Offsite at Gerber/Hart:

Join us at Gerber/Hart on Saturday, August 22nd, at 1 PM to celebrate historian John D’Emilio’s newest book, Making Gay History: Memoir of a Scholar-Activist . 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. A pioneer in the field of LGBTQ history and the history of sexuality, John D’Emilio is the author of several books, including Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America; Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-70; and Memories of a Gay Catholic Boyhood: Coming of Age in the Sixties . He has served twice as president of the board of Gerber/Hart Library and Archives, and his book, Queer Legacies: Stories from Chicago’s LGBTQ Archives , is based entirely on research in Gerber/Hart’s collections.