John D’Emilio is Emeritus Professor of History and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and the author of many books, including The World Turned: Essays on Gay History, Politics, and Culture, also published by Duke University Press; Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin; Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970

; and Queer Legacies: Stories from Chicago’s LGBTQ Archives. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and a National Endowment of the Humanities Fellow, and he was a finalist for the National Book Award for Lost Prophet, which won the American Library Association’s Stonewall Book Award for nonfiction. D’Emilio was inducted into the Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame in 2005 and was named Chicagoan of the Year by the Chicago Tribune in 2004. He lives in Chicago.