Joseph Epstein

Who is Joseph Epstein?

Joseph Epstein is an essayist, short story writer, and editor, and from 1974 to 1998 the editor of the Phi Beta Kappa Society's The American Scholar magazine. He was also a lecturer at Northwestern University from 1974 to 2002. He is a Contributing Editor at The Weekly Standard and a long-time contributor of essays and short stories to The New Criterion and Commentary. In 2003, he was awarded a National Humanities Medal by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

In 1970, Epstein wrote an article for Harper's Magazine called "The Struggle for Sexual Identity," that was widely criticized for its perceived homophobia, although Harper's editor Midge Decter defended it as an "elegant and thoughtful account". Among other things, Epstein wrote, "if I had the power to do so, I would wish homosexuality off the face of the earth, because I consider it a curse, in a literal sense." He ended the article with

There is much that my four sons can do in their lives that might cause me anguish, that might outrage me, that might make [me] ashamed of them and of myself as their father. But nothing they could ever do would make me sadder than if any of them were to become homosexual.