George Chauncey

George Chauncey is a scholar of twentieth-century U.S. history and lesbian and gay history. He is co-director of the Yale Research Initiative on the History of Sexualities and has served as the chair of the History Department, chair of LGBT Studies, and Director of Graduate Studies and Undergraduate Studies for American Studies. He is author of Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 and Why Marriage? The History Shaping Today’s Debate Over Gay Equality.

Since 1993, Chauncey has participated as a historian in more than thirty gay rights cases, including five that reached the Supreme Court. He organized and was lead author of the Historians’ Amicus Brief in Lawrence v. Texas (2003), which the Court cited in its decision overturning the nation’s remaining sodomy laws. He also prepared the amicus brief on the history of antigay discrimination submitted by the Organization of American Historians, which the Supreme Court cited in its opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 case that established the right of same-sex couples to marry nationwide. He is the recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Humanities Center, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, and the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.