American academic, writer and activist Michael Warner was BOTD in 1958. He studied at University of Wisconsin–Madison and Johns Hopkins University, and became an academic, teaching English literature and American studies at Northwestern and Rutgers, before taking up a position at Yale University in 2007. His first book The Letters of the Republic established him as a leading scholar in American literature and public sphere theory. He is best known for his 1999 book The Trouble with Normal, Written partially in response to gay conservative Andrew Sullivan‘s 1995 book Virtually Normal, Warner argued that the gay marriage was a misguided attempt to sanitise queer sexuality and assimilate homosexuality into a cultural mainstream. Drawing from the theories of Michel Foucault, he proposed queer life as a sustainable alternative to gay/straight binaries and post-capitalist political and social hierarchies. Warner and Sullivan sparred through most of the 2000s about the appropriate positioning of gay identity in contemporary culture. While Sullivan “won” the gay marriage debate, Warner’s work has since been recognised as a key text in queer theory. His other work includes Publics and Counterpublics, an essay collection exploring the history of public and private spaces affecting feminist and gay rights movements, and Fear of a Queer Planet, continuing his analysis of queer theory as an agent of social change. He has also written about Walt Whitman as the gay daddy of American literature and the homoerotic undercurrents of Henry David Thoreau‘s Walden. Warner continues to teach at Yale. His current relationship status is unknown.