Dennis Altman

Dennis Patkin Altman (born 1943) is an Australian academic and gay rights activist.

Early life and education Dennis Patkin Altman was born in 1943 in Sydney, New South Wales, to Jewish immigrant parents, and spent most of his childhood in Hobart, Tasmania.

In 1964 he won a Fulbright scholarship to Cornell University, where he began working with American gay activists.

Career Returning to Australia in 1969, Altman taught politics at the University of Sydney.

In 1971, Altman published his first book, Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation – considered an important intellectual contribution to the gay liberation movements in the English-speaking world. Among his ideas were "the polymorphous whole" as well as "the end of the homosexual", in which the potential for both heterosexual and homosexual behaviour becomes a widespread cultural and psychological phenomenon.

Altman was a contributor to the New York City-based gay liberation newspaper Come Out!, published by the Gay Liberation Front, writing two articles for them in 1970 and their last issue in 1972.

One of Altman's most notable speeches was delivered during the first Gay Liberation Group meeting at the University of Sydney on 19 January 1972. It was reprinted as the chapter "Forum on Sexual Liberation" in his book Coming out in the Seventies.

In 1985, he became a lecturer at La Trobe University, where he later became a professor of politics. He wrote In the Mind of America (1986) and Power and Community (1994), both about HIV/AIDS.

In 1997 Altman wrote the essay, "Global gaze/global gays", in which he proposes that there are cultural connections between homosexuals in different countries and there is a nascent global gay culture.

In his preface to the 1995 republication of his 1946 novel The City and the Pillar, Gore Vidal wrote that Altman had taken a copy of the book back with him to Australia around 1970, but it was seized at Sydney Airport. The book was subsequently declared obscene by a judge who observed that the Australian obscenity law was "absurd", thus leading to it being repealed sometime later. In 2005 Altman published Gore Vidal's America, a study of Vidal's writings on history, politics, sex, and religion.

Altman was appointed Visiting Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard University in January 2005. In 2006 he was a professorial fellow in the Institute for Human Security at La Trobe University. In 2009 he was appointed director of the Institute for Human Security at La Trobe University.

Altman was president of the AIDS Society of Asia and the Pacific from 2001-2005. He was a member of the Governing Council of the International AIDS Society from 2004-2012. In 2010 he stepped down from this position.

Altman is a longtime patron of the Australian Queer Archives.

Recognition In July 2006, he was listed by The Bulletin as one of the 100 most influential Australians ever.

At the APCOM HERO Awards 2021, he was awarded the Shivananda Khan Award for Extraordinary Achievement.

Personal life Altman's partner of 22 years, Anthony Smith, died from lung cancer in November 2012.

Publications