COLUMN ONE : Opening the Door to Gay Studies : Programs at San Francisco State and other campuses seek to recognize the role of homosexuals in history and society. Skeptics fear politics may be overshadowing scholarly merit.

How things have changed for John DeCecco.

Thirty years ago, the San Francisco State psychology professor concocted a story to conceal his homosexuality, saying he was secretly dating a black woman colleague. DeCecco, who is white, told his bosses that the couple did not want their families to know about the interracial romance. In fact, the woman was a lesbian friend.

“I chickened out. I lied,” said DeCecco, looking back with both bemusement and anger at those pre-liberation days, when campus discussions of homosexuality were usually held behind closed doors. “The suspicion and the cloud were there, and I just decided the politics was a dangerous business for me.”

Now 68 and nearing retirement, DeCecco is savoring what he considers a victory over homophobia in American academia. This fall, San Francisco State will be the nation’s first four-year university to offer a formal academic program of courses on gay, lesbian and bisexual culture. And DeCecco will lead it.

Students will be able to earn an interdisciplinary minor by taking at least eight of 22 courses including “Lesbian Literature,” “Homosexuality on Film,” and “Research on Sexual Identity.” DeCecco hopes to see a full major one day, serving as a model for campuses nationwide.

To organizers and students, the program at San Francisco State and one founded in 1990 at the two-year City College of San Francisco recognize that homosexuals’ accomplishments, history and problems merit scholarly attention.

The classes are being taught at a time of unprecedented public discussion about homosexuals’ role in American society and as gay and lesbian activism is increasing on college campuses.

Over the past five years, more than 45 U.S. colleges and universities have started to offer at least one course on the homosexual experience, usually in literature, sociology, psychology or history departments, according to the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. Activists are clamoring for more such classes at other campuses, from Yale University to UC Berkeley.

Whether or not this proves to be the first wave of an emerging discipline nationwide, the classes raise fundamental questions about how minority perspectives should be reflected in higher education.

Like ethnic studies and women’s studies programs, gay-oriented classes rankle traditionalists who believe that academia is being politicized and Balkanized. Witness the recent dispute over UCLA’s proposed Chicano studies program and the tempers raised in 1988 when Stanford University added works by minority and women writers to readings in required Western civilization classes.

DeCecco, however, contends that the courses have legitimacy, not only for political reasons. “Some of my colleagues believe we are an oppressed group of people and should have our place in the curricular sun,” he said. “My feeling is we should have our place in the curricular sun because we have something to say. Because we know a whole aspect of life and from that aspect we can examine institutions that would otherwise go unexamined.”

DeCecco’s appearance as a friendly, scholarly senior citizen might contradict some conservatives’ image of a radical activist planning to conquer the academic mainland from the often fogbound university near the Pacific’s shore. Still, some would be shocked by DeCecco’s course on “Variations in Human Sexuality,” a popular class he has taught for 12 years that will be an elective in the new program.

In an auditorium packed with about 600 students, DeCecco discusses all sorts of erotic practices, heterosexual and otherwise. Guest lecturers this semester included the owner of a nudist resort, a porn actress and a male couple who demonstrated sadomasochistic whipping on stage. Students are free to leave the room if things upset them too much, and a few sometimes do.

Less dramatic but no less important, the program’s faculty members say, are other courses planned for the new minor at San Francisco State, a mainly commuter public school of 25,572 students.

An English course, “Gay Love in Literature,” will study the writings of Walt Whitman, E. M. Forster, Christopher Isherwood, James Baldwin and David Leavitt. “Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual History” will survey the 19th and 20th centuries, including the sodomy trial of Oscar Wilde, Nazi persecution, homosexuals’ status in the military and early gay rights movements. “Homophobia and Coming Out” will focus on personal and professional issues such as legal recognition for lesbian couples and how the AIDS crisis has increased sympathy for and fear of gay men.

The death toll from AIDS on campuses and off has contributed to the increase in gay studies courses. “I think everyone is a lot more serious about our culture with mortality hanging over our heads,” said English professor Jack Collins, who chairs the program at City College in San Francisco. A colleague who died of AIDS left $50,000 to that program, mainly to fund scholarships for gays and lesbians.

Most gay studies courses are in liberal coastal cities. City University of New York began a gay and lesbian research center for graduate students in 1991. UC Santa Cruz has offered a cluster of undergraduate courses for two years. Collins predicts that such courses will be copied more widely only after battles against prejudice and rigid academic boundaries.

Even at a liberal campus such as his, he said, “a sizable minority of instructors does not perceive our program as academically legitimate.”

Gay studies advocates believe that sexuality fundamentally affects the way literature is written, art produced, history analyzed, science investigated. But critics question whether the differences are enough to merit separate scholarship. They portray the courses as group consciousness-raising.

DeCecco encountered little open resistance last December when San Francisco State’s Faculty Senate approved the new minor. A few professors questioned whether the campus should found a program during a period of budget cutbacks.

However, Stewart Creighton Miller, professor emeritus in social science, contends that many faculty members were afraid to challenge the program because they did not want to be labeled politically incorrect. “If you criticize it, you are called homophobic. So people don’t speak out,” said Miller, who is active in the California Assn. of Scholars, a group of scholars seeking to preserve what they consider traditional academic values.

Although Miller said he respects people involved in the program, he said he fears that the classes may “become politicized and that more radical people will come in who don’t care about traditional scholarship.”

The ultraconservative monthly magazine Heterodoxy, which mercilessly attacks any hint of political correctness, last year ran a cover story about gay studies programs. The otherwise sober article was accompanied by a cartoon of Karl Marx wearing women’s underwear and high heels and carrying a whip. The headline shouted, “Queer Studies,” a title that many young gay and lesbian activists proudly embrace for the classes because it so directly confronts past slurs.

“It seems to me that we’re on a slippery slope in creating academic bodies and disciplines based on politics of resentment, politics of grievance,” said Heterodoxy’s co-editor Peter Collier in a recent telephone interview.

That portrayal of gay and lesbian studies infuriates Jonathan Katz, an art historian at City College in San Francisco and one of the founders of Queer Nation, the radical gay activist group. “Yes, my scholarship is politically invested. Of course, all scholarship is politically invested. It’s just that scholarship that in no way challenges the status quo finds its political charge neutralized by being reflective of dominant culture, whereas my political investment is visible,” Katz said during a break at the school’s cafeteria.

His classes investigate the effects of sexuality on art, literature and style. In one recent lecture, he showed works of 19th-Century gay Germans who photographed Sicilian boys in poses that copied straight prototypes of Oriental harem women. Katz also talked about lesbian artists trying to rebel against the male-dominated art Establishment in New York.

Among the six women and three men in the classroom was Gina Marie Hakiello, a lesbian who is vice president of the community college’s student council. She said she plans to transfer to San Francisco State and take courses in the new minor.

“When I walk into this classroom, I feel a kind of reprieve from my other classes,” said Hakiello, 30. “Most, if not all, of the students in this class are gay, lesbians or bisexuals. I can relate to them a little better.”

Sean Higgins, one of DeCecco’s students at San Francisco State, wants to take more gay studies courses because “I’m gay and I want to know all there is to know about gays, lesbians and bisexuals. When I grew up, I didn’t know anybody who was gay.” A native of Oroville in Northern California, the 23-year-old junior predicts that the program will mold leaders the way ethnic studies did for some minorities. “Why not have something for us?” he asked.

Using that point, skeptics argue against the classes. Curricula should not be designed for minority group solidarity, they contend. Moreover, some heterosexuals feel awkward in the classes.

By its nature, gay studies entail some “consciousness-raising,” said Jim Brogan, who teaches a gay-oriented literature course at San Francisco State. “I would hope there is always a feeling that there is a safe place for students who aren’t quite sure, to check out others, to come out, to come out a little more, to have friends they can trust, a teacher they can trust.” But he stressed that the novels and poems will always be the centerpieces in his classes

Still, some activists fear that a university setting tames gay studies, divorcing it from real life. Infighting over that issue apparently scuttled plans to hold the fifth-annual national Lesbian, Bisexual and Gay Studies Conference this year in San Francisco. Previous conferences at Harvard and Rutgers universities attracted more than 800 scholars and activists; a revived gathering is expected to be held next year at the University of Iowa.

In fact, gay studies arose in institutes and associations that originally were shunned by universities.

For example, the ONE Institute of Homophile Studies, which occupies a mansion in the Hancock Park section of Los Angeles, has offered lectures, forums and classes since 1956. Among its faculty has been Evelyn Hooker, the former UCLA psychologist whose research led to the removal of homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Assn.’s list of mental illnesses in 1974. The ONE Institute has awarded 300 or so graduate degrees over the past decade, said W. Dorr Legg, one of its leaders.

Last fall, the Institute of Gay and Lesbian Education was founded in West Hollywood. The night school uses borrowed space and has 110 students in 11 classes on literature, psychology, biology, cinema and ethics. “Our general aim is to make gay and lesbians better ambassadors for their community,” said co-founder Simon LeVay, the neuroscientist who gained international attention for suggesting biological links to homosexuality.

Clearly, though, many gay and lesbian activists want their work to be inside traditional universities, partly to reach a wider audience.

Said Nancy Stoller, who has taught lesbian- and gay-oriented classes at UC Santa Cruz: “We are trying to get people to understand that we don’t live in a series of boxes in our society and that California is a place where many cultures and lifestyles come together. Studying about that is a way to get ready for the 21st Century.”

Martin Duberman, director of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the City University of New York, recalled that he faced hostility when he proposed such a graduate program in 1976. He finally succeeded two years ago.

“What happened in between is what happened to the country,” said Duberman, a historian who has written extensively about the gay liberation movement. “There has been an enormous increase in understanding and in visibility of gay and lesbian life.”

Now Duberman receives frequent inquiries from professors at other schools who want to set up lesbian and gay courses. At San Francisco State, DeCecco reports similar interest, an astonishing change from the time when he felt he had to stay in the closet to receive his tenured professorship.

“Knowledge today can be pursued from any perspective,” said DeCecco, wearing a satisfied smile. “It can be pursued from an ethnic perspective, from a sexual perspective, from a business perspective. All perspectives, it seems to me, ought to have an equal chance.”

Gay Studies

Here are some of the courses listed in the new bisexual, lesbian and gay studies program at San Francisco State University.

* Introduction to Bisexual, Lesbian and Gay Studies: Investigates the history of same-sex relations. Among the topics covered are the gay liberation movement, the experiences of older homosexuals, legal rights, and psychological aspects of gay and lesbian lives.

* Lesbian Literature: Covers works by feminists “who are oppressed not only by sexism and heterosexism, but also by . . . race, anti-Semitism, being working-class, being older or with disabilities.” Among the authors are Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich and Merle Woo.

* Research on Sexual Identity: Examines the anthropological, historical, psychological, sociological and, to some degree, the biological influences of sex and sexual identity. Topics include hormones and human behavior, domestic life in the 19th Century and changes in preferred sexual activity.

* Homosexuality on Film: Deals with lesbian and gay gender stereotypes and ethnicity, showing how censorship, the marketplace, politics, religion and public pressure have shaped film.

* Human Sexuality: Examines functions of the genital system, the physiology of sexual response, lovemaking, birth control, concepts of love and mortality, sexually transmitted diseases and other topics.

* AIDS--Contemporary Health Crisis: Studies AIDS from a variety of perspectives.