John D'Emilio


John D'Emilio is a professor emeritus of history and of women's and gender studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He taught at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He earned his B.A. from Columbia College and Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1982, where his advisor was William Leuchtenburg. He was a Guggenheim fellow in 1998 and National Endowment for the Humanities fellow in 1997 and also served as Director of the Policy Institute at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force from 1995 to 1997.

Honors and awards

D'Emilio was awarded the Stonewall Book Award in 1984 for his most widely cited book, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, which is considered the definitive history of the U.S. homophile movement from 1940 to 1970. His biography of the civil-rights leader Bayard Rustin, Lost Prophet: Bayard Rustin and the Quest for Peace and Justice in America, won the Randy Shilts Award and the Stonewall Book Award for non-fiction in 2004. He was the 2005 recipient of the Brudner Prize at Yale University.
In 1999, D'Emilio was Honored with the David R Kessler award for LGBTQ Studies from CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies.
His and Estelle Freedman's book Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America was cited in Justice Anthony Kennedy's opinion in Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 American Supreme Court case overturning all remaining anti-sodomy laws.
In 2005 D'Emilio was inducted into the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame.
He received the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from Publishing Triangle in 2013.

Personal life

Jim Oleson, D'Emilio's partner since the early 1980s, died at their home in Chicago on April 4, 2015.

Works

Author

Co-author

Editor

  • The Civil Rights Struggle: Leaders in Profile, with an introduction
  • The Universities and the Gay Experience: Proceedings of the Conference Sponsored by the Women and Men of the Gay Academic Union, November 23 and 24, 1973, with an introduction

Co-editor