potrero view
Photo by Kerry Fleisher.

Photo by Kerry Fleisher.

July 2008

Retired Sex Professor Makes Hill Home

By Kerry Fleisher

Perched in his lounge chair at his Potrero Hill condominium on Carolina Street, John De Cecco dissects the 2008 presidential election with the acumen of a professor in his prime.  “The disadvantage of gay politics is that it functions on categories,” intones the retired 83 year old in a sonorous voice that once mesmerized classes of up to 800 students.  “Obama, of course, transcends categories.  I think that’s why young people are attracted to his campaign.”

De Cecco has taken to retirement easily since he left his teaching post at San Francisco State University in 2003.  That’s in part because the class he taught for 53 years – Variations in Human Sexuality – dealt with a media-saturated subject matter:  human sexuality.  

The Eliot Spitzer scandal played to a predictable tune of wife-stands-besides-fallen-husband, according to De Cecco.  “Women are supposed to support the institution at all costs,” he mused.  On the mention of Hillary Clinton, De Cecco probes her sexuality with a twinkle in his eye.  “Her record as a straight person is not pure,” he chuckled, declining to name his sources.

De Cecco has made a profession out of examining sexual dichotomies.  In his wildly popular Variations in Human Sexuality class, he prompted his students to consider cheating as an “expansion of sexual options.”  Now, after an illustrious career pioneering the foundations of queer theory, he cites the case of former New Jersey Governor James McGreevey – who was pilloried for having a ménages a trois with his wife and former male aide – as an example of the press imperative to label individuals “gay” or “straight.”

A self-professed good listener, De Cecco has conducted thousands of sexual surveys and interviews, and penned enough meditations on sexuality to fill an anthology called The John Paul De Cecco Papers.  And after more than a half-century in the field, he has come to view the LGBTIQQ nomenclature – lesbian gay bisexual transgender intersex queer questioning – as a “clumsy” attempt to categorize what can’t be pinned down in a digestible acronym.  

In spite of his prodigious teaching record, De Cecco is anything but didactic on the subject of sex. “He didn’t shut people down…he tried to engage them,” said former student Terence Kissack, who’s now the executive director of San Francisco’s Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender Historical Society.  “He’s an extraordinarily analytic, tolerant and generous person…he treated the subject with great respect.”

Sex, in the personal realm, remained elusive and shrouded in mystique to De Cecco until he was 28 years old, when he had his first fully realized sexual experience.  He’d spent his undergraduate years at Allegheny College and graduate years at the University of Pennsylvania utterly bereft of sexual intercourse, closeted and lonely.  After stints teaching history and educational psychology in Michigan, he packed up and shipped off to San Francisco, where he experienced a sexual awakening and eventually went into four years of psychotherapy.

 In 1973, De Cecco came out of the closet in a campus publication, an unprecedented act of self-disclosure for a San Francisco State professor.  For De Cecco, coming out was a no-brainer.  “It was preposterous to be hiding something personally important and publicly too.”  Soon he became faculty advisor to the Gay Students Coalition, and later he helped found Delta Lambda Phi, the university’s first gay fraternity.  

He never sparked the same acts of self-disclosure amongst other closeted professors that he did with his students.  In the 1970s and 80s, many closeted colleagues disassociated themselves from him, fearing stigma by proxy.  Fortunately for De Cecco, the fact that many of his colleagues didn’t join him in his openness didn’t affect his love life.  “It may be too boring for two professors to get together,” he announced, a laugh rippling through his small frame.   

Meanwhile, his closeted students looked up to him as a mentor.  “I was probably the first teacher they ever talked to about it [being gay].”  For ethical reasons De Cecco never engaged in sexual contact with a student, in part because he felt students would feel compromised, trapped in an unfair power differential.  That’s not to say he wasn’t tempted.  “In a way I was encouraging the students to be promiscuous,” said De Cecco, reflecting on the course curriculum.  “It didn’t take a lot.”

From the 1970s forward De Cecco became a leading queer theorist and activist, founding the Center for Homosexual Education Evaluation Research (CHEER) at San Francisco State and working with million dollar grants.  He was friends with politician Harvey Milk (“he very much New York”) and though he never met philosopher Michel Foucault, he talks of him like brethren: “Oh, he was into leather, and definitely visited bars on Folsom street.”  On sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, De Cecco muses that “he was a pioneer, and yet, I think he tried to quantify what can’t be quantified.”

Above all, De Cecco wanted his students to break from traditional thinking and question the vast panorama of sexual expression.  It was commonplace for De Cecco’s students to study sadomasochism in psychological terms and frame bestiality into the historical context of agricultural societies.  He sparked conversations on sexual reassignment surgery before transexuality was a leading topic amongst queer activists.

Outside the classroom, De Cecco has written extensively on aging lesbians, sexual discrimination and male-to-male assault in prison.  The Journal of Homosexuality, which he founded in 1977 and edits arduously to this day (though some submissions after 30 years fielding them, he admits, are “quite boring”) includes such essays as  “Sadomasochism: Powerful Pleasures,” “Drag King Anthology,” and “Fag Church: Men Who Integrate Gay and Christian Identities.”

When De Cecco first moved to San Francisco in 1960, the Castro neighborhood was undergoing a transition from working-class culture to a gay nightclub scene.  In later years, when the neighborhood was shifting toward an overt gay identity and gay men were starting to invest in homes around Castro Street, the AIDS epidemic hit.  “It was a very sad thing to see the area depopulate,” said De Cecco.  

He knew a gay doctor that tended to the enormous influx of AIDS victims in the early 1980s.  “There was a need for an openly gay doctor,” he said.  “It’s an irony he died of the very thing he was warning against.”  De Cecco incorporated debates about AIDS into his class, enlisting a nude couple to perform a play about AIDS.  When this sparked controversy amongst his colleagues, he charged ahead, recalling he “was supposed to have complete academic freedom.”  

De Cecco remembers how underground leather bars, where sadomasochism was common practice, proliferated South-of-Market in the 1960s and 70s.  He knew doctors who made a living treating S&M victims, noting that their expertise in treating their patients suggested that they, too, derived pleasure from the encounter.  The sadist is also an expert in a certain sense, according to De Cecco.  “To provide service you have to be sensitive to the fantasy it’s woven into.”

After establishing his post at San Francisco State, De Cecco moved to Potrero Hill from the Haight “for the weather” and its convenient proximity to campus.  He moved into the Victorian Mews, a housing condominium complex located between 19th and 20th streets on Carolina Street, where he remains today. The condo, based on the architectural design of the London Mews in England, had a party atmosphere in his earlier years on the Hill, and there was “always a sprinkling of gay people in the neighborhood,” according to De Cecco.  De Cecco often held informal group panels on sexuality at his home on the Hill.  

The laid-back, open lifestyle in the Victorian Mews contrasts starkly with De Cecco’s repressed childhood.  He was born in Erie, Pennsylvania to strict Catholic-Italian parents, who never accepted his coming out.  He remembers his mother always holding a rosary, though she once had an affair, and sex outside of marriage was common amongst his relatives.  “Sex experiments” are how De Cecco describes the relationships between some of his aunts and uncles.

In private, De Cecco secretly lusted over the rough-and-tumble brawn that defined his blue-collar uncles and their friends.  His predilection for the stereotypically masculine image factored into his taste for men later in San Francisco.  “I was very active sexually with sailors…they were much more numerous than they are now.  It’s a sad thing they closed down the ports,” he laughs, slyly suggesting that younger generations in San Francisco are missing out.  

Between all the self-denial and self-exposure, De Cecco has learned that “living with contradictions can expand your mentality.”  And his personal struggle to uncover his own sexual identity eventually laid the foundation for his work.  “Putting all that together, [realizing he was gay], I made it a career,” he said.

 Subscribe to The Potrero View

All rights reserved. Copyright © 2006 The Potrero View.

Content on this site may not be archived, retransmitted, saved in a database, or used for any commercial purpose without the express written permission of The Potrero View or its Publishers.