Charles Kaiser was born in Washington D.C. and grew up there and in Albany, N.Y., Dakar, Senegal, London, England, Windsor, Conn., and New York City. He started writing for The New York Times while still an undergraduate at Columbia College. He spent five years there as a reporter on the Metro staff, covering City Hall, the environment, and State Supreme Court, among other beats. He then became the press critic at Newsweek for two years. After a brief stint writing about media and publishing for The Wall Street Journal, he wrote his first book, 1968 In America, which was published in 1988. The Gay Metropolis was first published in 1997. Both of them are available from Grove Press. He is completing The Cost of Courage, about a French family in the Resistance in Paris during World War II, to be published by The Other Press. When an updated edition of The Gay Metropolis was published in 2007, Kaiser appeared on The Colbert Report to discuss it: http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/90417/july-25-2007/charles-kaiser His writing has appeared in New York, The New York Observer, Vanity Fair, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and Manhattan,inc. among many other publications. Kaiser was a founder and former president of the New York chapter of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association. He has taught journalism at Columbia and Princeton, where he was the Ferris Professor of Journalism. He is an avid bike rider. A few years ago he biked 1,000 miles in three weeks over the Blue Ridge mountains in Virginia and Kentucky. He lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
