THE SUNDAY PROFILE : Let’s Talk About Sex : Mona Coates spices her popular Orange Coast College human sexuality class with visits from transvestites and discussions of intimate topics, but in her personal life, she says, ‘I’m about as vanilla as you come.’

Mona Coates stands in a lecture hall filled with college students and makes a few quick points about compulsions, pornography and “ejaculatory inevitability” before introducing three transvestites who are her guest speakers.

At the break, Coates props a mirror on her handbag and tries out a new mascara, on loan from one of the guests.

“I love transvestites,” she says, blinking at her reflection. “They always know the best makeup.”

Coates has taught human sexuality at Orange Coast College since 1975, and she has emerged from the sexually tumultuous decades with her colleagues’ respect, students’ affection and one of the most popular classes on campus.

Her blunt, unembarrassed responses have caused some students to dub her the “younger, West Coast version” of Dr. Ruth Westheimer, after the media personality famous for her frank discussions about sex.

Coates’ all-embracing teaching style contrasts sharply with her personal life, which is rooted in durable relationships, including her marriage five years ago to her fourth-grade sweetheart.

“It just happens that my preferences and lifestyle represent mainline, middle-class WASP America,” she says. “My life has always been rather conservative; sexual choices, sexual orientation. . . . I’m about as vanilla as you come.”

But there is nothing bland on the menu in her human sexuality class, a three-unit extravaganza of sexual potpourri that attracts almost 1,200 hormone-charged students every year.

“Her class is always full to capacity,” says Chris O’Hearn, vice president of instruction. “And there is always a waiting list.”

David Grant, president of the college since 1962, describes Coates as “a consummate professional” who plays best to a full house.

“She is an extraordinarily non-judgmental person in terms of her presentation, and (she’s) very, very popular with students because of that,” he says.

A fixture in her class is the Question Box, which is passed through the aisles at the beginning of each class and into which students drop anonymous--and sometimes searingly intimate--queries for Coates to answer.

She says the questions have changed markedly over the past two decades. The shift has been from a sexually experimental ‘70s, to the more cautious ‘80s to the worried and health-conscious ‘90s.

Some questions are timeless. Males fret perpetually: “Is my penis too small?” Females wonder incessantly: “Am I sexy enough?”

Some queries are wary (“Can men tell if females fake orgasm?”), worrisome (“Why do I feel like vomiting every time I have sex?”), playful (“Is there a lab for this class?”) and plaintive (“How do you feel about loveless sex?”).

“I never get embarrassed answering the questions,” she says. “I realize all our body parts are normal. I don’t think it’s so terrible to separate the knees and the elbows from the vaginas and the penises.”

Coates, 50, who is a psychotherapist, licensed marriage and family counselor, certified hypnotherapist and certified sex therapist, began teaching sociology at the Costa Mesa college Sept. 5, 1967, when she was just 22. She launched her human sexuality class about eight years later at the urging of her students.

To prepare, she spent a year attending training workshops throughout the state, including Masters and Johnson seminars and the National Sex Forum in San Francisco.

It was an era of “sensual razzmatazz,” she remembers, the “if it feels good, do it” decade.

“In the ‘70s, it was, ‘What all can we think of to do? What can we think of to experiment (with) sexually?’ ” she says. “In the ‘80s, it was, ‘Should we be experimenting with our sexuality?’ In the ‘90s, the attitude is, ‘We’d better not experiment sexually unless we know it’s absolutely safe.’ You see the increasing conservatism.”

In two decades, student inquiries about health have doubled, Coates says. In the past six years, questions about AIDS alone have tripled.

“The concerns around the consequences of sex are far more serious,” she says.

Sex education is serious stuff. It’s also great theater under Coates’ sure direction.

“I think Mona is--I don’t want to cheapen it--(but) more of an entertainer,” Grant says. “She has more of a flare for the way the material is presented. She has an excellent (way of) inspiring large audiences.”

On a recent afternoon, Coates took center stage. Like a practiced talk show host, she dragged her microphone cord behind her, occasionally chopping the air with her hand to make her point.

The question in her hand from the Question Box was from a male, 19, who felt turned on by pornography but guilt-ridden because it demeans women. She applauded his sensitivity and warned him of developing a dependency on such films.

“If you feel any compulsive need to use pornography, back off,” she says. “Don’t let anything run you . . . just wean yourself away from it.”

Next, Coates readies the class for her guest speakers. Transvestites, she says, are “just normal people” with a “deep and profound need” to wear clothing of the opposite sex.

“When women dress like men, nobody blinks an eye. The problem always exists when the men get out of line.

“Men get this much space,” she adds, pinching the air between her thumb and forefinger, “to express themselves.”

“Cyndi,” “Jennifer” and “Beverly” enter stage right.

Following a cool initial response, the students begin to warm to the smartly dressed and carefully coiffed trio as they take turns telling their life stories. Female students, in particular, quickly begin relating to the most feminine of the three men.

At the break, Coates approvingly notes the shift in the students’ attitude.

“What I really see the class (having) is a compassion for people,” she says.

*

Mona Alberta Gordon was born June 5, 1944, in Johnstown, Pa., into a family she describes as “functional and genuinely happy.” Her only sibling, Barbara, arrived four years later.

Their father was a master electrician, hard-working and kind; their mother, a skilled seamstress of abundant good humor, Coates says. The couple had fallen in love during the Depression but waited until 1942 to marry because money was so scarce.

Coates’ early childhood was snug and nurturing, she says. If the day held family conflicts, her parents sat late at the kitchen table, talking until they reached a resolution.

Life turned even rosier for the vivacious girl with the curly blond hair, when, at 9, she spied Eddie Jacobs in Miss Kramer’s fourth-grade class and fell irretrievably in love.

By sixth grade, they were set to marry but, like Coates’ parents, couldn’t scare up the cash. “We only had 50 cents a week allowance,” she remembers, “so we had to wait.”

Then, her life caved in.

Her father died suddenly of a massive heart attack, and her mother slid into a deep depression that lingered for years.

“Those were the dark years,” she recalls, her green eyes turning serious. “I literally grew up at age 11.” Young Mona kept house, mowed the grass and cared for her mother and sister.

“I feel so grateful for the beginning,” she says, brushing over the rough spots, “the first 12 years.”

During the next few years, Eddie was her bright spot.

They hiked, rode bicycles and attended Friday night sock hops. After school each day, they stopped at the corner drugstore and sipped cherry Cokes. They met regularly at the YMCA where, Coates says, they would “sit in the bleachers and make out.”

But they only went so far, she adds. She believed her virginity should be preserved for marriage.

In the summer of 1959, as she prepared for junior high school, she suffered another life-altering blow when her family moved to California, and she had to leave Eddie behind.

“We stayed together as a real couple, very seriously, until we were 15,” she says. After that, they lost contact.

Then, at 19, Coates heard that Eddie, her “true soul mate,” was dead. Killed in Vietnam.

She was devastated.

“I cried,” she says, “for about two years.”

Still carrying Eddie’s sixth- and seventh-grade pictures in her wallet, Coates hurried through college, cleaning her professors’ houses to get spending money and earning her master’s degree from Cal State Fullerton in 1967 (she received a doctorate from UC Irvine in 1980).

At 22, she claimed the job at Orange Coast College and began gathering outstanding teacher awards.

In 1972, she married John Coates, another Orange Coast College professor, and became step-mother to his 8- and 12-year-old sons. The couple were divorced in 1976.

Then, shortly after Coates’ mother died five years ago, she received some startling news.

The schoolmate who had died in Vietnam was not Eddie Jacobs after all. Jacobs, as it turned out, was twice divorced and living in Philadelphia.

A stunned Coates “wore out about three Philadelphia information operators” trying to find his telephone number. Finally, she says, as if she still can’t believe it, “Eddie himself--the real Eddie--picked up the phone.”

They married seven weeks later.

Stanlee Phelps, one of Coates’ best friends, was with the couple the night they were reunited. They ate at a seaside restaurant in Laguna Beach and then strolled through an oceanfront park at sunset. The mood was tender and edgy.

“Mona, when she’s nervous, talks a lot, and Eddie, when he’s nervous, can’t say anything,” Phelps says. “They were both nervous. . . . It was so much fun to see how star-struck they both were and how grateful they were to find one another.

“I really felt funny being there, but I think both of them needed someone to really keep their feet on the ground. It was really a very precious evening,” Phelps says.

Eddie and Mona continued to float for the next couple years, so overwhelmed at their good fortune that they got married five times.

Their first wedding was June 15, 1989, in Ocean City, Md., at a ceremony attended by Jacobs’ parents. When it was over, the groom couldn’t resist asking his bride, “Would you marry me again?”

“She said, ‘Sure, I would marry you five times,’ ” he recalls. “So we did.”

In July, returning to California, they stopped in Las Vegas and repeated their vows in a small chapel on the strip.

In August, they rented a hall in Westminster, invited about 100 friends and replayed the blissful event. The fourth ceremony was the next month, beneath the Golden Gate Bridge.

And, finally, Jan. 5, 1991--surrounded by palm trees and a Polynesian setting--a minister wearing a colorful shirt pronounced them husband and wife on the Big Island of Hawaii.

That will probably be the last of it, Jacobs says, since five is Coates’ lucky number. But, he adds quickly, “you never know.”

Today, Jacobs, a computer programmer, and Coates live on a quiet Huntington Beach street. Inside, the walls are blanketed with pictures of the beaming couple and their extended families. Resting on the mantle in a heart-shaped frame are Mona and Eddie at 9 years old.

Their married life, Coates says, is very traditional.

“I’m not only very (sexually) discriminating, I’m very monogamous,” she says. “I’m not attracted to any kind of fetish. I’m simply not attracted to any of the different sexual practices that I feel very tolerant of in others.”

She is shy about only one thing--her sex life with Jacobs.

“Speaking about my sexual experiences with my own husband, they seem so private and sacred,” she says.

Since Coates has tenure at the college and a busy counseling practice, Jacobs agreed to relocate. He has since learned plenty from sitting in on his wife’s classes and joining her when she treats her guest speakers to meals.

“I find myself sitting there with transvestites, hermaphrodites or gay people,” Jacobs says. In fact, he now takes them to dinner if Coates is busy.

Some days, Coates seems to have blown way past busy and entered a state of perpetual motion.

In addition to her work at the college, Coates counsels at least a dozen clients four days a week in her private practice. She also attends seminars where she is sometimes a guest speaker.

“She is probably one of the most active faculty members in staying abreast of the subject matter in her discipline,” says Dick Marsh, dean of social and behavioral sciences. “She’s constantly going to conferences all over the United States, and she usually pays for it out of her own pocket.”

Despite the controversial subject matter, Marsh said he’s had no complaints about Coates, unless he counts the one student who was booted from a lecture for talking and wanted back in.

Recommended readings in Coates’ class include “The New Joy of Sex,” “The Ultimate Sex Book,” “Hot Monogamy” and “How to Make Love All the Time.”

Though it is not required for any major, this class is one of the most hotly pursued on campus. (Coates also teaches advanced human sexuality, a more in-depth look at many of the same issues.)

James Kowalski, one of six teachers who now teach human sexuality at the college, says an instructor’s personality and priorities determine how the subject will be tackled.

He, for example, emphasizes relationships, sexually transmitted diseases, child-rearing and other issues that “affect the mainstream.”

“I rarely talk about sex as a positive thing independent of the relationship,” he says.

Kowalski admits some students might find his class boring compared to Coates’. On the other hand, he says, some might find Coates’ topics more superficial than his.

“Consistently, what I’ve heard from students about Mona’s class is really quite positive,” he adds. “They find her class enjoyable and extremely informative.”

Coates’ views her classroom discussions as anything but superficial.

“My big job is to create and teach only love,” she says, and that “every person, regardless of sexual orientation or dysfunction, is a precious human treasure.”

Coates says she tries by example and attitude to teach students how to talk, listen and “show up emotionally” so strong relationships can be forged.

“It’s not just (giving) information, it’s teaching attitudes and values that enhance human life and human development,” she says.

But all that is just the wrapping; many students want simply to rip into the gift--the basics about sex. Coates does not disappoint them, even showing videos and using transparencies to describe sexual techniques.

Generally, the first 20 minutes of each class are set aside for Coates to address queries from the Question Box. She may then proceed with a lecture based on a previous assignment.

On guest speaker days, a panel of attorneys may discuss sex and the law, members of the clergy may tackle sex and religion, or a medical doctor may describe venereal disease, contraception, pregnancy or childbirth.

And, of course, there are speakers from “sexual minority groups”--including gays, transsexuals and the sexually disabled.

Despite the broadly accepting attitude she displays with her students, Coates believes promiscuity “tears down the fabric of commitment” and makes it harder for “human beings to really grow.” Sex before marriage? Well, that depends on the relationship.

And she doesn’t hesitate to tell a student he’s doing wrong. For example, a 20-year-old man claimed he was being seduced by a 15-year-old girl.

“No matter what the 15-year-old girl does--if she throws her clothes off and jumps on him--it is statutory rape in the eyes of the law. Period,” Coates says.

When her personal beliefs contrast with her mission as a sex educator, Coates says she “centers herself” with a brief prayer or meditative technique.

“It’s not about meeting my needs, it’s about meeting their needs, whether it’s a client or a student or a class as a whole.”

Coates says she has continued teaching human sexuality in part because it allows her to take swipes at the myths, fears, guilt and ignorance that make people miserable.

“It’s not necessary for people to suffer the way they do,” she says.

Her students seem to appreciate the effort. At the close of each semester, most leave behind glowing class evaluation forms.

Jacobs says his wife has taught so many students that, at times, it seems they can’t escape them.

When they were returning from Paris two years ago, a flight attendant stopped suddenly at their aisle and said, “Mona Coates!” The attendant told Coates that one of the pilots was a transvestite. “I know all about it because I studied that in your class,” the attendant said.

“She’s very bright and she could have done many things,” Jacobs says of his wife. “But I personally believe she couldn’t have found a better vocation, both for her and for all the people she’s touched.”