Reagan Appointee Backs All-Out Assault on AIDS

Dr. Theresa Crenshaw, the San Diego physician specializing in sexual dysfunction who was appointed Thursday to President Reagan’s commission on AIDS, is an outspoken advocate of antibody testing for adults and children and has favored barring children with AIDS from schools.

Crenshaw, 44, the author of “Bedside Manners: Your Guide to Better Sex” and co-host of the Playboy Channel’s “Women on Sex,” has also questioned the efficacy of condoms and has challenged the conventional concept of safe sex.

Safe Sex Is Limited

“The only safe sex is celibacy or masturbation,” Crenshaw wrote in testimony on condom advertising given to a congressional subcommittee earlier this year. “Next best is monogamy with a trustworthy partner who is not already infected.”

Crenshaw has also called for loosening the confidentiality requirements of AIDS test results. She has argued for making “all forms of (AIDS virus infection) reportable” to public health authorities.

“Modify civil rights issues if necessary for health and survival,” she recommended in documents submitted to San Diego County officials considering appointing her to a county task force. “Modify existing laws to conform with good medical and ethical practices.”

“Celibacy, monogamy, condoms, spermicide, education, contact tracing, testing are some of our resources,” Crenshaw argued. “We must utilize them all.”

Touring to Fight AIDS

Crenshaw is on sabbatical from her San Diego practice to speak throughout the world on the AIDS threat, associates said. She has appeared increasingly on television and radio specials about AIDS and on talk shows like “Donahue.”

She contends that experts and public health officials, fearing a panic, have misled the public into complacency about AIDS--a disease that, she argues, could kill one-quarter of the world.

Preventing that will require a radical restructuring of sexual and marital habits, Crenshaw maintains. She says that in her own medical practice, which centers on problems in sex and relationships, she has seen a renewed commitment to building satisfying marriages.

In San Diego, Crenshaw has become a controversial figure in recent years.

Would Bar AIDS Students

In 1985, she voluntarily appeared before the city’s school board and sought to bar students with AIDS from the schools--a recommendation that ran counter to the recommendations of the superintendent and to top AIDS researchers at UC San Diego.

“I am not secure that this disease cannot be passed through casual contact,” Crenshaw told the board. “Even though we do not have a documented case, I think there is good reason to wonder.”

The board initially voted to follow Crenshaw’s advice, though there were no known cases of students or employees with AIDS at the time. A year later, they voted to rescind the ban and consider each case individually.

This spring, gay activists in San Diego denounced a move by county supervisors to add a position to the county’s Regional Task Force on AIDS and to install Crenshaw. They attacked Crenshaw as a “publicity seeker” who had no experience dealing with AIDS patients. The appointment has been tabled.

Crenshaw is the immediate past president of the American Assn. of Sex Educators, Counselors and Therapists, a New York-based group with 3,000 members nationwide.