Author David Halperin gives LGBT-sponsored talk at Yale

Distinguished scholar and noted author David M. Halperin, recipient of the 2011 James Robert Brudner ‘83 Memorial Prize, will deliver the 2011 Brudner lecture, titled “How To Be Gay,” which is the name of his most recent book. The lecture will be held on Wednesday, Oct. 5, in Linsly-Chittenden Hall, 63 High St., Room 102, at 5 p.m.

Free and open to the public, the lecture is sponsored by Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Studies at Yale.

Halperin is the W. H. Auden Distinguished University Professor of the History and Theory of Sexuality at the University of Michigan, where he is also professor of English, women’s studies, comparative literature and classical studies.

A scholar of ancient Greek literature and philosophy as well as a historian of sexuality, he has helped to establish the fields of lesbian and gay studies and queer theory. In addition to co-founding and co-editing GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies and to co-editing “The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader,” he has written or edited eight books, including “One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love,” “Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography,” “How to Do the History of Homosexuality,” and the forthcoming “How To Be Gay.”

James Robert Brudner ‘83 was an AIDS activist, urban planner, journalist and photographer. He spent 12 years as a policy analyst for the City of New York, and wrote for various publications on gay- and AIDS-related topics. “Jim became a member of ACT UP, the Treatment Action Group, and other organizations after the death of his twin brother, Eric, of AIDS in 1987,” say lecture organizers. He worked on treatment and prevention issues with the National Institutes of Health, pharmaceutical corporations and federal agencies. In 1997, La Mama Gallery in New York mounted an exhibition of photographs Brudner had taken in his final years traveling through the back roads of rural America. Brudner died of AIDS-related illness in 1998 at the age of 37. Through his will, he established the Brudner Prize at Yale as “a perpetual annual prize” for scholarship and activism on gay and lesbian issues.