The Value of History

After retiring from academia in 2014, John D’Emilio ’70, GSAS’82, a pioneering historian whose work helped to establish the field of LGBTQ history, began writing his memoirs.

“Whenever possible I would include a memoir in the required course reading, because it really brought students into history in a more personal way,” says D’Emilio, a professor emeritus of history and of gender and women’s studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “So in my head I always imagined [doing] that.” Memories of a Gay Catholic Boyhood: Coming of Age in the Sixties, published in 2022, describes D’Emilio’s early life growing up in an Italian immigrant family in the working-class Bronx; it ends with his College graduation and determination to attend grad school.

His latest, Making Gay History: Memoir of a Scholar-Activist (Duke University Press, $32.95), picks up there, with D’Emilio’s decision to study U.S. history at Columbia. It details his life over three decades — the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s — in three cities: New York; Greensboro, N.C., where he taught at the University of North Carolina; and Washington, D.C., where he served as the director of the Policy Institute at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

From the start of his career, D’Emilio has been motivated by the belief that historical knowledge can be a force for progressive social change. His early research uncovered and interpreted a period of gay history and activism that had never been written about; his Ph.D. dissertation became the influential 1983 book Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, which ushered in a new period of visibility and study.

D’Emilio went on to garner wide recognition as a scholar and author. He collaborated on the 1988 bestseller Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America and earned a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1998.His 2003 biography of the gay civil rights leader Bayard Rustin won a Stonewall Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award; he was inducted into the Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame in 2005.

The first section of Gay History, which covers the years 1971–83, is a particularly exciting depiction of his early adulthood. It features D’Emilio’s formative time on campus — colloquia taught by the young scholar Eric Foner ’63, GSAS’69; dinners with iconic historian James Shenton ’49, GSAS’54, who became a surrogate parent to D’Emilio; the camaraderie and community formed by the Graduate History Student Association — as well as his involvement with the newly established Gay Academic Union (GAU) in 1973 and his exploration of gay life in post-Stonewall NYC.

“I wanted [this book] to be three dimensional and full, so I do talk about some very personal things,” D’Emilio says.

In this excerpt, D’Emilio details his decision to study gay history — a big leap in 1974, that would effectively out him to faculty, his future professional world … and his parents. (A tentative first step was telling them he’d narrowed his topic down to three possibilities: a history of either prostitution, venereal diseases or homosexuality. “Simultaneously, as if they had rehearsed it, they both said, ‘Oh, John, please. NOT HOMOSEXUALITY!’” Happily, they eventually came around.)

He also shares how his dissertation was shaped by two people: his adviser, the esteemed Columbia history professor William E. Leuchtenburg GSAS’51; and his friend Jonathan Ned Katz, a scholar of human sexuality and a founding member of the GAU.

Discussing the chapter, D’Emilio says that Leuchtenburg’s approval of his dissertation proposal was everything: “His stature was such that no one was going to say no to Bill Leuchtenburg. His validation was tremendous.” Challenged by research for which there was no existing historical literature, D’Emilio’s Ph.D. ultimately took seven years to complete.

He chose to end Making Gay History in 1999, when he was recruited specifically to teach LGBTQ studies in Chicago. “It was a good place to stop because that was such a symbol of social change,” he says. “The sphere of research and writing which had for so long marginalized me in the academic world had now proven a calling card for a high-level position.”

He says he’s certain there won’t be a third volume in his memoirs: “It would be too close to my current life.” And despite D’Emilio’s concern about ongoing attempts to render gay history invisible, he remains hopeful.

“It’s important to remember that if we jumped back in time 50 years, there would be no LGBTQ history to ban,” he says. “These reactionary politics are only possible because of the tremendous gains and changes that have happened.”

And as D’Emilio makes clear in this memoir: History can be a tool to inspire and motivate. “One of history’s greatest values is that it can offer us encouraging lessons in difficult times,” he writes. “Without underestimating the dangers and challenges that the LGBTQ community and other marginalized groups are facing, I hope this account of my experiences serves as an empowering reminder that historical knowledge can be a force for progressive change and that intellectual work does not need to exist only in an ivory tower.”

— Jill C. Shomer

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The Decision to Do “Gay History”

Soon after taking my oral exam, I approached Professor William Leuchtenburg about serving as my dissertation director. Leuchtenburg had a sterling reputation among students, within the university, and in the wider academic world. He had written books on the United States in the 1920s and on the New Deal, and each had quickly become the standard work in the field, assigned widely in college U.S. history courses. He wrote in a style that was accessible to a nonacademic audience, and he expected his students to do the same. In the colloquium that I had taken with him, he had praised my writing and my interpretive analysis while also offering deeply constructive feedback. He knew about my earlier work on the Committee for Economic Development, and he encouraged me to continue exploring the workings of corporate liberalism in the mid-twentieth century.

That summer I read anything I could find about homosexuality and its history. There was a small literature concerning Christian religious teaching and a much larger literature based in the social sciences, medicine, and psychiatry. As I expected, the bulk of it was condemnatory, with an emphasis on pathology, deviance, and moral turpitude. I soon imagined writing a dissertation that spanned the length of U.S. history, moving from the religious teachings that shaped law and social attitudes in the settlement era and the nineteenth century to the rise of a scientific literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I would explore the way police, courts, mental institutions, the military, and a growing federal government dealt with the increasing visibility of a homosexual world in the twentieth century. The goal would be to understand why the United States was so extremely homophobic and what made it possible for an organized resistance movement to rise up in the mid-twentieth century. I talked about this with the graduate students whom I had come to know well through my study group and through working on Common Sense, and they were uniformly supportive of the idea. Estelle Freedman, who was well engaged in research for her dissertation on nineteenth-century women’s history, was especially encouraging, and we had many conversations as I moved forward with my reading.

When the fall semester began, I made an appointment to meet with Leuchtenburg. Naturally, I was worried about how he might react when I informed him of my intentions, but I determined to keep those worries buried and, instead, to present my proposed topic with joyful enthusiasm. Sitting in his office in Fayerweather Hall, I announced that I had reached a decision. “I want to write a history of homosexuality in the United States,” I told him, and then briefly described my sweeping panoramic concept. Pausing for barely a moment and with an expression of thoughtful reflection on his face, he responded, “John, I think you have an area of research. Now what you need to do is narrow it down and come up with a more precise topic.” I could not have asked for a more supportive and constructive response.

Not surprisingly, Jonathan came to the rescue in my efforts to zero in upon a focused area to explore. He told me about the interviews he had done with people like Harry Hay and Barbara Gittings, who were activists in the two decades before Stonewall. Hay, a communist, had founded a group called the Mattachine Society at the height of the McCarthy era. Gittings had edited a lesbian publication and participated in the first demonstrations protesting the federal government’s ban on the employment of LGBTQ people. Luckily for me, Jonathan at this time was also pulling together a large series of out-of-print books and periodicals on homosexuality that a reference book publisher would reprint. Through him, I got my first look at some issues of The Mattachine Review and The Ladder, two of the core publications produced by gay and lesbian — or “homophile,” as they called themselves then — groups before Stonewall. He told me that the New York Mattachine Society still had an office in Greenwich Village and that they had masses of materials on movement activism from the 1950s and ’60s. Jonathan also provided me with the names and addresses of activists in California with whom he had been in touch. I wrote to all of them, and they quickly responded affirmatively. Yes, they had materials from the 1950s and ’60s that I could explore, and yes, they welcomed the opportunity to be interviewed by me so that their work might receive recognition.

With support like this, it did not take long before I succeeded in following Leuchtenburg’s advice. I prepared a proposal to write a dissertation on the history of LGBTQ activism in the United States. I explained why the topic was worth exploring, the dearth of historical literature on it, and how such a study would fit into and help revise what was already written about the United States in the 1950s and ’60s. My working title was “Invisible Minority: The Homosexual Rights Movement in the United States.” The dissertation would address the question of how a stigmatized minority coalesced into a politically conscious force agitating for social change. I even managed to come up with a tentative structure of eleven chapters. Given how little was known about the pre-Stonewall activism of the 1950s and ’60s, I assumed the project would need to take the story up to the current year of 1974. Reading the proposal now, five decades later, I am shocked at how thin it seems. But Leuchtenburg expressed support for it, and, with his backing, this very unusual topic — indeed, unique for the times — received the approval of Columbia’s history department. I was now launched on a path that would completely shape my professional and personal life, an impact that I could never have imagined in 1974.

From Making Gay History: Memoir of a Scholar-Activist by John D’Emilio. Copyright © Duke University Press, 2026.