In 2001, Yale University inaugurated one of the country’s first initiatives for gay and lesbian studies with a $1 million gift from Arthur Kramer, the brother of famed playwright and ACT-UP founder Larry Kramer.
To lead the initiative, which sponsored visiting faculty, lectures, and conferences as well as student research, the university brought on the country’s first tenured faculty in queer studies, Jonathan Katz, from Stonybrook University. At the time, Katz hoped Yale’s program would inspire other universities to invest in queer studies and grow into a full-fledged department with tenured faculty.
But when funding ran out five years later, Yale shuttered the program and let Katz go. Rather than establish a new academic department, the university impaneled a committee of faculty from other academic departments, which oversees the university’s offerings in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies.
In Katz’s exit interview, Yale’s provost expressed “no hard feelings” but said the program was getting ahead of the field in the U.S. If in 30 years queer studies became a standard part of the academy, Yale could then hire the best faculty in the world.
“They didn’t see a need to invest in the development now,” Katz said.
In the intervening 15 years, queer studies has indeed blossomed at universities across the country, buoyed by high demand from students seeking to make sense of the changing cultural conversation around sexuality. More than a dozen schools now offer undergraduate majors in the field, and scores more offer minors. Often housed within Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies departments, queer studies enjoys the sort of legitimacy it struggled to attain when courses about queer sexuality first prompted criticism that the academy was indoctrinating students in sexual deviancy.
“There’s no longer the stigma around queer studies that there was when I was a student,” says Karma R. Chávez, an associate professor in the Mexican-American and Latinx Studies Department at the University of Texas at Austin who specializes in queer studies. “If you took a queer studies class, everyone thought you were gay. But now you have straight boys in these classes who are just interested in the topic. It’s a totally different world.”
But as with Yale, universities across the country have been reluctant to invest wholesale in the field, often viewed as a luxury amid wider cutbacks to the humanities. Rather than fund autonomous departments — only the City College of San Francisco boasts a standalone department — universities increasingly house queer studies scholars in centers with a rotating roster of visiting professors and within departments like English, comparative literature, American Studies, and history.
“Whereas once queer studies was an aspirational development on the part of universities — many wanted to invest in this and see where the field would go — now what we see is a movement away from dedicated programs and toward hiring of faculty in queer research,” says Katz, who now teaches at the University at Buffalo. “The more significant impact of queer studies has been in other disciplines, where today you really can’t encounter much new work in anything related to sexuality or gender without dealing with the key and defining ideas of queer studies.”
The problem with housing queer studies within other departments or merely bringing on a visiting scholar or two, however, is that it cuts off queer studies from broader sources of funding (like alumni fundraising) and can leave queer academics marginalized within their departments. Katz’s own PhD program in queer visual studies at the University at Buffalo, housed within the Art History Department, was cut two years ago.
“The cost of housing queer studies within other departments is that it returns queer studies to the kindness of strangers,” Katz says.
Queer studies has not only permeated the academy; its key concepts and vocabulary have trickled down into popular culture, with celebrities as mainstream as Miley Cyrus identifying as “gender-neutral, sexually fluid” and actors like Laverne Cox raising awareness about transgender identity. The idea that gender is socially constructed and sexual orientation exists along a spectrum has achieved widespread cultural cachet. According to one recent survey from GLAAD, 12 percent of Millennials now identify as gender non-conforming.
“Queer studies is actually trying to catch up with what’s going on in popular culture,” says Omise’eke Tinsley, a queer studies scholar in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. “Oftentimes, my undergrads come with a broader understanding of sexuality and gender than grad students, because they’ve come across things circulating on social media long before they get into the classroom.”
