John D'Emilio

media release: In Honor of National Coming Out Day, A Room of One's Own welcomes author and LGBT scholar John D'Emilio for a reading and conversation on his newest book Memories of a Gay Catholic Boyhood: Coming of Age in the Sixties. We are excited to cohost with the Wisconsin Historical Society and the UW Madison Department of Gender & Women's Studies.

This event is hosted at the Wisconsin Historical Society.

How does a boy from an Italian immigrant family in which everyone unfailingly went to Confession and Sunday Mass become a lapsed Catholic? How does a family who worshipped Senator Joseph McCarthy and supported Richard Nixon produce an antiwar activist and pacifist? How does a family in which the word “divorce” was never spoken raise a son who comes to explore the hidden gay sexual underworld of New York City? Memories of a Gay Catholic Boyhood is John D’Emilio’s coming-of-age story in which he takes readers from his working-class Bronx neighborhood to an elite Jesuit high school in Manhattan to Columbia University and the political and social upheavals of the late 1960s. He shares the personal experiences of his conservative, tight-knit multigenerational family and describes how he went from considering entering the priesthood to losing his faith and coming toterms with his same-sex desires. Throughout, D’Emilio outlines his complicated relationship with his family while showing how his passion for activism influenced his decision to use the researching and writing of history as a tool for social change. This is not just John D’Emilio’s personal story; it opens a window into how the conformist baby boom decade of the 1950s transformed into the tumultuous years of radical social movements and widespread protest during the 1960s.

A pioneering figure in the field of LGBTQ history and studies, John D’Emilio is a retired professor of history and gender and women’s studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and the author of many books, including Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin, which was a finalist for the National Book Award; Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America; and Queer Legacies: Stories from Chicago’s LGBTQ Archives. He was the founding director of the Policy Institute of the National LGBTQ Task Force and served as president of the board of the Gerber/Hart Library and Archives in Chicago.