Ken Sherrill died at home in New York City after an illness on December 2, 2023. He was 81. Ken will long be remembered for his pioneering scholarly and political work on LGBTQ+ politics and for his extraordinary role as mentor, teacher, institution builder, and friend. Ken’s lifework stands as an example of a commitment to rigorous scholarship and effective, inspired advocacy in the service of building a more just and free society.
A native New Yorker, Ken graduated from Brooklyn College in 1963 and went to the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill to do graduate work, as he reported, because it was the only place at the time to study Black political participation. Ken later served as an instructor at Oberlin College from 1965-1967 before joining the faculty of Hunter College, City University of New York where he remained until his retirement. His PhD was granted in 1968 for his dissertation on “‘Political Modernization’ in the United States.” Ken was active in civil rights activities in North Carolina and New York, and became deeply involved in Democratic Party politics in New York City, working, for example, on the 1968 campaign for Robert F. Kennedy and serving as a delegate to the 1984 Democratic National Convention. In 1969, he offered expert witness testimony on the effect of early registration deadlines to discourage voting. In 1977, he became the first openly gay elected official in New York City when he was elected as the party’s District Leader in Manhattan’s 69th Assembly District. He also creatively paid his political dues on the ground, for example, by going to a bordello in Hell’s Kitchen to get out the vote in 1972.
Ken’s early scholarly works in the 1960s concerned racial attitudes, but beginning in the early 1970s he also turned his attention to LGBTQ+ people as political actors. He published (often with co-authors, as collaborative research was an important value for him) many articles, for example “What Political Science Is Missing by Not Studying AIDS” in PS: Political Science & Politics (1992) admonishing the discipline for ignoring the important political issues raised by sexual minorities. He edited an award-winning book with Marc Wolinsky on Gays in the Military: Joseph Steffan versus the United States (Princeton University Press 1993). He testified in several cases about the relative political power of gays and lesbians, including Romer v. Evans, the first US Supreme Court ruling applying the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause to protect the rights of sexual minorities. Ken published the research that formed the basis of this testimony in PS as “The Political Power of Gays Lesbians and Bisexuals” in September 1996. He studied the effects of gay marriage on political opinions, and he and his long-time partner, now long-time husband, Gerald Otte, married as soon as feasible in Canada in 2003. Ken was often quoted by the LGBTQ+ media and by the mainstream media on matters of national, state, and New York City politics, including by such outlets as CNN, CBS, and The New York Times.
In addition to his scholarly and public work, Ken Sherrill fought tirelessly to make the City University of New York more open and accessible. He was involved in studies to determine admissions requirements as the university instituted “open admissions” in the early 1970s. As Chair of the Hunter College Senate, he shepherded through a “pluralism and diversity” requirement in 1992 that preceded many other universities’ efforts to diversify curricula by decades. He was a formidable advocate for public higher education and a frequent lobbyist on behalf of public higher education in New York City and State.
Ken will also be fondly remembered as a teacher and as a mentor. As a teacher, he would end his first semester American politics class by reminding students that, as people who had passed this class, they were now among the top one-quarter of Americans who understood American politics, and implicitly, that they now had a duty as citizens to act. He collaborated with many undergraduate and graduate students on research projects. He would tell the people who had applied for positions at Hunter that, while at many universities outstanding students were attracted to attend by an extraordinary faculty, at Hunter, an extraordinary student body attracted and created an outstanding faculty. Ken served as Department Chair at Hunter and is fondly remembered by all of his colleagues there for his advice, mentoring, and support. He befriended and advised scholars throughout the discipline and around the world who were interested in studying LGBTQ+ issues, and these were his frequent co-authors. Ken institutionalized his commitment to fostering LGBTQ+ scholarship through his creation and financial support of the APSA Awards for the best dissertation proposal and best book prize in the field. His contributions were recognized by the profession in the August 2023 issue of Political Science Today. Queer J. Taylor’s cover story, graced with Ken’s picture and riffed the title of his essay, is called “Fifty Years of LGBTQ+ Scholarship: Kenneth Sherrill, an LGBTQ+ Leader Who Has No Trouble Finding Followers.”
Beyond his political, scientific, pedagogical, and institutional accomplishments, Ken was a remarkable human. An early member of a men’s-only consciousness-raising group, he supported the struggles of all people wanting more freedom. He was surprised at how much political progress LGBTQ+ people had made in his lifetime, but he modestly never measured how much his own work had clearly helped contribute to this change. And he also enjoyed many pleasures, including the opera (Ken had been a supernumerary at the Metropolitan Opera in New York while a student) and baseball (as Ken frequently told people, “Of course I’m an optimist, I’m a Mets fan”). He had a wonderful sense of humor, a far-flung network of global correspondents through his social media accounts, and many grateful friends who had stayed at their brownstone on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, at one time or another, at what Ken and Gerald called "the Otte-Sherrill Arms.” He will be missed, but his legacy of support for everyone’s inclusion and dignity will endure.
