He is currently working on a book about race, urbanism, and gay male culture and politics in postwar New York City. In 2012 he was awarded Yale University's Sidonie Miskimin Clauss Prize for Teaching Excellence in the Humanities, primarily for his lecture course on U.S. He has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Humanities Center, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, and the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

He has been an expert witness on the history of antigay discrimination in more than thirty gay rights cases, including the Supreme Court cases establishing the right of same-sex couples to marry, and he has served as historical consultant to several major public history projects, including exhibitions and lecture series at the New York Public Library, the Chicago History Museum, and the New-York Historical Society. history, and Why Marriage? The History Shaping Today's Debate over Gay Equality (2004). He is the author of Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (1994) which won the OAH Merle Curti Award for the best book in social history and the OAH Frederick Jackson Turner Award for best first book in any field of U.S. An updated 2019 edition commemorates the Stonewall Rebellions 50th anniversary. He writes about the history of gender, sexuality, and the city. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 18901940 is a 1994 history book by George Chauncey about gay life in New York City during the early 20th century. George Chauncey is a professor of history at Columbia University where he also directs the Columbia Research Initiative on the Global History of Sexualities.

Chauncey gay new york