A refined eye
Gail ELIZABETH WYATT doesnât look the part.
Hooker.
With her fair complexion, silky hair and refined dress, she resembles the archetypal African American trophy wife of her generation. Indeed, her husband is an obstetrician-gynecologist, and they live in a grand home -- tennis court, swimming pool -- high above Beverly Hills. Yet even on his arm, and even when she âlooked like a lady going to churchâ in a new, emerald silk dress, she has been mistaken for a prostitute.
How could anyone see that when looking at this woman?
Race alone, she says, and her pioneering research proves it.
âI did the first study on African American female sexuality,â Wyatt says during an interview in her office at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute, where she runs the sexual health program. An associate director of the UCLA AIDS Institute, she is also a professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the medical school. The first black and female licensed psychologist in California, Wyatt, 59, earned her doctorate at UCLA, stayed for training as a sex therapist and never left.
âWhen I told my mother I wanted to become a sex therapist, she said, âHoney, canât we just tell people youâre a teacher?â â Wyatt recalls.
A scholar of sexual behavior, she studies factors that influence decisions, actions and responses, largely in relation to HIV. For most of her career, she has also investigated the consequences of slavery, rape, breeding -- the centuries when African American women couldnât say no -- and the resulting stereotypes of black females as oversexed and immoral.
Overcoming those stereotypes was the focus of her first book for a general audience, âStolen Women: Reclaiming Our Sexuality, Taking Back Our Livesâ (John Wiley & Sons, 1997), which remains in print. Her latest is âNo More Clueless Sex: Ten Secrets to a Sex Life That Works for Both of Youâ (Wiley), which she co-wrote with her husband, Dr. Lewis Wyatt.
But she needs neither books nor federally funded, peer-reviewed, scientifically defensible studies to prove how sexual stereotypes influence behavior.
Ask about that green dress, the one she wrote about in âStolen Women,â the one with the Peter Pan collar and sash tie.
âIt was made from material Lewis had brought home from Thailand just for me. I guess thatâs why I felt so special,â she says. She remembers everything about that day 25 years ago, in that hotel outside Cleveland where they stayed while attending his sisterâs wedding.
As she waited alone in the lobby, two white guys walked out of the hotel bar. One said, âShe must cost $100.â
Nothing protected Wyatt from that insult -- not her wedding band, her doctorate or her very sheltered childhood.
Middle-class upbringing
Fourth- generation college, a granddaughter of a Methodist minister, a daughter of conservative educators, Gail Smith came of age in L.A.âs newly integrated Leimert Park, with suitable friends, membership in Jack and Jill (an exclusive group for cultured, middle-class black families), a cruise to Norway, deportment classes and a second trip to Europe, all before she graduated at 16 from Dorsey High School.
Her own sex education?
Books and pamphlets given to her by her mother, at a time when most parents said nothing.
For years, she and her sister Sandra performed with their father, Ulysses âJeepâ Smith, a jazz musician and high school band leader. The Smith Sisters also sang on the â50s âMickey Mouse Clubâ television show, and recorded eight singles before rejecting a major label to finish college.
Gail followed Sandra to historically black Fisk University in Nashville at the height of the civil rights movement, pledged her motherâs elite sorority and in her junior year met Lewis Wyatt. Two months after her graduation, she married the man who for nearly four decades has been her first and only husband.
Sounds like a black âLifestyles of the Rich and Famous,â but Wyatt is as comfortable with grandes dames as she is with homeless street women.
âYou may see a small, little lady, but donât be fooled,â says Dr. Eric Bing, also a behavioral science researcher and an assistant professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Charles R. Drew University medical school near Watts. He met her in 1987 during his residency at UCLA and has since collaborated with her on research projects, journal articles and international consulting.
As her thick curriculum vitae and stacks of press clippings show, Wyatt is best known for work regarding behavior and the HIV virus. Her most prominent work in this area, a landmark longitudinal study conducted between 1994 and 2000 for the National Institute of Mental Health, closely matched diverse women with HIV to those without it to determine how the virus affects actions and responses.
âWe try to be the bridge between basic sciences and real people,â she says. So sheâs not looking for a cure for AIDS, sheâs looking at why someone who has the virus refuses to take his medicine. Or why a girl who is sexually abused is more likely as an adult to be infected.
Because federal funding sets research priorities in her field, Wyatt says, AIDS is her primary topic. But before the virus was identified, she had made a name for herself with substantial scholarship on child abuse, and by disproving sexual behavioral theories that lumped all black women together.
Back then, it didnât matter if you were rich, poor, illiterate, well-educated, rural, urban, cultured, crude, religious or a worshiper at St. Mattress. All that mattered was race. If you were a black woman, the literature said, you tended toward early intercourse, teen pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.
âWho were these people?â Wyatt asked. She didnât recognize herself or her friends in those studies.
âSheâs from a black middle-class family, and girls from that background didnât do that. They didnât sleep around like white girls or girls from the inner city,â says Hector Myers, a UCLA psychology professor who knew her in grad school. âWhat that did for Gail, from a positive standpoint,â he says, âit allowed her to step outside, and rather than judge what these women were doing, to ask tough questions about how did these women ... make these decisions.â
In her seminal 1980 study of black female sexuality, Wyatt compared black and white women of similar backgrounds and found the flaw. Her predecessors had paired a diverse group of white women -- rich, poor, educated -- with a group of poor black women, and then reported that all black women tended toward the unhealthy sexual behaviors associated with poverty. Wyatt found that similar women tended to behave similarly when making sexual decisions, a pattern that held across race, income and other characteristics.
âWhen I started to look at the experiences of these women, and then teased out the economic background, the family structure ... these [black] women were no different from anyone else,â Wyatt says. âThe saddest thing was, many of them believed these stereotypes, and the stereotypes were driving them.â
She still sees those stereotypes everywhere. In âbootyliciousâ music videos. In movies (Halle, Halle, Halle!). On television. In explicit books, like the ones by Zane, that top African American bestseller lists.
Her advisor for her masterâs thesis at Fisk, Henry Tomes, remembers a brilliant student who brought her work and her baby son to his office. Tomes, now the executive director of the American Psychological Assn.âs public interest sector, describes Wyattâs career emphasis as âcourageous.â
âMany African American psychologists shied away from sexuality as a topic of scientific professional interestâ in those days, he says in a telephone interview from his Washington, D.C., office. âIt was not necessarily a quote-unquote mainstream topic, and people who were already different just being in the field didnât necessarily want to take on a topic that might not cause them to advance.â
Husband and partner
Dr. LEWIS WYATT had concerns when his wife talked about becoming a sex therapist. She persuaded him to join her.
âWe shared the training together,â she says, âwhich made it a lot easier than coming home in the â70s with all this information totally out of context for the time, for a black woman and for a married woman.â
While he uses that expertise in his medical practice, she sees clients -- with a box of Kleenex nearby -- in her UCLA office. (Sex therapists donât watch people having sex, itâs talking therapy.) Their book, âNo More Clueless Sex,â is not a sex manual, so donât look for pictures.
âThere are enough books out there to tell people what to do, how to do this to get the person you want,â she says. These pages explain how to think about sex. Hint: âYour brain is the sexiest part of your body.â
Of course, thereâs a lot more in a book whose jacket flap asks: âWhatâs Standing Between You and Great Sex?â A lot that wonât be printed in a family newspaper. A lot that the authors think would make for a great TV talk show starring Wyatt and Wyatt. (She has already taken meetings with two producers.)
Heâs game for that, but at 66, heâs ready to retire from delivering babies. âThis is the time weâre supposed to be sitting back,â he says during an interview in their formal living room. Their children, Lance and Lacey, both physicians, are long out of the house. Thereâs a darling granddaughter, for whom Grandma loves to shop when she has a spare hour.
Thatâs rare.
âIâm enjoying what Iâm doing. Iâm at my peak intellectually. I know how to deliver my message verbally. Iâve got the passion to do it. My health is good,â she says. âIf he wants to retire, he should.â
Not without her. He wants to travel together, like they did to Zimbabwe, and to Lake Como, Italy, where she had vowed at the age of 14 to return with the man she loved, and that unforgettable vacation in Hong Kong -- where as she strolled arm in arm with her husband, an Asian man pointed at her and asked, âWhere can I get one like that?â
It happens.
But Gail Wyatt knows, and her research shows, that neither she nor most African American women fit that part.