Historian/activist/writer/educator John D’Emilio is someone who can actually say he was in the rooms where it happened. In his new memoir, “Making Gay History: Memoir of a Scholar-Activist” (Duke University Press, 2026), D’Emilio’s follow-up to 2022’s “Memories of a Gay Catholic Boyhood,” D’Emilio invites readers along on his personal and professional journey. Beginning in New York and including stops in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Greensboro, North Carolina, Washington DC, and Chicago, D’Emilio’s odyssey in education, activism, writing and research and ultimately in love, is as compelling as any you will ever encounter.
Gregg Shapiro: Because of your life as a historian, were you a journal keeper during the periods about which you wrote, or did you rely on your memory?
John D’Emilio: I kept a journal on and off during these decades. Sometimes I’d write regularly for several months, and then I’d have a break for a few months. But I also had a lot of other sources to confirm and flesh out my memories. I have all my calendars/ appointment books going back to the 1970s. I have paper files related to my organizational involvement as well as correspondence from friends, and a couple of my friends provided me with copies of the letters I had written them. So, in some ways, writing this book involved doing a lot of “research” in my extensive personal archives.
GS: In the prologue to “Making Gay History: Memoir of a Scholar-Activist,” you mention book bans. Are you aware of any of your books being banned?
JD: It’s possible that this has happened in some locations, but frankly, I’m not aware of any such banning.
GS: In chapter two, you wrote about “young activist-oriented historians-to-be,” as well as Roosevelt, the New Deal, and socialism. The subject of socialism also came up again in the ninth chapter. Would you agree that this makes your book timely with the rise of democratic socialism?
JD: There was definitely a good number of gay male activists in the 1970s – not only in New York, where I was living, but in several other cities as well – who identified as socialists. We engaged in militant activism as well as efforts at community education. I find it very encouraging that, even in this era of Trump, we are seeing a resurgence of democratic socialist activism. I think one of the ways this current activism is different from what I experienced in the 1970s is that today, they understand the importance of engaging directly with the political system and electoral politics.
GS: By the fourth chapter, you had already begun to have community interactions with significant people, including Jonathan Ned Katz and Sylvia Rivera. In chapters that follow, your encounters with Harry Hay, Frank Kameny, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, Barbara Gittings, Larry Kramer, Allan Bérubé, Abby Rubenfeld, Ginny Apuzzo, Cleve Jones, and Urvashi Vaid, to mention a few, make the book read like a who’s who of LGBTQ history.
JD: I had two different forms of connection with LGBTQ activism. Some were from the pre-Stonewall generation of movement activists, and I had the privilege of interviewing them at length about the pioneering work they had done, and so I was certainly aware then of their significance. And I love the fact that I am making people like Hay, Kameny, Martin, Lyon, and Gittings visible to a generation of readers who might have no knowledge of them. But as to the others, these were individuals who, over the years, I was connecting with on the ground, so to speak, engaging with them in the work of social change, sometimes through our research and writing and sometimes through organizational engagement. I knew, at the time, that people like Cleve and Urvashi and Larry and Ginny were key activists, and it gave me great pleasure to give them recognition through the content of this memoir.
GS: Chapter seven features the story of your coming out to your parents. There are some wonderful quotes, including “Oh, John, no. Not SEX!” followed by “Oh, John, please. Not HOMOSEXUALITY!” Then your parents came out for you to relatives! How would you say that coming out to your parents compared to revisiting the experience in your memoir?
Credit: Facebook
JD: It was such an intensely emotional experience when it was happening. It provoked deep feelings and worries: how would they react? Would I lose my connection to them? Would they be condemning and unforgiving? And, given that this was happening in the months after my relationship with Carlos had ended, it would be fair to say that I was an emotional wreck back then. And then, when I needed support, it had this amazingly and unexpectedly happy ending. Writing about it several decades later? Given that I knew what the positive outcome would be, it was a joy to go back to it and recapture the final set of feelings that the experience had provoked – that I would always be their son and we would always have each other.
GS: Throughout the book, you regularly refer to being faced with finding ways to make ends meet. Is this your way of creating a cautionary tale for those considering the life of a historian/writer/activist/educator?
JD: Actually, I hadn’t thought of it as speaking to the present and what some Millennials and Gen Z folks might face. It was more directly meant to be descriptive of the challenges I faced being both openly gay and doing openly gay work back in the ‘70s and early ‘80s. Today, technology seems to be having the biggest impact on the challenges that younger generations face economically but – in terms of LGBTQ folks – the opportunities to be one’s true self in the work world are so much more expansive than what they once were.
GS: Near the end of the book, you wrote about “Christian evangelicals associated with the Republican Party” in the early-to-mid 1990s which is a reminder that they’ve been coming at us with political backing for a very long time. What do you think it will take to make that change?
JD: Christian evangelicals have been going after LGBTQ folks for half a century, and their relationship with the Republican Party has been strong at least since the Reagan era in the 1980s. I don’t think that will change any time soon. But it is worth pointing out and acknowledging that, even though there have been some stretches of time when the anti-LGBTQ backlash has been both strong and successful, we have continued to progress as a movement and community. Despite them, we succeeded in achieving marriage equality, something unimaginable back in the period that the memoir covers.
GS: Are there audiobook versions of your memoirs, or plans for them in the works? It would be great to hear you telling your own story.
JD: There aren’t audio books of either of the two memoirs, and I’m not aware of any plans to make that happen. But your asking this question will lead me to asking folks at Duke University Press about the possibility of doing this.
GS: Lastly, you have now been living in Chicago for many years. In 2005 you were inducted into the Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame. Please say something about what that distinction means to you.
JD: I’ve been in Chicago since 1999. As I mention in the epilogue, the very fact that I was recruited to come to UIC (University of Illinois – Chicago) was a measure of how much had changed since I made the decision to do gay history in the mid-1970s. Colleges and universities across the country were starting to include LGBTQ studies courses in their curriculum. So, my hire, as well as the induction into the Hall of Fame a few years later, brought a tremendous amount of emotional satisfaction realizing that my work was recognized as significant and that I – along with others – had really made a positive difference.
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