When Theresa Crenshaw spoke about sex, people listened. “You’re not just sleeping with one person,” the groundbreaking sex therapist cautioned in a 1987 NBC television interview. “You’re sleeping with everyone they ever slept with.”
Her blunt warning quickly became a motto of the safer-sex campaign.
Crenshaw’s straightforward approach, coupled with her charisma, made her a powerful spokesperson for sexual awareness in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s. “Theresa was a very beautiful, statuesque blonde who was educated and bright,” Roger Crenshaw, her former husband and business partner, told the San Diego Union-Tribune last fall. “She was able to present her ideas in places where others may not have been comfortable.”
Crenshaw died September 3 in San Diego after a long battle with cancer. She was 59.
A native of Sweden, she grew up in San Francisco. After earning her bachelor’s degree in history, she attended medical school at UC-Irvine. She met famed human-sexuality researchers William H. Masters and Virginia Johnson at a conference during that period and later became their pupil.
After medical school, Crenshaw interned at the San Diego Naval Medical Center, rising to the rank of lieutenant commander in the Navy Medical Corps. In 1975, she and Roger opened the Crenshaw Clinic, a pioneering sex therapy clinic in San Diego. They also co-founded the San Diego Society for Sex Therapists and Educators before divorcing in 1983.
Crenshaw emerged on the national scene with the publication of her book Bedside Manners: Your Guide to Better Sex (1983). She spoke on television talk shows and news programs, hosted radio shows in San Diego and Los Angeles and lectured widely, using her warm, humorous style to educate and entertain.
She closed her clinic in 1987 when President Reagan appointed her to a term on his AIDS commission. HIV awareness and AIDS prevention became her new focus. Some of her views drew strong opposition, such as her call for mandatory HIV testing of high-risk individuals and the disclosure of the results to their sexual partners. More often, however, her messages hit home. In a 1991 address at the National Conference on HIV, she rattled the 800 experts in attendance with a pair of provocative questions. When she asked if they supported the use of condoms in preventing HIV infection, almost everyone raised a hand. Then came the follow-up: would they trust a condom for protection in a sexual encounter with their dream partner—who happened to be HIV-positive? Not one hand appeared.
Crenshaw is survived by her son, Brant.
