Walter L. Williams
Walter Lee Williams (born November 3, 1948) is an American former professor of anthropology, history, and gender studies at the University of Southern California (USC) until his retirement in 2011. With MAP ally Jim Kepner, he oversaw the merger of the International Gay and Lesbian Archives and the ONE, Inc. library holdings to form the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at USC, the largest repository of LGBT materials in America and one of the largest in the world. He is one of the pioneers in the field of queer studies, with many years in human rights activism.
He lived in Mexico on a retirement visa from 2011 to 2013, where he continued his earlier research among the Mayan Indians. In 2013, after his retirement, he became the 500th person added to the FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list, after being accused of engaging in sexual acts with two underage males in the Philippines via webcam. At the time of his warrant, the reward value for his arrest was up to US$100,000. He was arrested the following day in a public park in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, and extradited to Los Angeles, California for prosecution. In 2014, Williams pleaded guilty to illicit sexual contact with males aged 14 to 16 in the Philippines, and was sentenced to five years in prison.
He was a personal friend to many now deceased early gay liberation founders, including Harry Hay, Jim Kepner, Dorr Legg, and Frank Kameny, as well as Prof. Vern Bullough whom he wrote an obituary for.
Early life
As a teenager in Atlanta in the 1960s, Williams was inspired by Martin Luther King Jr. to get involved in the civil rights movement. In 1978 he became a gay rights activist, protesting against Anita Bryant’s Save Our Children campaign.
Williams earned an undergraduate degree in History from Georgia State University in 1970. He did graduate work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he earned a Master's in History in 1972, and a Ph.D. in History, in 1974.[5] His doctoral thesis was Black American Attitudes Toward Africa: The Missionary Movement, 1877—1900, and would form the basis of his first book.
Career
In 1979, while Williams was an assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati, he and Gregory Sprague founded the Committee on Lesbian and Gay History, an affiliate of the American Historical Association.
In his fourth, most famous and influential book, The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture (1986), Williams came out as gay. Because Williams spoke openly about having sex with some of the informants of his research, arguing that this allowed him privileged access to otherwise hidden and stigmatized same-sex practices and communities, the book led to controversy at his university and he was fired. This book was the first complete study of the berdache, a term for androgynous and gender-variant people among the American Indians. After his firing, the book won the 1987 Gay Book of the Year Award from the American Library Association, the 1986 Ruth Benedict Award from the Society of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists, and the Award for Outstanding Scholarship from the American Foundation for Gender and Genital Medicine and Science, presented at the 1987 World Congress for Sexology. After winning these prestigious awards, Williams was re-instated as a professor and promoted.
From July 1987 to July 1988, Williams was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to lecture in American history at Gadjah Mada University, in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. While there, Williams collected autobiographical interviews, 27 of which were published as Javanese Lives: Women and Men in Modern Indonesian Society in 1991.
An anthropologist, Williams has also traveled throughout North America from Alaska to Yucatán to study Native American tribes. His other areas of expertise include cultures of Southeast Asia and the South Pacific, based on his years of field research in Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia, the Philippines and Polynesia.
In 1986, Williams became a registered member of Soka Gakkai International. On February 27, 1996, he provided a series of lectures on Gay Marriage at Soka University. Ultimately, on March 24, 2006, Williams was awarded the Gandhi, King, Ikeda Award from Morehouse College, for his work during the civil rights and peace movements and in support of LGBT rights.
Bibliography
Books
- Williams W. L. Black Americans and the Evangelization of Africa, 1877—1900. — University of Wisconsin Press, 1982. — 288 p. — ISBN 978-0299089207. Based on Ph.D. thesis.
- Williams W. L. Indian Leadership. — Sunflower University Press, 1984. — 92 p. — ISBN 978-0897450522.
- Williams W. L. The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture. — Beacon Press, 1986, ISBN 0807046027. Second edition 1992, ISBN 978-0807046159.
- Williams W. L., Siverson Claire Javanese Lives: Women and Men in Modern Indonesian Society. — Rutgers University Press, 1991. — 264 p. — ISBN 978-0813516493.
- Cameron D. G., Williams W. L. Homophile Studies in Theory and Practice / Ed. W. Dorr Legg. — Global Publishers, 1994. — 464 p. — ISBN 978-1879194168.
- Williams W. L., Johnson T. Two Spirits: A Story of Life With the Navajo. — Lethe Press, 2005. — 332 p. — ISBN 978-1590210604.
- Williams W. L. Spirit of the Pacific. — Lethe Press, 2013. — 326 p. — ISBN 978-1590213889.
Editor
- Overcoming Heterosexism and Homophobia / Eds. James T. Sears, Walter L. Williams. — Columbia University Press, 1997. — 456 p. — ISBN 978-0231104234.
- Gay and Lesbian Rights in the United States: A Documentary History / Eds. Walter L. Williams, Yolanda Retter. — Greenwood Press, 2003. — ISBN 978-0313306969.
- Southeastern Indians Since the Removal Era / Eds. Walter L. Williams. — University of Georgia Press, 2009. — 272 p. — ISBN 978-0820332031.
Selected magazine articles
- Walter L. Williams "The United States Indian Policy and the Debate over Philippine Annexation: Implications for the Origins of American Imperialism" // The Journal of American History — 1980. — No. 66.
- Williams, Walter L. (1990). "Women and Work in the Third World: Indonesian Women's Oral Histories". Journal of Women's History. 2 (1): 183–195. doi:10.1353/jowh.2010.0296.