacobson.com and follow me on Instagram at @deniseshererjacobson (https://www.instagram.com/deniseshererjacobson/)