Implicated in contributing to the problems youth today face in trying to claim an education, an informed active participation in the social order, dominant discourses of desire in education foreclose formal, critical analysis of social structures that construct, police, entreat, and deny desire. Looking at the ways in which desire is encoded in sex education curricula and the ways in which students find spaces--outside the formal curriculum--to collectively and critically decode it, illuminates desire as a space where the agency of subjects of desire takes shape. This essay puts federally funded discourses of desire in education in conversation with the counterdiscourses produced in student created, alternative spaces by examining recent research on sexuality education and sharing aspects of ethnographic research on Gay Straight Alliances (GSAs). The first part of this essay engages critique of educational policy and practice of sex education that deny female and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ) sexual subjectivities and frame desire as individual, dangerous, and in need of repression. Drawing on the work of Michelle Fine, Cris Mayo, and Lynda Measor, Jennifer Logue illustrates how the policies surrounding the implementation of sex education aimed at producing responsible democratic citizens threaten the very principles upon which they are supposedly based. In the second part of the essay, she shares aspects of ethnographic research on GSAs that focuses on how youth challenge the institutional barriers to their recognition, helping to situate the policies/practices of sex education in the cultural context that is overlooked. By way of conclusion, she calls for a more finely developed phenomenology of desire to inform educational theory and practice aimed at achieving social justice.