Crenshaw No Stranger to Controversy : From AIDS Stance to Credentials, Sex Therapist Leaves Many People Guessing

Doc TLC was doing her thing: Talking about sex.

Theresa Crenshaw, M.D.--doctor of the libido, disciple of Masters and Johnson, soon-to-be appointee to the President’s Commission on AIDS--was spending an evening last May in a dreary banquet room of a San Diego hotel, entertaining construction contractors.

A statuesque blonde in bright red, Crenshaw made her way to the podium as the tinkle of dessert forks fell silent. Dipping her head toward the microphone, she began, in a soft , almost childlike voice:

“Well, it’s nice to see so many men and women here tonight, all interested in erections.”

Theresa Crenshaw creates a stir.

She is San Diego’s most-talked-about sex therapist, the publicity-minded proprietress of the Crenshaw Clinic. She is the author of a sex guide, sex tapes and a handful of articles on sex. She co-hosts her own sex talk show on the Playboy Channel.

Phil Donahue solicits her thoughts on penile implants. She opines about the G Spot, aphrodisiacs, even tennis and sex. She addresses physicians, therapists, Rotarians, fire chiefs, Kiwanis members, prostitutes and water bottlers.

She counts among her acquaintances Burt Lancaster and Dr. Seuss. Friends say she attends opera with Gordon Getty. She throws lavish Christmas parties at her condominium on Mission Bay and drives a Cadillac, license plates DOC TLC.

Now Crenshaw has a new feather in her cap: An appointment to President Reagan’s 13-member commission on AIDS. The much-maligned panel has been in existence only two months, but already, Crenshaw is one of its most controversial members.

The flap centers on her unusual opinions about AIDS, including her suggestion that the AIDS virus might travel through insects and casual contact--contentions that the government’s own public health officials dismiss as misinformed.

She has advocated barring infected students from schools. She wants widespread AIDS testing of the general public, including children. She has suggested that officials “modify civil rights issues” to control AIDS, which she suggests threatens our “extinction.”

The fracas, however, is not Crenshaw’s first.

Last spring, gay activists in San Diego objected bitterly when the 45-year-old physician was briefly nominated to the county’s task force on AIDS. They attacked her as an extremist, a self-promoter with no expertise on AIDS. In the end, she withdrew her name.

Shortly before, Crenshaw had ruffled feathers within her own profession, by rising to the presidency of the American Assn. of Sex Educators, Counselors and Therapists and then devoting much of her one-year term to developing a public position on AIDS.

Questions have been raised in the past about how Crenshaw represented her credentials and, in one case, how she described her role in scientific research. A close look at a recent copy of Crenshaw’s curriculum vitae turned up several misstated credentials.

She stated she is a member of the “Committee on Education” for the American Foundation for AIDS Research (AMFAR), based in New York City. An AMFAR spokesman said the foundation has no such committee and Crenshaw has no official ties to the group.

She claimed membership in the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex, one of the more selective professional societies. But an official in the Philadelphia office of the organization said Crenshaw has never been a member.

Not in Who’s Who

Other small discrepancies include a claim to be named in current editions of Who’s Who, although company officials say she has not been listed for years.

Crenshaw declined to be interviewed for this article, though in the past she has denied ever deliberately misstating her credentials. She contended that to profile a commission member at this point would hamper the AIDS commission’s work.

Others interviewed for this story were reticent for different reasons: Some expressed concern about Crenshaw’s perceived political clout; others feared being sued. Some friends asked for anonymity.

One prominent specialist in sexuality, currently medical director of San Diego County’s mental health facility in Hillcrest, explained his refusal to talk by producing a letter from Crenshaw’s lawyer threatening to sue him for defamation.

“Dr. Crenshaw has learned from several sources that you have been disseminating false and malicious information concerning Dr. Crenshaw and her credentials,” read the July 17, 1987, letter to Dr. David McWhirter.

“It is categorically false that Dr. Crenshaw has ever intentionally misrepresented her credentials to anyone,” the letter stated. It warned McWhirter that he could face criminal and civil charges for defamation and interference with economic advantage.

Friends chuckle when they remember the early Dr. Crenshaw.

They say she was serious, bespectacled, a little plain--a young doctor launching a sex therapy practice with her husband, Roger Crenshaw, in 1975. One friend characterized her taste in fashion as “yellow polyester pantsuits.” Others remember her white doctor’s coat.

Born in Sweden, Crenshaw emigrated to the United States as a child and was raised by her mother and stepfather in San Francisco. She studied history at Stanford University and graduated from UC Irvine School of Medicine in 1969.

She opted against serving a one- to five-year medical residency and earning so-called board certification in a specialty such as obstetrics and gynecology. Instead, she and Roger spent four years abroad as general medical officers for the U.S. Navy.

After returning to the United States with a young son in 1974, they won one-year fellowships with the Masters and Johnson Institute in St. Louis. Then they returned to San Diego County, where Roger had grown up, and opened the Crenshaw Clinic in Hillcrest.

Not as Polished

“San Diego Has Own Masters and Johnson,” read the headline of a January, 1976, article in the El Cajon Californian. An accompanying photograph showed Crenshaw, short-haired, in spectacles, behind a desk. She wore a doctor’s coat and a man’s shirt, buttoned to the neck.

“Theresa was not nearly as polished as she is now,” recalls Laura Walcher, the veteran San Diego publicist to whom the Crenshaws turned for advice in the mid-1970s. As Walcher puts it, “She had not availed herself of the benefits of the California life style.”

Walcher taught the Crenshaws the tricks of the trade: Talk in specifics, give examples, animate your voice, Walcher told them. Don’t talk philosophy because you lose your audience. Be positive. You’re the experts. Don’t say you don’t know.

Theresa caught on quickly.

She took to speaking widely around San Diego. There were 41 talks in 1977 alone (each listed individually in her 47-page curriculum vitae ) . She spoke at churches, hospitals, colleges, schools, local societies, even the San Diego Yacht Club.

She became a weekly guest on a radio talk show in 1978. The following year, she became a regular on the TV show, “Sun-Up San Diego.” Later would come Donahue, Merv Griffin, more talk shows, radio and TV specials, and a newspaper column syndicated by Copley News Service.

Her topics ran the gamut: Sex therapy, sex education, sexual myths, sexual dysfunction, sex in the office, sex after menopause, sexual aversion, sexual manners, rape, herpes, sex and the college student, sex and the doctor’s wife.

“She got the hang of it very fast,” marveled Walcher, who quit doing most of Crenshaw’s PR work when her client went national in 1983. “She’s one of the quickest and brightest women I know. She went far beyond what my coaching could do.”

But the spotlight has not always endeared Crenshaw to her colleagues.

In August, 1983, Crenshaw announced in an interview in San Diego Magazine that she and others had “confirmed the existence of Grafenberg’s spot,” the so-called G Spot believed by some to be a special erogenous zone in the vagina.

The claim created a minor uproar among physicians, some of whom publicly accused Crenshaw of going public with another doctor’s work. The researcher, Dr. Jeffrey Pollen, declined to comment recently when asked about the matter. He said Crenshaw committed no misrepresentation, then hung up.

But a report by United Press International at the time said Pollen, who, like Crenshaw, worked at the UC San Diego School of Medicine, “shied away from any speculation about the G Spot and expressed indignation at Dr. Crenshaw’s publicizing the research before he could write it up for a medical journal.”

San Diego Magazine ran a “clarification” the following month:

“It appears that since my August interview piece with Dr. Theresa Crenshaw appeared, an unfortunate controversy has arisen in the medical community over the authorship and release of certain information concerning research on the Grafenberg Spot,” the author wrote.

“The material was taken directly from transcripts of interviews with Dr. Crenshaw, and Dr. Crenshaw was given the opportunity to read and correct the article in its entirety, because of the sensitivity of some of the issues raised, so I do not feel that we acted injudiciously.”

No Close Professional Ties

The same article prompted correspondence on another matter.

Dr. Robert Resnik, chairman of the Department of Reproductive Medicine at UCSD, wrote to correct the article’s statement that Crenshaw was co-chairman. Her status, he wrote, was “non-salaried assistant clinical professor without administrative responsibilities.”

His letter was followed by one from Crenshaw noting that the magazine had gotten her title wrong. In communications with other UCSD officials who contacted the magazine, the magazine acknowledged that it had misquoted Crenshaw’s curriculum vitae.

The resume in fact stated her title as “co-director of the division of human sexuality in the Department of Reproductive Medicine”--the same title that appears on the jacket of her 1983 book, “Bedside Manners: Your Guide to Better Sex.”

But Leslie Franz, a spokeswoman for UCSD School of Medicine, said recently that there is not and never has been such a division within the department.

Colleagues say Crenshaw’s local professional ties have not been close.

Indeed, when several county supervisors suggested naming Crenshaw to the county’s AIDS task force earlier this year, the local professional society of sex therapists, of which she is a member, seemingly went out of its way not to endorse her.

The San Diego Society for Sex Therapy and Education wrote to Supervisor Susan Golding recommending five other therapists. Asked about the letter, President Emma Pellettiri insisted, “It was not necessarily a vote against her.”

“For one thing, most of (the therapists recommended) have worked with AIDS patients and in the area of AIDS,” she said. “ . . . That just seemed like a natural criterion: That you would recommend people that had worked in the specific area that the task force is addressing.”

Public life also took a toll on the Crenshaws’ marriage. In 1978, they divorced.

Roger Crenshaw blames the divorce in part on differing ambitions. He says he wanted to treat “normal people with normal problems”--problems like impotence, premature ejaculation and marital difficulties. Theresa, he says, had a different goal.

“Theresa kind of went much more . . . towards the things that drew more publicity,” said Crenshaw, who now has a competing practice based in La Jolla. “ . . . Theresa wanted to be famous. That was one of the major reasons we got a divorce.”

A friend of Theresa’s offers a different interpretation.

“Their lives were going in different directions,” said Margaret Wright, a San Diego accountant who has known both Crenshaws for 10 years. “Theresa has a mission in life. Theresa wasn’t raised like all of us. Theresa was raised with social responsibility.

” . . . It’s very possible that 100 years from now, you and I will be looking down from wherever we are and she will be looked at as a savior. Not the only savior, but one of the forces.”

Another admirer is Tex Warren.

Warren, a former patient of Crenshaw’s, is a 64-year-old dealer of homes and guns in Imperial Beach. He has traveled across the country with Crenshaw to testify to, and occasionally demonstrate, the device he says saved his sex life.

‘Saved Our Marriage’

He met Crenshaw in about 1975. He was impotent and looking for help. Dr. Albert McBride, an El Cajon urologist pioneering penile implants in San Diego County, sent Warren to Crenshaw for a psychological evaluation to make sure his problem was not in his head.

McBride ended up doing the operation. Warren is now something of a zealot about penile implants. He also returned to Crenshaw later for counseling and ended up one of her fans.

“She saved our marriage,” Warren marveled, in his soft, West Texas drawl. Asked how, he said simply, “Beats the hell out of me. I could no more tell you than I could fly.”

Under the terms of the divorce, Roger Crenshaw withdrew as partner in the Crenshaw Clinic--by then a thriving business that in 1977 had produced for the two Crenshaws a gross adjusted income of $84,000, according to papers on file in Superior Court.

In the following years, the clinic continued to grow--from two full-time therapists and one part-timer to five full-time therapists and three consultants. One clinic therapist estimated that the center logged 3,000 to 4,000 “therapy hours” in a single year.

Former therapists say that the clinic’s rates in 1985 were $150 for 45 minutes for Crenshaw’s time and about $100 for 45 minutes with a staff therapist.

James Goldberg, director of research at the clinic since 1983, described Crenshaw as an early explorer in the fields of sexual aversion and the use of drugs to overcome sexual problems. He described her forte as integrating medicine and therapy.

Critics and competitors fault Crenshaw for having little specialized psychiatric training and for having done little published research. But they credit her with a rare talent for making information about sexual dysfunction accessible to the public.

“That is the type of person that she is,” said Goldberg, who is a defender of Crenshaw. “ . . . She has a spontaneous reaction to people and a God-given facility for delivering a message. She has a personal attractiveness--and that’s been another criticism of her, of a big, beautiful, stacked blonde.”

On Sabbatical

Early last summer, Crenshaw embarked upon a sabbatical. The clinic has closed down, though some therapists can be reached through the old number. Friends say Crenshaw is spending at least a year raising public awareness about AIDS.

Crenshaw’s public positions startled a few colleagues.

Sallie Hildebrandt, a therapist who left the Crenshaw Clinic in 1985 and is currently in practice in San Diego, remembered Crenshaw as “intuitive” and “non-judgmental” in therapy--a posture Hildebrandt contrasted with Crenshaw’s views on AIDS.

“When she came out with her stand on AIDS, I was shocked,” said Hildebrandt. “Because I always thought of her, in terms of sexuality, as being more moderate and thoughtful.”

Others said Crenshaw differs from her peers in what she chooses to emphasize.

“She’s emphasizing that condoms are not 100% safe,” said therapist Emma Pellettiri. “I agree they’re not 100% safe. . . . (But) my feeling is everything in life has a degree of risk. Probably the most dangerous thing most people can do is get in a car and drive on the freeway.

“People aren’t advocating not getting in cars. Use seat belts, obey the rules of the road, don’t drink and drive. My feeling is the same about condoms and sex: Abstinence works, but . . . my feeling is that it’s somewhat unrealistic to advocate abstinence on any long-term basis.”

Crenshaw’s views on AIDS first received publicity in September, 1985, when she appeared before the board of the San Diego Unified School District and argued against the superintendent’s recommendation that students with AIDS be allowed to stay in school.

Her position contradicted that of AIDS researchers at UCSD, who were advising the district, and guidelines from the federal Centers for Disease Control. But principally on the strength of Crenshaw’s testimony, the board voted narrowly to keep AIDS-infected students out.

In November, 1986, Crenshaw distributed a 14-page leaflet on AIDS suggesting among other things that the virus might be spread by insects. It also advised against “casual (dry) kissing” because AIDS patients “often carry other diseases.”

In February, in testimony before a congressional committee, Crenshaw stressed the fallibility of condoms--widely promoted, at the time, as a key to safe sex. She said the only safe sex is celibacy or monogamy with a partner not infected with the AIDS virus.

The following month, controversy erupted in San Diego.

Crenshaw had appeared before the county Board of Supervisors to speak about the dangers of AIDS and offer assistance. Several supervisors then proposed adding Crenshaw, as a prominent sex therapist with knowledge of sexual behavior, to the county’s AIDS task force.

Angry Opposition

The nomination sparked angry opposition, primarily from representatives of the county’s gay community, who argued that Crenshaw had never attended a task force meeting in the year of its existence and had not assisted in support work for people with AIDS.

“Theresa Crenshaw is recognized . . . as not being in the mainstream of the AIDS debate,” said Lance Clem of the San Diego AIDS Project, the city’s principal support group for people with AIDS. “She represents a fringe argument.”

But in July, Crenshaw was named to the president’s commission, which is to meet during the coming year and produce recommendations on AIDS policy. The White House cited her AASECT presidency, but it is unclear precisely who recommended her for membership.

Friends of Crenshaw credit Sen. Pete Wilson (R-Calif.), who knows Crenshaw. But Wilson’s press secretary, Bill Livingston, said Wilson did not recommend her. Others said Crenshaw had contacts in the White House Office of Policy Development and the Department of Education.

The new commission immediately encountered opposition from Democratic members of Congress, specialists in AIDS and organizations representing AIDS patients. They have pointed out that few of the members had any significant prior experience with the disease.

Crenshaw’s views, in particular, have drawn attention and criticism, along with those of three other members with comparably controversial views. In an August interview, Crenshaw told a reporter from the Washington Post that she had not modified her positions.

Others within Crenshaw’s field also questioned her appointment.

While several said they were pleased to see someone with a background in sexuality on the commission, they wondered why, in a field viewed by many as questionable, the President did not select a prominent academic with extensive research credentials.

But back in San Diego, Margaret Wright was not surprised.

“I think she truly believes that if the forces of the world aren’t marshalled to do something about AIDS that we won’t be around 10 years from now to tell the story,” Wright mused one recent morning.

” . . . And, hey, I hope she is an alarmist. I hope she’s wrong. The most successful prophets, I think, are people who turn out not to be prophets because . . . their prophecies turn out not to be true. So I hope her crystal ball is wrong.”