Charles Kaiser


Charles Kaiser is an American author, journalist and academic administrator. In 2018 he was named Acting Director of the LGBTQ Public Policy Center at Hunter College. He is also a nonfiction book critic for The Guardian.
His book about one family in the French Resistance, The Cost of Courage received enthusiastic reviews from The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The Christian Science Monitor, among many other publications. It also won the grand prize at the Paris Book Festival. In 2016 it was published in France by Seuil as Le Prix du Courage.
His blog about the media, Full Court Press, originated on the website of Radar Magazine in the fall of 2007. He continued it at the Columbia Journalism Review and the Sidney Hillman Foundation until the spring of 2011.
His main interests include modern French history, The New York Times, torture conducted by the Bush administration, American politics, the French Resistance, Bob Dylan, and The Beatles.

Early life

The son of a diplomat, Philip Mayer Kaiser, he grew up in Washington, D.C., Albany, New York, Dakar, Senegal, London, England and Windsor, Connecticut. He has lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan for many years.

Career

Kaiser first started writing for The New York Times when he was an undergraduate at Columbia University. He has taught journalism at Columbia and Princeton.
Kaiser is a former reporter for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, and a former press critic for Newsweek. He has also written for The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Observer, New York magazine, Vanity Fair, the Columbia Journalism Review, and many other publications.

Works

He is the author of The Cost of Courage, 1968 In America, and The Gay Metropolis. The Gay Metropolis was a Lambda Literary Award winner, as well as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. He was a guest on the Colbert Report, where he discussed a new edition of The Gay Metropolis. He wrote the afterword for a 2012 edition of Merle Miller's landmark work, On Being Different: What it Means to Be a Homosexual. That afterword was excerpted on the website of the New York Review of Books.
In 2015 he was inducted into the LGBT Journalists Hall of Fame.