Persistent Voices: John D'Emilio

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John D'Emilio (born 1948, New York City) is a professor 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 Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1982, where his advisor was William Leuchtenburg. A Guggenheim fellow in 1998 and National Endowment for the Humanities fellow in 1997, he served as Director of the Policy Institute at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force from 1995 to 1997.

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 Stonewall Book Award for non-fiction in 2004. He was the 2005 recipient of the Brudner Prize at Yale University.

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.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_D%27Emilio


John D'Emilio by Robert Giard

American photographer Robert Giard is renowned for his portraits of American poets and writers; his particular focus was on gay and lesbian writers. Some of his photographs of the American gay and lesbian literary community appear in his groundbreaking book Particular Voices: Portraits of Gay and Lesbian Writers, published by MIT Press in 1997. Giard’s stated mission was to define the literary history and cultural identity of gays and lesbians for the mainstream of American society, which perceived them as disparate, marginal individuals possessing neither. In all, he photographed more than 600 writers. (http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/digitallibrary/giard.html)