About

Eric Gonzaba is a historian of race and sexuality in the United States and an Associate Professor of American Studies at Cal State Fullerton. His research examines the politics of pleasure and leisure in modern America, especially in nightlife. He is currently completing a book on the history and culture of gay male nightlife since 1970. His work has been supported by the Point Foundation, the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell University, and the Elton John AIDS Foundation.

Gonzaba also leads several public digital humanities projects. In 2014, he founded Wearing Gay History, an award-winning online archive that explores the global histories of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people through T-shirts; it received the National Council on Public History’s top student prize in 2016. With Dr. Amanda Regan, he co-launched Mapping the Gay Guides, a digital mapping project that uncovers overlooked queer geographies since 1965. The project received a multi-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2021 and an honorable mention for the American Studies Association’s 2020 Garfinkel Prize in Digital Humanities.

From 2021 to 2024, Gonzaba chaired the Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History (now the LGBTQ+ History Association), the nation’s oldest organization of queer historians, and he co-chaired and hosted the 2024 Queer History Conference.

When he’s not working, Gonzaba enjoys going to the movies (with popcorn and fountain Coke), plunking away at the piano, reading Langston Hughes, Nora Ephron, Truman Capote, and Zora Neale Hurston, and trying to beat friends and family at Jeopardy!. On especially stressful days, he rewatches his never-fail comfort film: The Birdcage.