Making Gay History

Memoir of a Scholar-Activist

By: John D'Emilio

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Hardcover | 7 July 2026

At a Glance

Hardcover
288 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
22.9 x 15.2

Hardcover

RRP $76.99

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Making Gay History recounts John D’Emilio’s career as a public historian, activist, and academic. Tracing his involvement in developing LGBTQ history from the 1970s to the 1990s, D’Emilio paints a queer history both personal and national that helps us understand how the LGBTQ movement has grown.

Making Gay History continues John D’Emilio’s story, following his memoir of his early years, Memories of a Gay Catholic Boyhood. Here, D’Emilio recounts his career as a public historian, activist, and academic, relating his own queer history alongside the development of the LGBTQ movement in the United States. D’Emilio was part of the first burgeoning period of LGBTQ studies while still a graduate student in New York City. From there, he takes readers through his experiences as an out professor at UNC Greensboro, his activism in Washington, DC, and finally, his employment at the University of Illinois as an LGBTQ historian, a position that was unimaginable at the start of his career. At the same time, he narrates his own coming out, his successes and struggles with LGBTQ advocacy, and the loves and losses faced throughout his adult life, telling an intertwined personal and national history of queer hearts and minds.

Industry Reviews

"This lively, engaging memoir by one of the earliest, major historians of US sexuality is a report from the trenches, a history of the struggle to create a history of sexuality, a personal history of political activism, the story of a smart boy from the Bronx who made himself into a pioneering, left, feminist, anti-racist gay, public intellectual."--Jonathan Ned Katz, author of, The Daring Life and Dangerous Times of Eve Adams

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