Susan Stryker received her PhD in U.S. History at UC Berkeley in 1992. Her dissertation was on the origins of Mormonism as a case study in the formation of identity-based communities. She subsequently worked on the history of sexuality- and gender-based communities. She has been a lecturer, author/journalist, queer activist, and artist, a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University's History Department between 1998-2000, and the Executive Director of the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society of Northern California, which runs its own exhibit/lecture series.