The New York Times promoted a leftist sex education activist who founded a “beginner’s sex store” and has authored explicit books intended for a child audience.

The Times has promoted Sex is a Funny Word author Corey Silverberg and his work on multiple occasions, most notably in a June 2022 article titled The Books About Sex That Every Family Should Read.

The article, written by literary critic Elaine Blair, first discusses a book titled It’s So Amazing! A Book About Eggs, Sperm, Birth, Babies, and Families, which was not written by Silverberg and was at one time considered “the standard-bearer of liberal sex education for younger school-age children.”

Blair took issue with the book’s focus on heterosexual couples, remarking that, though gay couples were also included, “All the different kinds of couples did fun things together with their clothes on, but only the man and woman in the previous chapter got to take their clothes off.” 

The article, which is part a review of Sex is a Funny Word and part a biography of Silverberg, explains that the author started working at a sex shop at age 17. “Silverberg’s father was a sex therapist, and the job he found for his kid was working as a clerk at Lovecraft, the first sex-toy store in North America owned by women,” the article explains. 

“Silverberg is perfectly happy to be going against the liberal pedagogical tendency toward showing kids more,” the article claims. But the book, which is intended for young children, does include mature content, including an illustration accompanying a section called “Touching Yourself.”

In fact, the article omits a number of pertinent facts about both the author and his work, all of which contradict the presentation of Silverberg’s books as innocent and age-appropriate, if unique, material. 

The book features a number of other troubling scenes, such as children peeking over a fence into a nudist colony. There are also graphic depictions of genitalia. 

The article also does not discuss, for example, the author’s role in founding what was referred to as a “beginner’s sex store.” The store not only sells Silverberg’s books, it also has a concerning history.

The Toronto Star noted that the store had intended to “hold an off-site sex-education workshop for parents of children aged 7 to 12, one that will focus on more than reproduction.” It also quoted Silverberg as saying, “Our overall focus is pleasure-based rather than fear-based.” The store hosted several workshops, including those that featured naked adults performing sex acts on each other. 

The author is also directly involved in an organization called Ante Up that seeks to implement leftist curriculum in American schools so that teachers can unlearn “the white supremacist abelist heteropatriarchial ways of writing and educating others.”

The radicalism of the organization is unmistakable. One team member seeks to “utilize multi-disciplinary approaches to discussing Pleasure Activism as a tool for Black Sexual Liberation. Her goal is to infiltrate multi-oppressive systems to secure safe spaces for Black women to unpack intergenerational trauma,” according to her biography on the site.

A different New York Times article from May also highlighted the author’s book You Know, Sex. The review, titled Two Graphic-Style Guidebooks to Calm Kids’ Social Butterflies, written by Rachel Brian, calls the book’s characters “relatable and beautiful while openly challenging social constructs about conventional beauty.”

Brian also notes that the illustrator takes on “our culture of racism, colorism, ableism, body shaming and more, with empowering results.”

She even praises the book, saying “here is a kids’ book that discusses things like nonbinary and trans identities, variously shaped clitorises and penises, H.I.V. stigma, sexual pleasure, miscarriage, asexual feelings and abortion”

The author and his explicit book for children have been promoted by more than just the New York Times, however. 

Silverberg also joined NPR for an interview to discuss his work and his view for sex education where the author claimed, “Humans have come up with this idea of male and female as categories. And we just say very quickly, there’s more than those two categories.”

The author’s explicit books for children have also been promoted by the Association of Children’s Librarians of Northern California and the Southern Poverty Law Center, which advertised the book in their leftist “Learning for Justice” curriculum.

Spencer Lindquist is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SpencerLndqst and reach out at slindquist@breitbart.com.