Dennis Altman

Who is Dennis Altman?

Dennis Patkin Altman is an Australian academic and pioneering gay rights activist.

Altman was a Fulbright scholar at Cornell University in the 1960s when he met and began working with leading gay activists in the United States. Returning to Australia in 1969, he taught politics at the University of Sydney, and in 1971, published his book Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation—considered an important intellectual contribution to the ideas that shaped gay liberation movements in the English-speaking world. Among his prophetic constructions were "the polymorphous whole" and his posing of the notion of "the end of the homosexual", in which the potential for both heterosexual and homosexual behaviour becomes a widespread cultural and psychological phenomenon. In 2005, he also published Gore Vidal's America, a study, as the title suggests, of Gore Vidal and his writings on history, politics, sex, and religion.

In 1985, Altman accepted an appointment at La Trobe University, where he later became professor of politics; he was appointed the Visiting Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard University from January 2005.