Past Yale GALA Prize Winners include:

2018  Anonymous, “ ‘At His Majesty’s Pleasure’ ”: The 1906 Bucknill Inquiry and the Global Fates Of Chinese Labor”. Advised by Mary Lui (with input from George Chauncey). 

2017  Isabel Cruz, “Visibility & Violence: The Social and Legal Impacts of Argentina’s Transgender Rights Law”

2016  Sarah Giovanniello, “Marching Sideways: Queering Adolescence in Nadezhda Durova’s The Cavalry Maiden”

and Eliana Kwartler, “The Marked Body of Christ: Constructing a Queer Religion in the AIDS-Era Works of David Wojnarowicz and Ron Athey
 

2015  Jason Cyrus Mazella, “Queer Civil Society in Contemporary China: Understanding Variation in Success Across Gay and Lesbian Organizations”

and Christopher, “Male Bodybuilding: Theorizing the Hyperbuilt Body”

Gabriel Murchison, “Clinics, Cancer, and Children: Lesbian Health in the U.S. AIDS Crisis”

Rachel Looff, ‘The “Dykes” Chapter: Response to “In Amerika They Call Us Dykes” as a Representation of Lesbian Participation in the 1970s US Women’s Health Movement’

Joan Gass , “Queer Colonialism? International LGBT Funding in Bangalore, India.”  This paper analyzes the role of Western LGBT funding in the formation of working-class sexual subjects in Bangalore, India. To do so, this paper analyzes pivotal moments in the history of Sangama, a gender and sexuality minorities organization in Bangalore. In particular, this paper explores how Sangama both challenges dominant modes of Western LGBT activism, but also adopts a colonialist attitude toward its constituents. As Sangama evolves, it grows more disconnected from its constituents,  creating ruptures that lead to the emergence of a new political hijra subject and raising complicated questions about the responsibility for international funders to withdraw funds.

Gabriel Seidman

Bradley K. Milam, “Gay West Virginia: Community Formation and the Forging of a Gay Appalachian Identity, 1963-1979.”  As the title denotes, the essay focuses on the development of stronger and more defined communities of and identities for gay men and lesbians. Most of them faced and feared religious-based hostility, violence and condemnation throughout this period and for decades before it, which delayed the establishment of gay bars and the emergence of a visible and defined gay community; nevertheless, they retaliated in these years by forming and frequenting their own gay bars for the first time, which they called “family bars,” and which became centers of gay life throughout the state — and later by filling the pews of a gay-affirming church in Charleston, West Virginia, in clear retaliation of their former oppressive religious experiences. As bars gave them a strong, well-defined and more visible community that encouraged many to “come out,” their time at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Charleston furthered that family bond and gave them a tremendous sense of legitimacy in such a religiously-focused region. These experiences enabled them to both sustain a gay community and feel welcome in their own facet of life in Appalachia.

Kathryn Himmelstein, “Scared Straight: Institutional Sanctions against LGBTQ Youth”

Anna Wipfler, “The Making of ‘the Gay Ivy’: A History of Lesbian and Gay Student Organizing at Yale, 1969-1987”

Michael Nedelman, for his film “Everyone Who Has Ever Lived Here”

Matthew Busick, “Becoming a Yale Man: Intimacy among Yale Students in the Nineteenth Century”