David M. Halperin

David M. Halperin (born April 2, 1952) is an American theorist in the fields of gender studies, queer theory, critical theory, material culture and visual culture. He is the cofounder of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, and author of several books including Before Pastoral and One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (1990).

Early life and education David Halperin was born on April 2, 1952, in Chicago, Illinois. He graduated from Oberlin College in 1973, having studied abroad at the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in 1972–1973. He received his PhD in Classics and Humanities from Stanford University in 1980.

Career In 1977, Halperin served as Associate Director of the Summer Session of the School of Classical Studies at the American Academy in Rome. In 1994, he taught at the University of Queensland, and in 1995 at Monash University. His work has been published in the Journal of Bisexuality, Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Journal of Homosexuality, Michigan Feminist Studies, Michigan Quarterly Review, Representations, the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, Ex Aequo, UNSW Tharunka, Australian Humanities Review, Sydney Star Observer, The UTS Review, Salmagundi, Blueboy, History and Theory, Diacritics, American Journal of Philology, Classical Antiquity, Ancient Philosophy, Yale Review, Critical Inquiry, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Notes & Queries, London Review of Books, Journal of Japanese Studies, Partisan Review, and Classical Journal.

Halperin is openly gay. In 1990, he launched a campaign to oppose the presence of the ROTC on the MIT campus, on the grounds that it discriminated against gay and lesbian students. That same year, he received death threats for his gay activism. In 2003, the Michigan chapter of the American Family Association tried to ban his course 'How to Be Gay: Male Homosexuality and Initiation.' In 2010, he wrote an open letter to Michigan's 52nd Attorney General Mike Cox to denounce the homophobic harassment by one of the latter's staffers, Andrew Shirvell, of a University of Michigan student, Chris Armstrong.

Work

Genealogy of homosexuality Halperin uses the method of genealogy to study the history of homosexuality. He argues that Aristophanes' speech in Plato's Symposium does not indicate a "taxonomy" of heterosexuals and homosexuals comparable to modern ones. Medieval historian John Boswell has criticized Halperin's arguments.

One Hundred Years of Homosexuality

Halperin's book was published in 1990, two years before the centenary of Charles Gilbert Chaddock's English translation of Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis. Chaddock is credited with the first use of the term "homosexual" in English in this translation. Halperin believes that the introduction of this term marks an important change in the treatment and consideration of homosexuality. According to L'Express in 2011, Halperin had not yet responded to Eribon's claims. Paglia's long review article was itself criticised in the following issue of Arion by W. Ralph Johnson and Thomas Van Nortwick.

Since Paglia's critique, Halperin has gone on to publish four monographs and co-edited two volumes of queer criticism.

Publications

The War on Sex. Edited with Trevor Hoppe. Durham: Duke University Press. 2017.