In high school, Amanda Morgan’s friends called her “Mom.”

“They would give me Mother’s Day cards. ‘I feel more comfortable talking with you than I do my mom,’” she recalls them saying.

That was when she realized her superpower was making people feel safe.

Morgan, a professor-in-residence at the School of Public Health, now teaches Human Sexuality to students at UNLV. To date, she has taught more than 4,000 students in the class about their bodies, how to access services if they need them, how to say no and understanding consent, and sexual violence prevention.

“So many of them are so upset at how little they know about their bodies,” Morgan says of her students. “It’s not until they take my class that they realize that they didn’t even know the proper names for their own body parts, that they didn’t know how their hormones work, that they didn’t really understand how pregnancy happens. They didn’t really understand how to protect themselves from testicular cancer or breast cancer.

"Nobody’s taught them about this, and so they thank me because I finally empowered them to feel comfortable in their bodies.”

A triple alumna of UNLV with degrees in human services counseling and public health, Morgan talks about her journey from wanting to be a sex therapist, to teaching students about sex and relationships in a post-COVID world.

What does being a Rebel mean to you?

This is the only school that I’ve ever started at and finished at in my whole life. All of elementary school, middle school, high school, I always moved somewhere in between. That’s why UNLV is special. It’s a place where I got to start and finish something three times. I’ve grown so much as a person here.

I was actually sitting in one of these classrooms on the first floor of CEB right as I was finishing my senior capstone for counseling and one of my friends said, “Wouldn’t it be funny if you became a professor? You’d be a good professor.” It wasn’t that long into the future from there. I was not thinking about being a professor. I thought professors were 40 to 50 years old; I was 24 when I started teaching here.

When did you become interested in sex education?

I grew up in a very open-minded family. The topic of sexuality wasn’t ever something that was hidden from me, but even then I wouldn’t say it was super in my face. My parents were always very approachable. If I had questions, they were there.

When I was in high school, I started to notice my friends — as we were all growing up and having our first boyfriends and having these experiences — they had a lot of questions and they didn’t know who to talk to. I became the sex advice person when I was 15, 16 years old.

How did you find your way into public health?

I started aiming for sex therapy. I started as a psych major but it didn't align with learning how to connect with people. I found human services counseling and transferred to that. It just fit.

Human service counseling was so much more about learning how to help people. I deeply enjoy helping people, and I identify as a helper.

Toward the end of the program, I started to see what the reality of being in therapy was going to be. I was graduating in 2008 when the economy was crashing and everybody in Las Vegas was being laid off and losing their houses. I knew I would have my therapy practice formed during one of the worst times in American history, and I didn’t think I was going to last very long doing that.

Luckily one of my counseling teachers was a health educator and a sex educator. His name was Dr. Larry Ashley, and he was my biggest cheerleader. He was one of the first people that when I told him I was interested in sex, he wasn’t dismissive. He said, “Awesome. So am I; let’s talk.” He’s the reason that I ended up in public health instead of therapy.

I love public health. I love that I can still help people emotionally, but I don’t have to do it in a therapeutic sense of doing an intake and having to diagnose people. I can just hold space for people. So much of what therapy is is education. People want to know that they’re normal and that they’re okay. And I can do that as a health educator. And I do, and I love it.

How does what you teach help students understand themselves better?

A lot of these young people have grown up with explicit images as the way that they learn about bodies and sexuality. That doesn’t normalize anything. It makes them feel like they’re not enough, that their body’s too big, too small, too fat, too skinny. Very rarely do people feel seen in those places.

I joke with my students that when we’re using porn as sex education, that’s like using Fast and Furious as driver’s ed. You’re gonna have problems. 

I have a lot of students who come out of my class, and they’re like, "I know myself better, I know who I am better, I know my body better, I know what I’m okay with and what I’m not okay with, and I’m better equipped to help other people have those conversations."

How do you navigate talking about sex in a professional educational setting?

I use humor, because I think humor is a way for people to laugh shame out of their bodies. I think so many people have shame and fear that has ended up in them because of culture, society, their parents.

I use a lot of media. I use music. There are a lot of songs that relate to this topic. Those are ways that I can help access my students where they’re at. We kind of have to build from the ground up. Just because they’re adults doesn’t mean that they know everything.

But I learn, too — that’s the thing that I love. Even in a professional setting, my students share stories with me and share their experiences and I’m constantly learning. I think that’s what makes me a good educator is that I’m not just here to talk to them. I’m here to talk with them.

Can you talk about the puppets you have with you today?

I use what are called giant microbes in my class to talk about the different potential risks of sexuality. I also have ones that students have made me over the years. I have a pubic louse that was made for a puppet show they did about crabs. They’re cute and a way to make microbiology a little less terrifying.

I think people have so much stigma and fear around sexually transmitted infections, instead of understanding it’s just a pathogen, and you’re just its home for a while. There are ways that we can treat or cure these things and it’s not the end of your world. I think the cute, squishy stuffed microbes help with that. I love having the hands-on stuff because it helps different learners who like to touch and look at things.

But I also just think it expresses the diversity of biology, which is the thing I think is so important about my class. There’s not one right way to be. You be you, and find a way to take care of yourself and other people while you do that.

What have you learned from your students and has it changed the way you teach about sex?

As of August, it’ll be 15 years that I’ve been teaching sex ed at UNLV. That’s when Instagram came out. The world has changed in the way that people relate to each other, in the way that students communicate. I see students who are even more disconnected than they used to be, especially post-COVID.

There has been such a massive change in the way that people relate, but also such an increase in loneliness. I think people live in this world of the illusion of connectedness through social networks, but we also don’t just go and drink coffee and hang out with our friends as much anymore, and I see that impact on my students. We talk about how they meet and how they date, and it’s changed. 

But my students also are way more self-expressive. They are less afraid to talk about gender and sexual orientation and any of those things. They’re definitely more unfiltered in some ways.

The generation of students I have right now were in middle school and high school during COVID. So many of them didn’t get sex education that was very good. It was over Zoom. They don't have a lot of knowledge, and they have a lot of fear. They go to TikTok to get their information.

I do in the course of my class try to teach them how to at least think and analyze critically some of the stuff they engage with online. Because we do live in a world that doesn’t really encourage people to feel good about themselves. I want to change that. I want my students to leave my class feeling better about themselves.

What are the topics that students are introduced to in your class?

My course starts off with history, so understanding that sexuality is not new. It’s how we all got here. Then we go into anatomy. It’s amazing how little people know. Then we talk about sexual development, how we grow in the womb, and the diversity that that can express in.

We talk about attraction, sexual relationships and behaviors, sexuality through the lifespan, from birth to death: puberty, menopause, andropause. Talking about sexual orientation, atypical sexuality, sexually transmitted infections, sexual disorders, sex work, as well as things like sexual assault and sexual violence.

What do you do outside of work?

I am a creative person. I have been a professional musician, I play ukelele and piano and saxophone. I’m also a poet and a songwriter. I have just recently started going back to open mics. I used to host variety shows in town when I worked at the Erotic Heritage Museum. I am a performer and a producer.

What’s something people would be surprised to learn about you?

I’m a big nature person. I go out hiking almost every weekend. Nature is my church. Nature reminds me how tiny my problems are and looking at the beautiful rocks at Red Rock and realizing that beautiful things happen under pressure and time will pass and things will be OK.

I think it helps with getting through some of the obstacles and trials that life puts us through, trying to find a way to ground ourselves in the chaos of life.

Can you tell people why you always wear a flower in your hair?

I had a dear friend named Mercedes when I worked at the Erotic Heritage Museum. She was such a shiny person. She always had fake eyelashes and colorful hair and hair flowers. She gave me my first hair flower.

She had a brain aneurysm at the age of 44 very shockingly and surprisingly. I wear the hair flower to remember her, but also to remember the energy that she brought the world — that it’s OK to be a happy, sparkly, shiny thing in a world that wants us to be boring, that doesn’t want us to shine all the time.

She was such an interesting person and such a sweet friend. I like thinking about her when I put a hair flower in and bringing that beauty to the world. Now I have probably at least 50 to 60 hair flowers. I have students that will bring them to me. Always accepting hair flowers.

Learn more about Amanda Morgan by listening to her episode of the School of Public Health podcast, “So, You Want to Change the World?”