CUNY DIGITAL HISTORY ARCHIVE

In the keynote address of CLAGS’ 25th Anniversary conference, founding executive director of CLAGS Martin Duberman reflects on the history of the organization as well as his hopes for its future. Duberman begins by sharing some anecdotes about the years leading up to the founding of CLAGS and how he became invested in the idea. He then shares the story of how CLAGS was initially supposed to be institutionalized at Yale and how ultimately it ended up at the CUNY Graduate Center. Duberman, who worked at Lehman College as well as at the Graduate Center, notes that in the 1970s academia was highly averse to including any sexuality in any form as a topic of discussion. In the late 1980s, however, Duberman found support for CLAGS in Graduate Center President Harold Proshansky. Before concluding, Dubmerman expresses his hopes that CLAGS continues to be an organization that opposes assimilation and addresses intersectional, contemporary, social issues such as poverty and unemployment.

Although formally instituted at the CUNY Graduate Center in 1991, CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies was first conceived 5 years earlier by Martin, Duberman, one of the first historians to embrace the, then infantile, field of Queer Studies. Duberman sensed the need for a formal center devoted to queer research. As the first university-based center for LGBTQ research, CLAGS continues to demonstrate its dedication to advancing Queer Studies, by hosting public events showcasing queer research and sponsoring fellowships to support queer scholars. Among its many notable contributions, CLAGS annually puts on at least one major conference and holds the Kessler Award Lecture every fall to celebrate a queer scholar who has made a notable contribution to the field of queer studies.