Joshua Gamson

Joshua Gamson is a writer and sociologist based in Oakland, California. His book about the late R&B star Teena Marie, The Ballad of Teena Marie: Life, Music, and Soul Across the American Color Line, will be published in January 2027 by 37 Ink Books/Simon & Schuster. He is the author of four previous books: Modern Families: Stories of Extraordinary Journeys to Kinship (New York University, 2015); Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America (California, 1994); Freaks Talk Back: Tabloid Talk Shows and Sexual Nonconformity (Chicago, 1998), winner of book awards from the Speech Communication Association and the American Sociological Association; and The Fabulous Sylvester: The Legend, The Music, The Seventies in San Francisco (Henry Holt/Picador, 2005), winner of the Stonewall Book Award, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, an Out magazine Top Ten book, an Entertainment Weekly "Must List" selection, and a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller. Gamson’s work has been published in magazines such as The New York Times Magazine and The American Prospect. Gamson is Professor of Sociology at the University of San Francisco. He previously taught at at Yale University. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow (2009-10) and a Fellow at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (2015-16); he received the Sylvester Community Pillar Award from the Positive Resource Center in 2023 and the Simon and Gagnon Lifetime Achievement Award in the Sociology of Sexualities from the American Sociological Association in 2025.