Download my CV | Google Scholar Profile

Words like “sex” and “sexuality” are common in our conversations. And they have captured the minds of some of our greatest thinkers.

In 1860, Walt Whitman published the first edition of Leaves of Grass. In it, he mused on the mysteries of passionate attraction and touch. Inspired by phrenology, he named these elemental facets of the human experience “amativeness” (or heterosexual love) and “adhesiveness” (to describe what he called “the manly love of comrades”). By placing the two on equal moral footing, Whitman found a way to share how love looked through his eyes, especially his feelings for other men.

Now fast forward to postwar America when the zoologist-turned-sexologist Alfred Kinsey wondered, much like Whitman, about the vastness of human sexuality: “If every single living thing is different from every other living thing, then diversity becomes life’s one irreducible fact. Only variations are real.”

At the end of the 20th century, literary critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick found three words to explain this nearly one-hundred-year restlessness: “People are different.” The words leap off the pages of her landmark book Epistemology of the Closet. “It’s astonishing how few respectable conceptual tools we have for dealing with this self-evident fact.”

Poets like Whitman, social scientists like Kinsey, and humanists like Sedgwick have asked important questions about sexuality. I find myself in conversation with these great thinkers as I examine the process through which our sexuality becomes a phenomenon not just of biology and bodies but also of cultures and societies.

That one word — “sexuality” — expresses the meanings we assign to our body, the symbols we use to represent it, how the state governs what we can or cannot do with it, and entire disciplines of study and professional pursuits that our bodies inspire, from politics to professorships, art, and city planning.

In my research, I have examined how sexuality affects healthcare, activism, decisions about where to live, nightlife, the process of coming out, and art-making practices. I have had the pleasure of locating these ideas in fascinating empirical cases in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, including Marches on Washington, university classrooms, urban gay districts, gay bars, and underground queer parties.

I have published articles in the top journals of my discipline, and I am author or editor of 6 books with presses like Chicago, NYU, Oxford, and Princeton. Reviewed by The New York Times and The Nation, and featured on the Getting Curious podcast by Jonathan Van Ness, my most recent book, Long Live Queer Nightlife, won the Distinguished Book Award from the Sexualities section of the American Sociological Association. It was a Finalist for a Lambda Literary Award for Best Book in LGBTQ+ Nonfiction and a Finalist for the PROSE Award, given by the Association of American Publishers, in Cultural Anthropology and Sociology.

A former editor of Contexts magazine, the one and only public-facing periodical of the American Sociological Association, I am also a devoted public intellectual. My findings have informed commentaries in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Globe & Mail, The Guardian, Architectural Digest, British Vogue, BBC, CBC, and NPR radio stations. I have received scholarly distinctions in Amsterdam (Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study), Canada (Canada Research Chair), the U.S. (Princeton Society of Fellows), and the U.K. (London School of Economics). And finally, my research has shaped planning platforms in San Francisco about establishing the Castro as a queer cultural heritage district, walking tours in Chicago’s gay district, and strategies to preserve the vitality of Davie Village in Vancouver.