Whitney Strub, editor of the anthology Queer Newark (Rutgers Press, 2024), will be in conversation with Jason Chernesky as part of the Vital Perspectives on Healthcare and Science series.

Join this evening of scholarship made accessible, opening conversation around this book. Histories of gay and lesbian urban life typically focus on major metropolitan areas like San Francisco and New York, opportunity-filled destinations for LGBTQ migrants from across the country. Yet there are many other queer communities in economically depressed cities with majority Black and Hispanic populations that receive far less attention. Though just a few miles from New York, Newark is one of these cities, and its queer histories have been neglected—until now. Queer Newark reveals a new side of New Jersey's largest city while rewriting the history of LGBTQ life in America.

About the Series

Formerly the Future of Healthcare Series, Vital Perspectives on Healthcare and Science engages with some of the most pressing public health issues of our time, in a regular public forum catalyzed by a book. The series is sponsored by the Medicine, Science, and the Humanities Major.

About the Speakers

Whitney Strub writes about political, legal, and cultural battles over obscenity and pornography. He situates these social struggles in various contexts, particularly modern feminism, LGBT history, the rise of the New Right, and the sexual revolution. His first book, Perversion for Profit: The Politics of Pornography and the Rise of the New Right, was published in 2011, and his next book, Obscenity Rules: Roth v. United States and the Long Struggle over Sexual Expression, was published September 2013.

Jason Chernesky earned his Bachelor of Arts in history from Rutgers University-New Brunswick and his Master of Arts in history from Rutgers/NIJT-Newark. He recently earned his doctorate in the history and sociology of science from the University of Pennsylvania. As a historian of 20th-century medicine, health care, public health, and environments in the U.S., Chernesky's research examines race-based health inequities among American children and their families in the context of the built environments in which they lived. Chernesky's research interests also include histories epidemic disease, drug use, biomedical technologies, and nursing. Based on his doctoral dissertation, "'The Littlest Victims': Pediatric AIDS and the Urban Ecologies of Health in the Late-Twentieth-Century United States," Chernesky is working on a book proposal that examines the ways in which the AIDS pandemic affected Black and Latinx children and their families in the U.S. Chernesky contributed a chapter to Queer Newark titled "Project Fire: AIDS, Erasure, and Black Queer Organizing in Newark." Chernesky is also interested in public history and has helped create public history events on topics related to the history of medicine and public health. As the Council on Library and Information Resources opioid industry research postdoctoral fellow, Chernesky is involved in the stewardship of public access and engaged research into this growing digital archive co-curated by Johns Hopkins and the University of California, San Francisco.

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