CHARLES KAISER, who was born on this date, is an American author, journalist and academic administrator. His father, Phillip Mayer Kaiser, was the American ambassador to Austria.

In 2017 Kaiser was named Associate Director at the LGBT Social Science and Public Policy Center at Hunter College, as well as a Grove Fellowship Program Leader. The same year he became a weekend nonfiction book critic at The Guardian US.

His book about one family in the French Revolution, The Cost of Courage (2015) 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 (2015). 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 Columbian 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.

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 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.