He will be giving a talk entitled, "The Strange Career of the Closet: The Culture and Politics of Homosexuality from the Second World War to the Gay Liberation Era," at 3 p.m. in the Harry Ransom Center (HRC) Auditorium. Dr. Chauncey, a pioneer in the field of gay and lesbian history, is best known for his 1994 groundbreaking book, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (Basic), which won the Organization of American Historians' Merle Curti Prize for the best book in social history and Frederick Jackson Turner Prize for the best first book in history, as well as the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and Lambda Literary Award.

Dr. Chauncey is professor of history at Yale University. He taught at the University of Chicago for fifteen years, and has held positions at Rutgers, New York University, and the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris.

The Symposium is a graduate student-oriented and grad student-run organization. It provides one of the few informal environments on campus for grad students to gather, together with faculty, to discuss their work.