Wayne R. Dynes (August 23, 1934 – late July 2021) was an American art historian, encyclopedist, and bibliographer. He was professor emeritus in the Art Department at
Hunter College, where he taught from 1972 to 2005.
Dynes spent his early years in southern California, where he attended
UCLA and received his B.A. in 1969. After extended sojourns in Italy and England, he settled permanently in
Manhattan, where he obtained his Ph.D. from the
Institute of Fine Arts of
New York University. The subject of his dissertation was the eleventh-century illuminated
Stavelot Bible from Belgium. His training as a medievalist provided the basic core of his college teaching, first at
Columbia, then at Hunter College.
During the 1960s Dynes was a member of the
Mattachine Society of New York. He was in Europe at the time of the
Stonewall Uprising in
Greenwich Village in June 1969. After returning in 1973 he collaborated with Jack Stafford, a librarian, to work on one of many bibliographies of gay studies. This interest ultimately yielded his Homosexuality: A Research Guide (1987), followed by his work as editor-in-chief of the two-volume Encyclopedia of Homosexuality (Garland, 1990).
Works
The Styles of European Art (with Richard Waterhouse et al.). London: Thames & Hudson, 1965.
Palaces of Europe. Great Buildings of the World. London: Hamlyn, 1968.
Cloister Symposium, 1972 (coeditor, with Florens Deuchler). Fort Tryon Park: International Center of Medieval Art, 1973.
"Concept of Gothic", in Dictionary of the History of Ideas, pp. 367–374. New York: Scribners, 1973.
The Illuminations of the Stavelot Bible. New York: Garland, 1978.
Gay Books Bulletin (editor). Nos. 1–9. New York: Scholarship Committee of the New York Chapter of the
Gay Academic Union, 1982–83. Continued under the title The Cabirion and Gay Books Bulletin. Nos. 10–12. 1984–85.
"Afterword", in Reflections on the American Homosexual Rights Movement by Jim Levin, pp. 45–51. Gai Saber Monograph, no. 2. New York: Gay Academic Union, 1983.
Homolexis: A Historical and Cultural Lexicon of Homosexuality. Gai Saber Monograph, no. 4. New York: Gay Academic Union, 1985.
Homosexuality: A Research Guide. Garland Reference Library of Social Science, vol. 313. New York: Garland, 1987; London: Routledge, 2019. (Available online
here.)
"Art, Language and Romanesque", in Gesta / International Center of Medieval Art, vol. 28 (1989), pp. 3–10.
Major Lines of Investigation in Gay/Lesbian Studies: Critical Synopses of the History and Methodology of Scholarship (with Stephen Donaldson). New York: by the authors, 1992.
Studies in Homosexuality (coeditor with Stephen Donaldson). 13 vols. New York: Garland, 1992. Vol. 1: Homosexuality in the Ancient World. Vol. 2: Ethnographic Studies of Homosexuality. Vol. 3: Asian Homosexuality. Vol. 4: Homosexuality and Homosexuals in the Arts. Vol. 5: History of Homosexuality in Europe and America. Vol. 6: Homosexuality: Discrimination, Criminology, and the Law. Vol. 7: Lesbianism. Vol. 8: Homosexual Themes in Literary Works. Vol. 9: Homosexuality and Medicine, Health, and Science. Vol. 10: Homosexuality and Government, Politics and Prisons. Vol. 11: Homosexuality and Psychology, Psychiatry, and Counseling. Vol. 12: Homosexuality and Religion and Philosophy. Vol. 13: Sociology of Homosexuality.
Series Editor’s Foreword, in Forms of Desire: Sexual Orientation and the
Social Constructionist Controversy, pp. ix–xi. Ed. by Edward Stein. Garland Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 1. New York: Garland, 1992.
“Wrestling with the Social Boa Constructor”, in Forms of Desire: Sexual Orientation and the Social Constructionist Controversy, pp. 209–238. Ed. by Edward Stein. Garland Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 1. New York: Garland, 1992.
"Hispanic Homosexuals: A Spanish Lexicon" (with Stephen O. Murray), in Latin American Male Homosexualities, pp. 180–192. Ed. by Stephen O. Murray. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995.
"Portugayese" (with Stephen O. Murray), in Latin American Male Homosexualities, pp. 256–263. Ed. by Stephen O. Murray. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995.
"
Queer Studies: In Search of a Discipline", in Academic Questions, vol. 8, no. 4 (1995), pp. 34–52.
"The Return of the
Third Sex", in Journal of Sex Research, vol. 32, no. 4 (1995), pp. 335–337.
"Medievalism and
Le Corbusier", in Gesta / International Center of Medieval Art, vol. 45 (2006), no. 2, pp. 89–94.
Turning the Corner:
Abstraction at the End of the Twentieth Century. New York: Bertha and Karl Lwubsdorf Art Gallery, Hunter College of the City University of New York, 1997.
The Mind of the Beholder: History, Theory, and Criticism of Art. New York: by the author, 1998.
"Light in Hellas: How
German Classical Philology Engendered Gay Scholarship", in Same-Sex Desire and Love in Greco-Roman Antiquity and in the Classical Tradition of the West, pp. 341–356. Ed. by Beert C Verstraete and Vernon Provencal. London: Routledge, 2005. Simultaneously published in Journal of Homosexuality, vol. 49, nos. 3–4 (2005), pp. 341–356.