Alumni Caucus for Gay, Lesbian
and Bisexual Concerns at Allegheny College

ALUMNI PROFILE: JOHN PAUL DE CECCO, PhD, '46

by Bruce Shewitz '83

John De Cecco received his BS in biology from Allegheny College in 1946. He holds an MA and a PhD in history from the University of Pennsylvania and has done post-doctoral work in psychology at Wayne State and Michigan State Universities. Since 1960, he has been professor of psychology and human sexuality at San Francisco State University where he also directs the human sexuality studies program and the Center for Research and Education in Sexuality and coordinates the bisexual, lesbian, and gay minor. He has been editor of the Journal of Homosexuality since 1977, general editor of Haworth Press's Research on Homosexuality monograph series and editor-in-chief of its gay and lesbian studies publications. His other academic, administrative, and research positions, awards, publications (articles, books, book reviews), interviews, guest lectures, consultancies, professional associations, media appearances, and campus and community activities fill thirteen single-spaced pages of curriculum vitae.

DE CECCO ON CAMPUS

John De Cecco came to the Allegheny campus on Tuesday, April 11, and Wednesday, April 12, 1995, his first time back since graduation. He spoke to a number of classes, had lunch with the campus Committee and faculty members who will teach in the gay studies concentration, and gave a lecture Wednesday evening in Ford Chapel.

"BORN AGAIN GAY: THE BIOLOGY OF SEXUAL PREFERENCE"

Lecturing about the topic of his latest book, Sex Cells and Same-Sex Desire: The Biology of Sexual Preference, John De Cecco argued that biological explanations of homosexuality actually undermine the gay liberation movement. Current biological studies in the area use insufficient test groups and lack replication; the data are correlative, not causative; and the findings are inconclusive. He feels that sexuality is biological, psychological, and socio-cultural. He promotes queer studies as the forum where basic questions-What is a man? What is a woman? What is sexuality? Why are we sexual?-can be discussed openly.

AN INTERVIEW JOHN DE CECCO

[I had the privilege of attending John De Cecco's Wednesday evening lecture; the preceding summary does it and him only limited justice. Following Wednesday's lunch, I had the following talk with him.]

[BLS] You alluded before that there really wasn't any gay life when you were here at Allegheny.

[JPD] None at all.

Were you aware at the time that you were gay?

Not as a category, because it didn't even exist; I don't think the word "gay" was in wide usage until the 1960s. And I knew I was attracted to men in my living quarters, which happened to be fraternity houses; the fraternity houses weren't operating then because the air corps had taken over the dorms. For some reason I never got to do anything with the air corps; they sort of existed but there was very little intermingling. I was aware of my attraction to some of the men, and some of them came on to me-crawling into bed or on the bed or sitting close on the sofas or little flirtation things in the showers-that was all going on, but no one, any of the people I knew (including myself) who engaged in that ever thought of it as being gay...yet we knew that kind of activity was stigmatized, was forbidden; it was still done. There's a peculiar atmosphere that was going on; during the war, a lot of Victorian morality got loosened and jarred, partly because a lot of people thought "I'm going to war; I'm going to be killed; I'd better enjoy myself." So I suspect it was a period in which there was a lot of looseness of behavior, without the sense of how that fit into anyone's life, and I suspect that most of those people got married after they left, and if they maintained any connection with gay life it would've been very concealed and hidden.

So there was no support system on campus or permission to go and talk with someone if you had problems or questions.

No, we did have counselors, but it never once occurred to me to take this issue to them, and even sadder is that those of us who knew that we were in similar situations, similar degrees of confusion, never could build bridges to each other because that, we thought, would reveal more than we wanted to the other people we had to live with. So we didn't even have the interpersonal support of other gay people.

It occurs to me that for some people that's a fear that continues today, even though there's more visibility in the media and on campus, so one hears significantly more positive messages today about being gay, but even so, there's still that fear.

It came out in one of Sonya's [Prof. Sonya Jones] classes that I visited yesterday-the incredible fear of a marred reputation. We were talking very generally; we asked the students in her Constructions of Sexuality course (some of whom are, presumably, straight) how much sexual exploration do you allow yourself and what guidelines do you use? The answer we got back is that their reputations are on the line at all times, so any exploration they do has to be very limited. This means in effect that you hook up with one person and you stay put, because even to give up that relationship and go to another one is going to be a black mark.

And we hear in the gay community, too, that a person who is exploring and has serial partners is considered a slut. What's the difference?

I am appalled to the extent that members of the gay community have often unconsciously subscribed to a heterosexual ethic; they're heterosexist even though they're gay. That, you see, is why we need these curricula, because you need to look at things very deeply and systematically to realize that there are layers and layers of norms that we've incorporated in our lives and never questioned, and that sometimes the recognition that one is gay is the first level of awareness, but there are many more meanings, many more expressions of that than we can possibly know unless we study it, to see how it's changed through history and cultures.

Did any of your experiences at Allegheny have any significant impact on your coming-out process or was this just a stage in life?

Well, certainly the intensity of my attraction to men, which I was able largely to repress before I got here. I would say that my earliest awareness of that was during my early teens: I was wrestling once with a neighborhood playmate when I was twelve or so and I got an erection. I was sitting on top of him and suddenly this happened, and I've never forgotten the experience, although I've probably romanticized and elaborated it. But the fact of the matter is I suddenly realized I was turned on by this physical proximity. So it got started very early. I grew up in an Italian family, and my brother and I slept together for several years until I was sixteen or seventeen; I would want to get much closer to him than he did to me, and eventually I could bring him around to accepting this, so we would hug each other from the back, and I would get turned on by it, so that awareness was there. But what happened at Allegheny was that, living in a dormitory (the Delta Tau Delta fraternity house and later the Phi Psi house)...I'd never been in any situation like that; I had avoided taking gym throughout most all of high school, partly because I realized I was so attracted to men I didn't know what it would mean if I were in that situation, but the identification did not include my participation in athletics at all...so here I was confronted, and a lot of the men I was living with were not as inhibited as I was about sexual contact, and so they were sort of approaching me...We just published a book on the Navy, and evidently every so often on the ships one of the sailors would get identified as a queer, but instead of getting ostracized, that person becomes a way for the so-called straight sailors to validate their straightness by having sex with him. I think that I was backed up very unwittingly into that role; even though I wasn't having sex, the word sort of got around. At some level I realized that would do more to bolster their reputation as straight men than it would do anything for me: any satisfaction I might derive from it, any sense of belonging to that community. You learn the danger at a very early age, so I didn't have any sex at Allegheny; little skirmishes perhaps or wrestling matches on the bed, but that was it. There was no way and no one on the campus that I could use as a pivot point so I that could somehow come to terms with what I was experiencing and feeling. Very, very lonely in that respect, very sad.

When did a turning point come for you thereafter?

Where I could have full acceptance? Many, many years later. I went on to graduate school at Penn. There, I met some fellow graduate students who were a little bit more open about it. And in some cases, they were having relationships, in some cases ongoing relationships (but not usually). The word sort of got out that there were gay men who were accepting, and gradually somebody introduced me to the gay bars in San Francisco, and I suddenly realized "My God, I'm not alone." Then I met an old high school friend who was living at the Y, where I lived for a short period of time (partly to get back into this living with men), and he was living there and making out like wild with the Philadelphia sailors and he was very open about it. I continued the role I had here, of people sort of making themselves available and my absolute terror of it. I had this ridiculous feeling that if I actually started having sex, I would like it so much that I would become addicted and I would never get my PhD, which I really needed to emancipate myself from my Italian tyrant father and get a job where I could support myself; that was the ticket. It was soon after I got the PhD that I had my first really full sexual experience, and that was at the age of 28. So it goes to show you...college should be a time of sexual experimentation; you find out who you are sexually. I didn't have it at college or all through graduate school.

Is it happening now, do you think?

Oh yes. My gay students are all sexually active. There's that terrible cloud of the epidemic, and some of them are getting infected; there's no question about that.

So they're not practicing safer sex?

Well, they are and they're not, but who knows, and who knows if they're telling the truth? I mean, we've been trained by the Christian tradition to lie about sex. I'm the sponsor of the gay fraternity on campus, and the fact of the matter is that they almost all have relationships. And the same with the women. Some of them are even getting married in the Metropolitan Community Church or the gay synagogue. They want the public to know, they want their families to know; it's a total change from what I experienced when I was here.

Would you guess that for gay men and women of your age that your experience is pretty indicative of what people went through?

I can't imagine it's being anything else, because we never had lines of communication to each other, so how could there be anything collective when we didn't even have the interpersonal connection? I have been enormously curious about some of my classmates, whom I thought were more likely candidates than others, just by how they related to me and how we related to the men in the dorm. One of them went on to be a concert pianist, one went on to work for Standard Oil, a couple in medicine.

You were born and raised in Erie, PA, and still have some family there.

It was an Italian immigrant family, and my mother's parents actually lived in Erie; my father's parents remained in Italy, so I never got to know them. The grandparents were actually kind of the heart of the Italian ghetto in Erie, Sixteenth and Walnut Street, right across from St. Paul's Italian Roman Catholic Church, so I grew up with a very ethnic consciousness. My parents refer to people who weren't Italian as Americans. Somehow I was not an American, I was an Italian (at least in the house), although at another level they were very interested in having their children assimilate. They never taught us the language; I picked up some of it. At a public level, they were ashamed of being Italian, but at a home level, they were insistently Italian.

Did they contribute positively or negatively to your process of coming out?

It never became an issue, because I never dated...in fact throughout most of my life I've only had one date (or something like that) with a woman. But, peculiarly, that was not an issue with my parents. I didn't have any pressure from them. My father thought his marriage was...he regretted it, and my mother would have preferred a romantic version of the marriage she had, so the children, including me, were not pressured into a heterosexual model. I had five siblings; only two of them got married (one died very shortly after getting married). My brother is married, but my two sisters never did, so there are three of us holdouts. So that took a lot of pressure off, unlike a family where everyone was married except for the queer... so in that way they contributed.

And now, who in your family knows and what is their comfort level?

Well, everybody knows. There's no emotional acceptance; even when I told them I was coming down to Allegheny and that I had been invited because I'm gay, because I'm a gay scholar, they register it but they can't absorb it. When I go back tomorrow-I've been reminded several times that this is Holy Week. I have not thought about Holy Week for so many centuries now- and that Friday is the day of the great crucifixion, and we're going to have to not have any celebration. My 70th birthday is coming up the following week, and I assumed that we were going to celebrate it before I leave on Saturday. They informed me that they're very sorry, but that during Holy Week they can't have any celebration. And they're giving me some gifts, but no party...I'd rather have the party. They've remained very Catholic, and to the extent that they have, they don't have any way (as far as religious teaching is concerned) to accept it. So it's been frustrating, and I have other friends who have had this same thing. I've told them; they know this is my work-gay studies-and yet they have a very hard time incorporating it.

Do you remember why you chose Allegheny College?

Well, it was a compromise with my father...I wanted to go to Oberlin, and he didn't trust me; he said "That's too far away." Can you imagine that? But that's an Italian family for you. A lot of his friends-the lawyers and doctors-their sons were going to Allegheny...Allegheny was sort of an extension of the Erie country club at one time, and for Cleveland and Pittsburgh, too; I didn't know those people and I had nothing in common with them, so I resented it, but he was paying the bills. I would've preferred to go to Oberlin because I thought it was a much more intellectually alive place. I also think I wanted to get further away, even if it was just another forty miles. He wouldn't buy Oberlin, though. In a way I was getting away from home, and that meant a lot to me, that I was going to have some degree of freedom; anything would be better.

What would you like to see happen with a lesbigay alumni caucus from Allegheny?

For me it almost would be a regaining of paradise lost; it would be enormously thrilling to me to know that some of my peers are now open enough that they would join such a caucus, and that I would have contact with them that was not possible when I was here. I'm not terribly hopeful of that, but what it would mean to me is that we had started by getting to know each other even if it's post-graduation, that we could now be doing something for the mother institution, even decades after we left it, that would make it a lot better for the students who are here now than it was for us, without necessarily doing that out of a great deal of resentment but out of some optimism that things can be better and a sense of responsibility. And I feel that responsibility keenly, because I am a teacher; I went on to become a professor and to be on a campus, and I have played a major role on my campus; in a way this is still unfinished work out of my past that I did not think I was ever going to have the opportunity to do, but it's always been there.

You're very lucky.

I'm so lucky that the reality of it is sort of sinking in gradually, that I should have come full circle now.

Is there a parallel alumni caucus at San Francisco State?

We're forming it now; there's no obstacle, it's the energy that we can put into it. The reason that it was not started earlier is that at public institutions, you don't form the same relationship with your graduates that you do have at private institutions because you're leaning on tax money, and until the last five or six years, the California system was pretty well funded and supported, but with the bad economy and the conservative turn in politics, that's no longer the case, so that any new things that get started on campus, like the gay studies program, the administration almost expects you to go out and get the money. Also, you see, we don't have the same kind of relationship with the alumni; I've gotten the Allegheny bulletin religiously with lots of correspondence all the years I've been away; it's been absolutely amazing, because I don't have that kind of connection with Penn, even though I spent more years there than I did here. So there's this enormous energy to keep in contact with the alumni that the college has shown. We're now doing it, because we want things like a lecture series. We thought of getting a chair, but I don't think we'll ever be able to raise a half-million dollars. But there are some things we think we can do by tying in with the alumni, who in many ways operate the business in downtown San Francisco. I think Stanford and Berkeley supply the graduates for the very top positions, but in many cases the people who are really running the companies, the next level down, are ours, so I suspect that we have a potential source of funding and a potential source of community influence that we need to mobilize.

What sort of things are you doing to network those people?

The alumni organization will have its second or third meeting in a month. It's being started by alumni. We have a gay fraternity, which I sponsor, whose members are going out into the city and contacting graduates of the university who will come back and speak to them; we have one of the city supervisors. They're spotting people somehow just through the grapevine; I don't think they're using any records; it's not being done systematically. Then, in the gay studies program, we are now in contact with a new organization, about two years old, of gay employees at big corporations in the city, like VISA, Levi Strauss, Pacific Gas and Electric, and so on. They call themselves AGOG. Through a couple of courses we teach in the gay studies program-a community internship program and work and leadership in gay communities-we try to make a connection with people in the community: doctors, lawyers, a professional firm. AGOG has expressed an interest in working with our students, so we'll send them out on internships, because one of the fears that the students have is that if they got this on their diplomas, that they had a gay minor, or that some of the courses listed are undeniably gay courses, that it would prevent them from getting a job. So our way around this has been to establish the connection and even give them a head up on other students as far as getting a job is concerned. I should imagine that could be done through the campus here. Because you're not that close to the business and industrial centers, it might require that the students be given permission for a year to do an off-campus internship where there would be gay men and women to provide some mentorship. That will erase the enormous and sometimes realistic fear they have that they'll be set adrift; they've made their commitment here and now they have to pay the price after graduation. The SFSU alumni group has emphasized its social functions very heavily, and we always have to remember that gay society doesn't flow as easily as straight society does in that respect, so the fact that they can meet other people outside of their own sometimes very limited work settings is a very important function.

We've been talking about having an alumni caucus event on campus in May 1996. Would you have any thoughts on what might provide a good draw for such an occasion?

If it's centering on support for the curriculum, then you need to connect gay faculty with the gay caucus. If you have people in the caucus who have achieved business leadership or prominence, it would be very important as a way to tell the students and the faculty "Yes, you do have people out there who can be of some help to you." The more prominent the person is in law or medicine...people are coming out in all the professions now, so it's possible to show that there's life after college. The caucus needs to know that, because most of them are going to think, if it's just based on the experience that we had at Allegheny, that it's just a nightmare or that life has been a series of deceptions that we've had to practice to get along. That needs to be dispelled, because there's so much fear and so much hesitance. If you could get a Congressman-Barney Frank or Gerry Studds- to come, or Roberta Achtenberg...a national name from the community.

Is there anything else you would like the alumni caucus to know?

There have been enormous rewards in my coming out; there have been enormous rewards in contributing to the education of students by broadening the curriculum to include gay, lesbian, and bisexual studies; there have been enormous personal rewards in getting to know some of the most fascinating people I've ever known in my life; it has expanded my life enormously so that I have friends now all over the world, so I'm not even confined to the territorial limits of the United States. I think had I not accepted at some degree my homosexuality I would have been afraid to go to San Francisco, and San Francisco was one of the most profitable moves in my life. There were risks involved, but the gains have been enormous. People of my age, if we don't sense that we still have a connection to young people, our lives are kind of at an end before we even die. Ericsson said that as you get older, the generative needs become more prominent, what you can give to other people. As gay men and women, it's very easy, I think, if you have any degree of affluence or property, to shut yourself up in that closet. I see a lot of alcoholism and people desperately traveling and desperately engaging in activities that do not really interest them, and it seems to me to keep one's life going, since most of us do not have the connection with children (although lots do), is to reconnect with younger people and to feel that you're giving them something in their lives that would have been perhaps useful in your life, giving it to them in way that you're freeing them to make choices, that you're not committing them to a life-style or an ideology, you're showing them the options that otherwise will be closed off. The financial contribution is important because everything is going to depend on that, but you can actually come to the campus and talk to administration; I tried to do that today. The president seems at least to have opened the door; that's a big plus. I suspect many of the gay alumni have never come back to campus because they didn't feel any ties. Now the possibility exists to re-create those ties.

Thank you, John.

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