Dennis Altman, an academic and well-known gay rights campaigner, is the author of several books on homosexuality, including Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation (1971) and AIDS and the New Puritanism (1986). His books on politics include Rehearsals for Change: Politics and Culture in Australia (1980).
As a Fullbright scholar at Cornell University in the 1960s, Altman met and began working with some of the United States' leading gay-rights activists. Returning to Australia in 1969, he took a position teaching politics at the University of Sydney, and published his influential text Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation two years later.
Altman moved to La Trobe University in 1985, an institution at which he was later to become professor of politics. In 2005, he was appointed Visiting Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard University. Since 2009, he has been director of the Institute for Human Security at La Trobe.
