George Chauncey

George Chauncey (born 1954) is a professor of history at Columbia University. He is best known as the author of Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (1994). Life and works Chauncey received his bachelor's in 1977 in history and later his Ph.D. in 1989 in history from Yale University, where he studied with Nancy Cott and David Montgomery. From 1991-2006, he taught in the Department of History at the University of Chicago, rising from assistant professor to full professor of history. In 2006, he joined the Yale faculty. He subsequently joined Columbia University's Department of History in 2017. Chauncey additionally spent time as the director of the Columbia Research Initiative on the Global History of Sexualities, focusing on literature that researched gender and sexuality. George Chauncey is most well known for creating the popular text "Gay New York", which showed the public on a national scale the struggles that members of the LGBTQ+ community experienced daily. However, what goes unnoticed are the actions and events Chauncey participated in outside of his time as an author. Most notably, Chauncey spent time as an expert witness in thirty cases involving gay rights, some examples including Romer vs Evans (1996) and Lawrence vs Texas (2003). In his later years, Chauncey spent time working as a consultant on historical research projects as well as lecture series in New York City as well as Chicago. Chauncey's activism in gay rights movements as well as creating powerful literature caused him to receive countless community and writing accolades that are tied to his historical legacy for generations to come. His book Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (1994) was published to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion. It combined social, political, and cultural history, and in it, Chauncey argues that early twentieth-century New York had a thriving, open gay culture. Using newspaper accounts from a wide variety of mainstream and underground publications, the archives of reform organizations, police and court records, popular cartoons and caricatures, guidebooks, and maps, Chauncey offers a rich and textured account of urban gay life.