One Queer Man’s Fun, Insightful Journey To Find True Sexual Freedom

A Sexplanation is just your typical queer, Asian American, comedic sex education documentary about the universal search for love, connection, and family acceptance. 

To right the wrongs of his all-American sex education, 36-year-old health reporter Alex Liu goes on a quest to uncover naked truths and hard facts—no matter how awkward it gets.

From neuroscience labs to church pews, A Sexplanation features provocative conversations with psychologists, sex researchers, a Jesuit priest, and several generations of Alex’s own family. With humor and grit, Alex takes audiences on a playful, heartfelt journey from a shame-filled past to a happier, healthier, sexier future

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Like so many American children of the ’90s, Alex’s introduction to sex was through the internet. His formal schooling laced sex education with fear, shocking him with videos of childbirth and all-too-graphic images of untreated sexually transmitted infections. Because he knew early on that he was gay, these scare tactics worked. 

As a young man, Alex was convinced that sex would destroy him. To fill in what he didn’t know about sex, he secretly navigated gay porn sites. This secret led Alex down a path of guilt and isolation, eventually leading him to suicidal thoughts.

Now in his 30s and out of the closet, Alex has turned his fear and loathing into something positive and humorous. The documentary, A Sexplanation, seeks to turn a personal pursuit of shame-free pleasure into a call for comprehensive sex education for everyone. And surprisingly, he discovers it’s never too late to have “The Talk”—especially with the family he’s kept at a distance.

Alex hopes his documentary will help him—and everyone—embrace sex and pleasure, free from other’s political, religious, and social agendas, and recognize the need for shame-free, comprehensive sex education. “By nature, to be a human being is to be a sexual being,” says Alex. “It’s unavoidable. And that’s beautiful.”

Directed by Alex Liu, A Sexplanation is written by Leonardo Neri and Alex Liu, produced by Steven Flynn, and edited by Brian Emerick and Alex Liu. Brian Emerick serves as Cinematographer.

Screened at 34 film festivals on four continents, nine countries, and 19 states, the film currently has a 100% on Rotten Tomatoes and has won nine festival awards. LGBTQ film festival screenings and awards include Frameline, Inside Out LGBTQ (Audience Award Documentary Feature), MIX COPENHAGEN, AGLIFF/Prism, Honolulu Rainbow (Best Documentary Feature), Queer Screen (Sydney), Seattle Queer, Out on Film (Atlanta), Reel Q Pittsburgh International LGBT Festival (Audience Award Documentary Feature), qFLIX (Philadelphia), ImageOut Rochester LGBT, and Roze Filmdagen (Amsterdam).

Gaynrd spoke to Liu.

With the right talking about gay people being pedophiles and using words like “grooming” so freely, can you explain how getting a sexual education young will empower kids? Proper sex education at an early age makes children more abuse-resistant. How do we know this? Researchers like Meg Hickling interviewed child abusers in prison and asked how they chose their victims: “They look for the children who don’t know anything because they are the ones who are easy to manipulate and easy to silence.” The research is clear: One of the most powerful tools we have to prevent abuse is age-appropriate, comprehensive sex education. Why? Because if children feel comfortable talking to trusted adults in their lives about their bodies and boundaries, abusers have nowhere to hide. I think we can all agree that as society we want to do as much as possible to prevent children from abuse. The idea that anyone would disagree is so disturbing and cynical. But for some reason the right is convinced that keeping information from kids—keeping them ignorant—is somehow the best way to protect them. For no other topic would we say this is the best tactic.

Do you see a connection between the dearth of sex ed in public schools and the move to repeal Roe V Wade? I do see the connection of comprehensive sex education and fewer abortions. The more educated someone is—the better able they are to make the informed choices to live the life they want to lead. If anti-abortion activists really cared about reducing abortions—they would support comprehensive sex education, full stop.

Where do you think the motive for not wanting sex ed comes from? There’s a lot of fear and ignorance in the US when it comes to sex and sexuality. Our Puritan anti-pleasure heritage still runs deep. But it’s a vicious cycle: our grandparents never got good sex education and our parents never gets good sex education and so we don’t get a good sex education. The sexual shame passes on from generation to generation. So I actually have a lot of empathy for parents who are scared of sex ed being taught in schools—they don’t know what they don’t know—and that makes them easy to scare.

How effective is your message in this climate? If there’s one thing liberals get wrong in the messaging around sex education it’s to ignore parental rights. For better or worse parents hold a lot of political power in this nation so any message or any framing of the sex education debate has to accommodate their fears. There’s a lot of shame and ignorance when it comes to comprehensive sex education in a way I didn’t quite anticipate when making the movie. So much of our film’s message is named squarely at parents. It helped me understand that it’s not necessary to teach your kid all the things about sex—that’s impossible. But you’re really helping parents and children to have the very difficult nuanced conversations they need to have around sex and sexuality. None of us have a good model about how these talks are supposed to go. We all need help in this matter, so the message I would lead with when it comes to good comprehensive sex education in our schools, it’s a partnership between educators and parents to help families have the conversations they need and instill the values they want to around sex.

A Sexplanation comes to TVOD on June 7, 2022.