Award-winning book on LGBT history

John D’Emilio is co-editor of a prize-winning book on historian Allan Berube. Photo: Jenny Fontaine/UIC Public Affairs

A book co-edited by UIC gender historian John D’Emilio was honored by the American Historical Association.

My Desire for History: Essays in Gay, Community, & Labor History, co-edited by D’Emilio and Stanford University historian Estelle Freeman, is a retrospective on the life and work of the late independent historian Allan Bérubé.

The book was awarded the 2013 Boswell Prize by the historical association’s Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender History.

My Desire for History includes unpublished and little-known essays by Bérubé, considered a pioneer in the study of lesbian and gay history in the U.S. It highlights his efforts for social change and documents the emergence of a grassroots lesbian and gay community history movement through the 1970s and ’80s.

D’Emilio and Freeman also wrote the introduction to the volume, published by University of North Carolina Press in 2011.

D’Emilio, professor of gender and women’s studies and history, has devoted more than three decades to gay and lesbian issues, establishing himself among the field’s leading historians.

He is a Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities fellow. Founding director of the Policy Institute at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, he was inducted into the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame in 2005.

The Boswell Prize recognizes an outstanding book on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, and/or queer history published in English. It is named for John Boswell, a Yale University professor of gay history who died of AIDS.

bflood@uic.edu