SF State's department of sexuality studies mastered its talk about the birds and the bees, being the only school to offer a master's degree in the subject. With their focus on a push for sexual literacy, the department invites distinguished people to speak to their students.

"We have these lecturers come in to push our intellectual selves forward," sexuality studies graduate student Marik Xavier-Brier said. "Our department is the only one of its kind -- it's quite unique."

Xavier-Brier, 26, is one of the many students planning to attend the Third Annual John H. Gagnon Distinguished Lecture on Sexuality, Modernity and Change.

Cynthia A. Gomez, founding director of the Health Equity Institute for Research, Practice and Policy at SF State, will lead the lecture on Sept. 24 at 7 p.m. at 835 Market St., Room 607.

Gomez was an advisor to former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush on the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS from 1999-2002.

"I was rotated off because I didn't agree with the decisions being made," Gomez said. "The new council didn't even know much about HIV. That's when I was exposed to the sense of what happens not because of common sense but political will."

In her upcoming lecture, "From Reagan to Obama: The Impact of Politics in HIV Prevention in America," Gomez plans to talk about how politics affect public health policies -- specifically about HIV.

Gomez will also address how politics get in the way of public health efforts and "make policies that impact the health of our communities."

The lecture is in recognition of John H. Gagnon, who developed the concept of "sexual scripts," which puts forward that "a person's sexual behavior and experience of that behavior is influenced by their subjective understanding of their own sexuality," according to his research.

"Being at SF State, where the core of the University is about equity and social justice, it really appeals to me," Gomez said. "The focus is on discovery and a lot of passion."

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, HIV was first identified in the United States in 1981. A number of gay men were falling ill with a rare type of cancer; this outbreak was eventually traced to the immune system-attacking virus. Then-President Ronald Reagan did not mention AIDS for three more years.

Now, the Obama administration is putting AIDS "back on the nation's radar," according to an article in USA Today.

According to the CDC, 56,300 new infections of HIV occurred in the United States in 2006. At the end of that year, an estimated 1.1 million persons in the country were living with diagnosed or undiagnosed HIV/AIDS.

"It's something we are taught to constantly think about and worry about. It's important to know that STDs, et cetera, are out there but it doesn't do people any good to be afraid of it," Xavier-Brier said.

"We need to look at sexuality as a whole part of a being and we need to integrate it into more of our conversations -- academically, socially, in our community and talk about it as a positive thing and not only as a negative, scary, dangerous thing."