This study investigates the representations of sexuality within a unique corpus of sex education manuals for British teenagers, published between the years 1950 and 2014. It brings together a disparate set of linguistic and multimodal analyses under the aegis of Queer Linguistics, which takes as its focus the way writers and speakers orient themselves and others to social and sexual normativities. Queer Linguistics is an emerging discipline, and it is hoped that the present study will contribute to the field by demonstrating its applicability to a wide range of linguistic perspectives and approaches. The study draws upon the SexEd corpus, which comprises a unique collection of 88 sex education manuals published in Britain. It represents the only longitudinal body of texts of its type, and the only such body to be subjected to rigorous linguistic analyses.