UMass Boston

Gender and sexuality, 20th-century cultural history, literature, and art, U.S. radical culture

PhD, American Studies, Boston University

• Love's Next Meeting: The Forgotten History of Homosexuality and the Left in American Culture (University of California Press, 2021)
• Inventing the Egghead: The Battle over Brainpower in American Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).
• "Class," The Routledge History of American Sexuality (Routledge, 2020), 118-132.
• "Public Excursions in Fierce Truth-Telling: Literary Cultures and Homosexuality in the 1940s," in American Literature in Transition, 1940-1950, ed. Christopher Vials (Cambridge University Press, 2017), 193-211.
• “'Night Must Fall': Desire and Development in Motley’s Let Noon Be Fair,” in Red Love Across the Pacific: Political and Sexual Revolutions of the Twentieth Century, co-edited by Paula Rabinowitz, Ruth Barraclough, and Heather Bowen-Struyk (Palgrave: 2015): 141-161.
• “Sexing the Semiotext(e) Whitney Box Set,” English Language Notes 53:2 Spring 2015): 141-158.
• “Coming to Terms: Homosexuality and the Left in American Culture,” Review essay in special issue on Queer Studies and the Crisis of Capitalism, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 18:1 (2012): 179-195.
• “H.T. Tsiang’s Proletarian Burlesque: Performance and Perversion in The Hanging on Union Square,” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, Special issue on Asian American Performance Art, 36:4 (2011): 87-114.
• “Inventing the Egghead: The Cultural Politics of Brainpower in the Cold War United States,” Journal of American Studies 45:2 (2011): 245-265.
• Co-editor (with Cheryl Higashida and Gary Holcomb), "Sexing the Left," English Language Notes 53:1 (Spring/Summer 2015).
• "TWO Witch-hunts: On (Not) Seeing Red in LGBT History," American Communist History (December 2015), 241-247.
• Guest Editor, Queer Studies Special Issue, Journal of Popular Music Studies 18:2 (2006).
• “Between Decadence and Denial: Two Studies in Gay Male Politics and 1980s Pop Music,” Journal of Popular Music Studies 16:2 (2004): 111-146.

Selected Media Pieces

"The push for LGBTQ equality began long before Stonewall" in Washington Post (June 10, 2021)

“Editorial Suggestions for Tom Cotton’s ‘Send In the Troops’” in Abusable Past (June 4, 2020)

“The U.S. News Best College Rankings Are Not Excellent” in Abusable Past (Sept 13, 2019)

“Gay Rights Is Over, But I Like Rice Pudding” in Abusable Past (July 2, 2019)

“The Supreme Court’s Union-Busting Decision in Janus Is a Blow to LGBTQ Workers” in Slate (June 27, 2018)

“AIDS, It, and the Horror of the 1980s” in Slate (September 25, 2017)

Research Interests:

Aaron Lecklider's research focuses on the history of sexuality, class, race, and gender in twentieth-century American literature and culture. His most recent book, Love's Next Meeting, explores the relationship between homosexuality and the Left in American culture between 1920 and 1960. Lecklider uncovers a lively cast of individuals and dynamic expressive works revealing remarkably progressive engagement with homosexuality among radicals, workers, and the poor. His first book, Inventing the Egghead, studied how working-class Americans, particularly women, African Americans, and immigrants, imagined themselves as organic intellectuals. He is currently completing a book about socialism in American cultural history as part of the American Studies Now series at University of California Press. Lecklider also brings to the department an interest in contemporary art: in February 2013 he curated an exhibit, Lifelines: Recent Work by Avram Finkelstein, that featured contemporary paintings and sculpture by an important founding member of Gran Fury and ACT UP.

Work in Progress:

"Socialism in the US: A Cultural History"

Courses taught:

AMST 100 American Identities
AMST 101 Popular Culture in America 
AMST 203 The Thirties 
AMST 206 The Sixties
AMST 209 The 1990s
AMST 257 Queer Literature and History in the 20th-Century US
AMST 325L Sexual Identities in American Culture

AMST 603 Historical Sequence II
AMST 604 Gender and Sexuality in US History and Culture