Michael Bronski

Michael Bronski

Professor of the Practice in Media and Activism
photo of Michael Bronski

Pronouns: he/him

Michael Bronski is Professor of the Practice in Media and Activism in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. 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, will be published by Bloomsbury at the end of 2019. 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.

Courses Taught in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality
WOMGEN 91R Engaged Scholarship: Supervised Research and Writing in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
WOMGEN 97 Sophomore Tutorial
WOMGEN 1170 Power to the People: Black Power, Radical Feminism, and Gay Liberation 1955-1975
WOMGEN 1180 Hollywood Films and Postwar LGBT Politics
WOMGEN 1200sh Power to the People: Black Power, Radical Feminism, and Gay Liberation 1955-1975
WOMGEN 1239 Plagues and Politics
WOMGEN 1243 Men to Boys: Masculinity in Postwar Hollywood Film
WOMGEN 1247 I Will Survive: Women’s Political Resistance Through Popular Song
WGS 1259 Can We Talk? Jewish Women and Humor
WOMGEN 1462 Hollywood and Radical Political Movements of the 1960s

 

Contact Information

Office: Boylston
Cambridge, MA 02138

Websites