Bronski at Harvard University
Michael Bronski is Professor of the Practice in Media and Activism in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. He has been involved with LGBT politics since 1969 as an activist, organizer, writer, publisher, editor, and independent scholar.
Bronski’s latest book, A Queer History of the United States for Young People was published in the summer of 2019. His Considering Hate: Violence, Goodness, and Justice in American Culture and Politics (co-authored with Kay Whitlock) was published in 2015, and another of his recent books, You Can Tell Just by Looking and 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People (2013) (co-authored with Ann Pellegrini and Michael Amico), was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award for Best Non-Fiction. A Queer History of the United States (2011), was awarded the Israel Fishman Non-Fiction Award for best LGBT book of 2010 by the American Library Association, as well as the Lambda Literary Award for the Best Non-Fiction Book of 2012. His other works include Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility (1984), The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash and the Making of Gay Freedom (1998), and Pulp Friction: Uncovering the Golden Age of Gay Male Pulps (2003), which won a Lambda Literary Award for Best Anthology in 2004. His 1996 anthology Taking Liberties: Gay Men’s Essays on Politics, Culture and Sex won the Lambda Literary Award for Best Anthology in 1997. His work is included in over fifty anthologies. He currently edits the Queer Action / Queer Ideas series for Beacon Press.
Since 1970 Bronski has written extensively on culture, politics, film, theater, books, sexuality, LGBT culture, and current events in publications such as The Village Voice, Cineaste, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Utne Reader, Boston Phoenix, The Advocate, Boston Gay Review,Lambda Book Report, Z, The Nation, Radical America, Boston Review, Notches, Journal of Human Sexuality, Harvard Design Magazine, and Contemporary Women’s Writing.
Bronski has been awarded the 1995 AIDS Action Committee Community Recognition Award for 20 years of journalism on gay and AIDS-related topics; the 1996 Cambridge Lavender Alliance Lifetime Achievement Award for journalism and political organizing; the 1999 The Martin Duberman Fellowship for scholarly research in LGBT studies, awarded by the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, City University of New York; the 1999 Stonewall Award, in recognition for “helping improve the lives and LGBT people in the United States” ($25,000 honorarium) granted by the Anderson Prize Foundation; the 2004 Leadership Award from the D-GALA (Dartmouth Gay and Lesbian Alumni Association); the 2008 Distinguished Lecturer Award granted by Dean of Faculty of Dartmouth College; and he was named the 2017 recipient of the Publishing Triangle’s Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement, arguably the single most prestigious award in honor of LGBTQ writers.
His research interests include: LGBT history and culture, film, theater, contemporary U.S. culture, and children’s literature. Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History: Critical Readings, a four-volume collection of influential essays on LGBT history. He is now at work on The World Turned Upside Down: The Queerness of Children’s Literature, which will be published by Beacon Press in 2021.
Michael Bronski at Alexander Street Press Breakfast
Bronski speaks during the Alexander Street Press Customer Appreciation Breakfast at ALA Chicago in 2013.
Bronski’s Biography
Michael Bronski (born May 12, 1949) is an American academic and writer, best known for his 2011 book A Queer History of the United States.[1] He has been involved with LGBT politics since 1969 as an activist and organizer. He has won numerous awards for LGBTQ activism and scholarship, including the prestigious Publishing Triangle’s Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement. Bronski is a Professor of Practice in Media and Activism at Harvard University.[2]
Since 1970, Bronski has written extensively on culture, politics, film, theater, books, sexuality, LGBT culture, and current events. As a journalist, cultural critic and political commentator he has been published in a wide array of venues including The Village Voice, The Boston Globe, GLQ, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Phoenix, Cineaste, Contemporary Women’s Writing, TIME,, The Nation, and the Boston Review [3][4][5] His scholarship includes over 50 essays in anthologies on LGBTQ culture and politics.
He was an original member of Fag Rag Collective from 1971 to 1998 and the Good Gay Poets Collective.[6] He was a founding member of the Boston Gay Review. He acted as program coordinator for OutWrite: Lesbian and Gay Literary Conference for five years in the 1990s.[7]
Bronski was awarded the 1995 AIDS Action Committee Community Recognition Award for 20 years of journalism on gay and AIDS-related topics.[8] In 1996, he received the Cambridge Lavender Alliance Lifetime Achievement Award for journalism and political organizing.
Bronski was featured in the BBC’s Stage Struck: Gay Theater in the Twentieth Century (1999), PBS’s After Stonewall (1999), Cinemax’s The Hidden Führer: Debating the Enigma of Hitler’s Sexuality (2004), and Wrangler: Anatomy of an Icon (2008).[9]
In 1999, the Anderson Prize Foundation granted Bronski the Stonewall Award in recognition for “helping improve the lives and LGBT people in the United States.”[10]
A Queer History of the United States won both a Lambda Literary Award and a Stonewall Book Award in 2012.[11] He also previously won two Lambda Literary Awards as an editor of anthologies, in 1997 for Taking Liberties: Gay Men’s Essays on Politics, Culture, & Sex and in 2004 for Pulp Friction: Uncovering the Golden Age of Gay Male Pulps.
Bronski consulted on LGBT content and analyzed focus group results for MTV/Logo in 2014 and wrote ten biographies of noted LGBT historical figures for the MTV/Logo June Pride Month programming in 2017.[12]
In 2017, he was the recipient of the Publishing Triangle’s prestigious Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement.[8] Previous awardees included Audre Lorde, Martin Duberman, and Alison Bechdel.
He was a senior lecturer in Women’s and Gender Studies and in Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College, where he was granted the 2008 Distinguished Lecturer Award and 2004 Leadership Award from the Dartmouth Gay and Lesbian Alumni Association.[13] He is currently Professor of the Practice in Media and Activism in the Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University.[11]
Bronski has resided in Cambridge, Massachusetts since 1971. He was the partner of American poet Walta Borawski, who died in 1994.[14]
- “How Gays Helped Make and Remake America”. Slate, May 23, 2011.
- Michael Bronski”. wgs.fas.harvard.edu. Retrieved June 8, 2019.
- “Bronski, Michael 1945- | Encyclopedia.com”. www.encyclopedia.com. Retrieved June 15, 2019.
- “Authors”. Boston Review. Boston Review. Retrieved May 2, 2020.
- “Authors”. The Nation. The Nation. Retrieved May 2, 2020.
- “Good Gay Poets Collective | The Cambridge Room”. Retrieved June 8,2019.
- Aldrich, Robert; Wotherspoon, Garry (July 25, 2005). Who’s Who in Contemporary Gay and Lesbian History Vol.2: From World War II to the Present Day. Routledge.
- “Michael Bronski Receives Bill Whitehead Lifetime Achievement Award”. wgs.fas.harvard.edu. Retrieved June 8, 2019.
- “Michael Bronski”. IMDb. Retrieved June 8, 2019.
- “August 2011 – DGALA | Dartmouth LGBTQIA+ Alum Association”. Retrieved June 8, 2019.
- “Harvard”..
- Nichols, James Michael (June 3, 2017). “Celebrate Pride Month With Logo’s Beautiful Animations Of Historic LGBTQ Icons”. HuffPost. Retrieved June 8,2019.
- Oct 2011, Michael Bronski | Sept-. “America Is Queer”. Dartmouth Alumni Magazine. Retrieved June 8, 2019.
- “Michael Bronski and Walta Borawski. Cambridge, MA”. Retrieved September 22, 2017.
“Bronski at Harvard University” published by Harvard University (open access), “Michael Bronski at Alexander Street Press Breakfast” published Alexander Street, a Proquest Company, on YouTube (republished with embed permission), “Bronski’s Biography” published by Wikipedia (republished under Creative Commons).