Tom Johnson Bio 

Tom Johnson has retired after 30 years of teaching in the anthropology department at California State University, Chico. He has also taught anthropology and sociology at Kyungpook National University (Taegu, Korea) and Waseda University (Tokyo), as well a serving for three years as a founding faculty member at Miyazaki International College in southern Japan. His original discipline was folklore, with an emphasis on children's culture and children's games. He has two books (Shonendan: Adolescent Peer Group Behavior in Rural Japan and Children's Folklore: A Sourcebook) and several articles from that period in his life.

A great deal of time was wasted in various administrative roles, ranging from running the Asian Studies program to directing the Elementary Education program to serving as Dean. It is much more fun to drag students kicking and screaming into thinking or to spend class time "messing with their minds" in creative ways than it is to push papers.

At about the time that he retired, he stumbled across an unstudied sexual minority and, believing fully in the power of serendipity, has pursued it since. Thus far he has two articles in print on voluntary eunuchs with two more in press. A book and several more articles are in the works. A detailed questionnaire sent out to identified members of the eunuch community gathered 996 responses and he estimates that there are over 10,000 voluntary eunuchs in North America, mostly very well hidden from outside view. (These are voluntary eunuchs, as opposed to the over 500,000 prostate cancer eunuchs, who are also very well hidden.)

In his spare time he helps his daughter with the family winery, Roshambo, and baby-sits his four year-old grandson. He also volunteers in a sixth grade class, because teaching is too much fun to give up.