Remarks on the Ten Year Anniversary of the Human Sexuality Department

Where does the drama get its materials? From the “unending conversation” that is going on at the point in history when we are born. Imagine you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one person is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decided that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer [them]; another comes to your defense; another aligns against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hours grow late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.(Gagnon 2004:x-xi).

This is the Human Sexuality Department and our doctoral training in action. What I just read is a quote from Kenneth Burke, the American literary theorist, who so deeply influenced John Gagnon. Gagnon used this quote at the end of the preface to his 2004 book “An Interpretation of Desire: Essays in the Study of Sexuality.” I met John Gagnon as a young scholar, just finishing my Master’s work in Sexuality Studies at San Francisco State University (SFSU), at a 2004 book launch organized Gilbert Herdt. Dr. Herdt founded the SFSU Master’s program in 2002, then in 2014 founded the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) doctoral program. John Gagnon is known for developing the concept of sexual scripts, which gives us a theory to frame sexuality and also gender as shaped by sociocultural forces greater than biology—a radical proposition at the time it was proposed but now a mainstream theory in sexuality studies.

I have had the pleasure to chair the CIIS Human Sexuality Department for the past years. In reflecting on the past decade of this work here, recall that this is only the second accredited sexuality doctoral program in the US. This is the case is because doing work to think closely about sexuality is dangerous—to power structures and individuals alike for myriad reasons—programs and institutes on sexuality start, are attacked, close. Given this cycle, many people are under the erroneous notion that the study of sexuality is somehow new—this is not the case here in the US nor in many other places around the work. But this cycle remains alive and is currently happening especially in the US at the moment. A recent attack on the Kinsey Institute in Indiana is a higher profile example in recent months. In early 2024, the online Lavender Languages Institute formerly housed at Florida Atlantic University was forced to move or close down, and is now hosted here at CIIS (https://www.ciis.edu/news/lavender-languages-institute-finds-safe-haven-ciis). I easily say that doing the work to lead this department is the honor of my life as a way to speak truth to power via evidence and critical engagment—and most importantly to train students to do the same.

As I recalled the Burke quote that I began with, I realized that it is what lent me solace when taking over as chair of this department in 2016. You see, sexuality studies is a field not a discipline. Therefore, composing a vision for a doctoral program can be—well, daunting—yet bringing it down to the task of simultaneously listening for a while, catching the tenor, dipping into conversations through voices who have always-already come before, then saying something—with others—in a conversation, makes this eternally doable. We do our work in this spirit of flow, of integration, of critical engagement with our pasts towards transformations producing nuanced work on sexuality that are engaged, participatory, applied, and seek to place people implicated in webs of power—socioculturally centered even as we live in our bodies—at the center of our training and research. In this sense, this program and this department belong at a university that uses the concept of integral in its name. This is critical sexuality studies in action - these tensions and histories, along with our birth in San Francisco and nurturing at CIIS, have animated the teaching and scholarship of the Human Sexuality Department as I lead it.

Concretely and over the past ten years, the Human Sexuality doctoral program has admitted over 150 students with 23 alumni and counting. When I took over the program, we had about 25 students in process and currently at any given time we have 75 students in different phases of coursework, comprehensive examinations, or dissertation research. Our very first class had about 17 students and we have since averaged 12 students per cohort. We generally attract students who are in their 30s and are mid-career or seeking a career change. Recently, the department is consistently amongst the most diverse at CIIS, averaging an overall BIPOC (Black, indigenous, and people of color) enrollment of 31% for the past five years, including 11% identifying as Hispanic, and 3% living outside of the US/non-US residents. Students come from all regions of the US and internationally, including those from Canada and from as far away as China and Guam.

There is no way that I can name all those who deserve thanks for contributing to the effort that we call the Human Sexuality doctoral program. To return to Gagnon’s preface, “Thank everyone or thank no one? The dilemma is explicit.” But let me take a broad brush to say thank you to the California Institute of Integral Studies for taking a chance on the wild idea of a doctoral program in Human Sexuality, thank you to Dr. Gilbert Herdt, my mentor and at this point my family, for your vision in starting such an audacious program, to the faculty who have struggled with me to articulate the, at times, ineffable and transcendent as well as the difficult and therefore most important ideas, and to our students, past and present, who have taken a chance on us to do this ever dangerous and most rewarding work—catching the tenor, doing engaged critical work on today’s most pressing issues such as sex trafficking of indigenous people, black sexuality and the right to pleasure, contextualized meanings of lived sexual fluidity and shifting gender expression/identity, birth justice, and so much more. I raise a toast to our ten years with wishes for our good works to persist for many more to come!

Related Academic Program

Doctor of Philosophy in Human Sexuality