Bio
Tyler Carson is a PhD candidate in the Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University - New Brunswick. Tyler's research explores the policing of gender and sexuality, moral/sex panics about protecting children, and rise and fall of the gay liberation movement in the late twentieth century United States. His research has been awarded fellowships from Cornell’s Human Sexuality Collection, the Beinecke Library at Yale, the LGBTQ+ History Association, the Institute for Research on Women at Rutgers, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Tyler's dissertation, "Skeletons in the Closet," is the first archive-based project to map debates about intergenerational sex and age-of-consent laws in US LGBTQ rights activist circles from 1978 to 1994. He shows that while these activists successfully initiated dialogue on the taboo and politically explosive topic of intergenerational sex, their legitimacy in LGBTQ politics was undermined by their perpetual refusal to critically interrogate how gender, class, and race structured their radical positions on issues of age, consent, coercion, and differences in power. He postulates NAMBLA’s excision from the LGBTQ+ politics by the mid-1990s signaled the growing rift between libertarian ideals of sexual freedom and a respectability-focused rights agenda focused on securing legal protections from the state. In tracing how intergenerational sex became the “third rail” of queer politics—and how the men and youth associated with such relationships were erased, pathologized, and criminalized — Skeletons in the Closet illuminates the boundary-work of queer citizenship and the enduring politics of memory, respectability, and dissent. Parts of the project were recently featured as a digital history exhibit at OutHistory.