George Chauncey
Professor
Office: HGS 2684
Phone: (203) 436-8100
Email: george.chauncey@yale.edu
George Chauncey joined the department in the
fall of 2006 as professor in the fields of twentieth-century US history and lesbian and gay history.
He received his doctorate in history from Yale in 1989 and then taught for fifteen years at the University of Chicago, as well as for shorter stints at Rutgers, New York University, and the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris.
Professor Chauncey is best known for his book Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (Basic, 1994), which won the Organization of American Historians' Merle Curti Prize for the best book in social history and Frederick Jackson Turner Prize for the best first book in history, as well as the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and Lambda Literary Award. He recently published Why Marriage? The History Shaping Today's Debate over Gay Equality (Basic, 2004), and has co-edited three books and special journal issues and published numerous articles on the history of gender and sexuality. He is currently nearing completion of another book, The Strange Career of the Closet: Gay Culture, Consciousness, and Politics from the Second World War to the Gay Liberation Era, which reconstructs the racially-segregated and class-stratified African American, Latino, and white gay male worlds and sexual cultures of postwar New York City, analyzes the generational shift from the culture of the double life to the culture of coming out, and reinterprets the sources of postwar antihomosexualism, the development of gay politics, and the transformation of urban liberalism.
In recent years Professor Chauncey has been involved in several major court cases and public debates bearing on the rights of lesbians and gay men. He testified as an expert witness on the history of antigay discrimination at the Amendment 2 trial in Colorado, which resulted in the Supreme Court's historic decision in Romer v. Evans (1994) that gay people could not be excluded from the political process, and he was the organizer and lead author of the Historians' Amicus Brief in Lawrence v. Texas (2003), which weighed heavily in the Supreme Court's landmark decision overturning the nation's remaining sodomy laws. He has also authored or joined amicus briefs and affidavits on the history of marriage or antigay discrimination submitted in several state court cases in which same-sex couples have sought the right to marry. He has also served as the historical consultant to numerous public history projects, including major exhibitions, public lecture series, and documentary films. He is the recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Humanities Center, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.
