A refined eye

Gail ELIZABETH WYATT doesn’t look the part.

Hooker.

With her fair complexion, silky hair and refined dress, she resembles the archetypal African American trophy wife of her generation. Indeed, her husband is an obstetrician-gynecologist, and they live in a grand home -- tennis court, swimming pool -- high above Beverly Hills. Yet even on his arm, and even when she “looked like a lady going to church” in a new, emerald silk dress, she has been mistaken for a prostitute.

How could anyone see that when looking at this woman?

Race alone, she says, and her pioneering research proves it.

“I did the first study on African American female sexuality,” Wyatt says during an interview in her office at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute, where she runs the sexual health program. An associate director of the UCLA AIDS Institute, she is also a professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the medical school. The first black and female licensed psychologist in California, Wyatt, 59, earned her doctorate at UCLA, stayed for training as a sex therapist and never left.

“When I told my mother I wanted to become a sex therapist, she said, ‘Honey, can’t we just tell people you’re a teacher?’ ” Wyatt recalls.

A scholar of sexual behavior, she studies factors that influence decisions, actions and responses, largely in relation to HIV. For most of her career, she has also investigated the consequences of slavery, rape, breeding -- the centuries when African American women couldn’t say no -- and the resulting stereotypes of black females as oversexed and immoral.

Overcoming those stereotypes was the focus of her first book for a general audience, “Stolen Women: Reclaiming Our Sexuality, Taking Back Our Lives” (John Wiley & Sons, 1997), which remains in print. Her latest is “No More Clueless Sex: Ten Secrets to a Sex Life That Works for Both of You” (Wiley), which she co-wrote with her husband, Dr. Lewis Wyatt.

But she needs neither books nor federally funded, peer-reviewed, scientifically defensible studies to prove how sexual stereotypes influence behavior.

Ask about that green dress, the one she wrote about in “Stolen Women,” the one with the Peter Pan collar and sash tie.

“It was made from material Lewis had brought home from Thailand just for me. I guess that’s why I felt so special,” she says. She remembers everything about that day 25 years ago, in that hotel outside Cleveland where they stayed while attending his sister’s wedding.

As she waited alone in the lobby, two white guys walked out of the hotel bar. One said, “She must cost $100.”

Nothing protected Wyatt from that insult -- not her wedding band, her doctorate or her very sheltered childhood.

Middle-class upbringing

Fourth- generation college, a granddaughter of a Methodist minister, a daughter of conservative educators, Gail Smith came of age in L.A.’s newly integrated Leimert Park, with suitable friends, membership in Jack and Jill (an exclusive group for cultured, middle-class black families), a cruise to Norway, deportment classes and a second trip to Europe, all before she graduated at 16 from Dorsey High School.

Her own sex education?

Books and pamphlets given to her by her mother, at a time when most parents said nothing.

For years, she and her sister Sandra performed with their father, Ulysses “Jeep” Smith, a jazz musician and high school band leader. The Smith Sisters also sang on the ‘50s “Mickey Mouse Club” television show, and recorded eight singles before rejecting a major label to finish college.

Gail followed Sandra to historically black Fisk University in Nashville at the height of the civil rights movement, pledged her mother’s elite sorority and in her junior year met Lewis Wyatt. Two months after her graduation, she married the man who for nearly four decades has been her first and only husband.

Sounds like a black “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” but Wyatt is as comfortable with grandes dames as she is with homeless street women.

“You may see a small, little lady, but don’t be fooled,” says Dr. Eric Bing, also a behavioral science researcher and an assistant professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Charles R. Drew University medical school near Watts. He met her in 1987 during his residency at UCLA and has since collaborated with her on research projects, journal articles and international consulting.

As her thick curriculum vitae and stacks of press clippings show, Wyatt is best known for work regarding behavior and the HIV virus. Her most prominent work in this area, a landmark longitudinal study conducted between 1994 and 2000 for the National Institute of Mental Health, closely matched diverse women with HIV to those without it to determine how the virus affects actions and responses.

“We try to be the bridge between basic sciences and real people,” she says. So she’s not looking for a cure for AIDS, she’s looking at why someone who has the virus refuses to take his medicine. Or why a girl who is sexually abused is more likely as an adult to be infected.

Because federal funding sets research priorities in her field, Wyatt says, AIDS is her primary topic. But before the virus was identified, she had made a name for herself with substantial scholarship on child abuse, and by disproving sexual behavioral theories that lumped all black women together.

Back then, it didn’t matter if you were rich, poor, illiterate, well-educated, rural, urban, cultured, crude, religious or a worshiper at St. Mattress. All that mattered was race. If you were a black woman, the literature said, you tended toward early intercourse, teen pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.

“Who were these people?” Wyatt asked. She didn’t recognize herself or her friends in those studies.

“She’s from a black middle-class family, and girls from that background didn’t do that. They didn’t sleep around like white girls or girls from the inner city,” says Hector Myers, a UCLA psychology professor who knew her in grad school. “What that did for Gail, from a positive standpoint,” he says, “it allowed her to step outside, and rather than judge what these women were doing, to ask tough questions about how did these women ... make these decisions.”

In her seminal 1980 study of black female sexuality, Wyatt compared black and white women of similar backgrounds and found the flaw. Her predecessors had paired a diverse group of white women -- rich, poor, educated -- with a group of poor black women, and then reported that all black women tended toward the unhealthy sexual behaviors associated with poverty. Wyatt found that similar women tended to behave similarly when making sexual decisions, a pattern that held across race, income and other characteristics.

“When I started to look at the experiences of these women, and then teased out the economic background, the family structure ... these [black] women were no different from anyone else,” Wyatt says. “The saddest thing was, many of them believed these stereotypes, and the stereotypes were driving them.”

She still sees those stereotypes everywhere. In “bootylicious” music videos. In movies (Halle, Halle, Halle!). On television. In explicit books, like the ones by Zane, that top African American bestseller lists.

Her advisor for her master’s thesis at Fisk, Henry Tomes, remembers a brilliant student who brought her work and her baby son to his office. Tomes, now the executive director of the American Psychological Assn.’s public interest sector, describes Wyatt’s career emphasis as “courageous.”

“Many African American psychologists shied away from sexuality as a topic of scientific professional interest” in those days, he says in a telephone interview from his Washington, D.C., office. “It was not necessarily a quote-unquote mainstream topic, and people who were already different just being in the field didn’t necessarily want to take on a topic that might not cause them to advance.”

Husband and partner

Dr. LEWIS WYATT had concerns when his wife talked about becoming a sex therapist. She persuaded him to join her.

“We shared the training together,” she says, “which made it a lot easier than coming home in the ‘70s with all this information totally out of context for the time, for a black woman and for a married woman.”

While he uses that expertise in his medical practice, she sees clients -- with a box of Kleenex nearby -- in her UCLA office. (Sex therapists don’t watch people having sex, it’s talking therapy.) Their book, “No More Clueless Sex,” is not a sex manual, so don’t look for pictures.

“There are enough books out there to tell people what to do, how to do this to get the person you want,” she says. These pages explain how to think about sex. Hint: “Your brain is the sexiest part of your body.”

Of course, there’s a lot more in a book whose jacket flap asks: “What’s Standing Between You and Great Sex?” A lot that won’t be printed in a family newspaper. A lot that the authors think would make for a great TV talk show starring Wyatt and Wyatt. (She has already taken meetings with two producers.)

He’s game for that, but at 66, he’s ready to retire from delivering babies. “This is the time we’re supposed to be sitting back,” he says during an interview in their formal living room. Their children, Lance and Lacey, both physicians, are long out of the house. There’s a darling granddaughter, for whom Grandma loves to shop when she has a spare hour.

That’s rare.

“I’m enjoying what I’m doing. I’m at my peak intellectually. I know how to deliver my message verbally. I’ve got the passion to do it. My health is good,” she says. “If he wants to retire, he should.”

Not without her. He wants to travel together, like they did to Zimbabwe, and to Lake Como, Italy, where she had vowed at the age of 14 to return with the man she loved, and that unforgettable vacation in Hong Kong -- where as she strolled arm in arm with her husband, an Asian man pointed at her and asked, “Where can I get one like that?”

It happens.

But Gail Wyatt knows, and her research shows, that neither she nor most African American women fit that part.