Most famous gay men in history series#
This bequest allowed the FLAGS committee to appoint a series of one-year visiting lecturers, usually recent Ph.D.’s, to teach courses in the field. Baker ‘67 left a bequest to fund visiting professorships in lesbian and gay studies. That work was enhanced in 1992, when Stephen T. It supports the research of faculty and graduate students the acquisition of books, journals, and research collections at Sterling Memorial Library and the purchase of films for use in courses and research by the Film Studies Center.Īfter Boswell’s tragically early death due to AIDS in 1994, other faculty took over the leadership of lesbian and gay studies at Yale, including Charles Porter, professor in the French Department, who chaired the FLAGS committee for four years Marianne LaFrance, a professor in Psychology and Women’s and Gender Studies, who served as chair of its successor committee, Lesbian and Gay Studies, from 2000 until 2007 Joanne Meyerowitz, professor in History and American Studies, who chaired the committee in 2007-08 and George Chauncey, professor in History and American Studies, who chaired the committee in 2008-10.Īlthough Yale’s program became best known nationally for its conferences and faculty and graduate student research, it also devoted considerable attention to developing an undergraduate curriculum. The FLAGS endowment, since augmented by additional donations from numerous alumni and other supporters, continues to play an essential role in fostering LGBTS at Yale. In 1992, inspired in part by the success of these early ventures, an anonymous donor made it possible for a group of faculty associated with LGSCY to establish the Research Fund for Lesbian and Gay Studies (now known as FLAGS).
As academic gatherings of the most generative sort, they played a critical role in building a new community of scholars and a new field of study. The largest of these conferences attracted a thousand people, including a small army of graduate students whose work would go on to shape the field. The three Yale conferences inaugurated a series of six national conferences in lesbian and gay studies, with the fourth held at Harvard the following year, the fifth at Rutgers in 1991, and the final one at the University of Iowa in 1994. The conferences drew together pioneering community-based scholars such as Gloria Anzaldúa and Vito Russo and young academics just starting their careers such as Judith Butler, George Chauncey, Lee Edelman, Regina Kunzel, and Elizabeth Povinelli (all of whom earned their Ph.D.’s at Yale in the 1980s). In ways the organizers could not have foreseen, these three conferences played a crucial role in constituting the field of LGBT Studies at a critical early moment in its development. In October of 1987, LGSCY organized its inaugural conference, and in October 1988 and October 1989 Yale hosted two more such conferences, each drawing more speakers and registrants than the one before it. Six years later, Boswell chaired a committee of faculty and students that established the Lesbian and Gay Studies Center at Yale (LGSCY, or “Legacy”), one of the first such centers in the nation and the predecessor of today’s LGBTS.
Its phenomenal erudition also earned him an American Book Award and helped establish the scholarly rigor and compelling significance of gay studies. The book’s electrifying implications for one of the central religious debates of our time made Boswell the best known gay studies scholar of his day. This magisterial, highly acclaimed, and highly controversial study argued that the modern Catholic Church’s condemnation of homosexuality departed from the tolerance and even celebration of homosexual love that had characterized the first millennium of the Church’s teachings. In 1980, the Yale medievalist John Boswell published Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century. Yale has played a leading role in the development of LGBT and queer studies for more than thirty years.
The Origins of Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale, 1980-1994