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Wayne R. Dynes is an American art historian, encyclopedist, bibliographer, and gay activist. He is Professor Emeritus in the Art Department at Hunter College, where he taught from 1972 to 2005.
W. R. Dynes spent his early years in southern California, where he attended UCLA. After extended sojourns in Italy and England, he settled permanently in Manhattan, New York City. He obtained his Ph.D. at the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University in 1969. The subject of his art-history dissertation was an eleventh-century illuminated Bible from Belgium. His training as a medievalist provided the basic core of his college teaching.
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 many bibliographies of gay studies. This interest ultimately yielded his volume Homosexuality: A Research Guide, followed by his work as editor-in-chief of the two-volume Encyclopedia of Homosexuality.
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