LGBTQ Columbia University Oral History

Columbia’s LGBTQ Faculty Diversity Initiative will be collaborating with CCHOR and INCITE to produce an oral history of LGBTQ+ people affiliated with Columbia University. These interviews will weave the narrators’ biographies, experiences, and analyses into a deep analytical history of LGBTQ+ people at Columbia University.

In September 2016, the Columbia Center for Oral History Research and the Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics, with support from the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences Divisional Deans, commenced the project. To date the archive includes interviews with noted U.S.-based alumni and affiliates John D’Emilio, Tony Kushner, Robbie Kaplan, Ann Kansfield, Laura Pinsky, and Dennis Mitchell, among others. The oral histories are rich with detail, charting the narrators’ complex relationships with Columbia University dating back to the 1960s.