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Keshet
Working for the full inclusion of lesbian, gay,
bisexual, and transgender Jews in Jewish life
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David Robinson, Ph.D.
David Robinson, Ph.D.
Bay Area Regional Director
David Robinson has been working to change the world through activism and education for the past twenty-five years. Fresh from Princeton University with a B.A. in English, David moved to New York City in 1986 to pursue a career in modern dance and find gay liberation. While performing with Senta Driver and Harry, and earning an MFA at Tisch School of the Arts, David became an ardent member of ACT UP/NY, starting with its first demonstration. Within a few months, at age twenty-two, he had become one of the group's main facilitators, running the weekly meetings of hundreds of outspoken, impassioned AIDS activists for the next three years (and skipping a lot of dance classes to go to demonstrations). He was an early and active member of Queer Nation, first in New York and then in San Francisco, where he was active with ACT UP/Golden Gate as well. After the loss of his partner Warren Krause to AIDS in 1992, David was one of the lead organizers of ACT UP's historic Ashes Action at the White House, and a member of ACT UP's AIDS Cure Project.
After earning a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, David spent the better part of a decade teaching English Literature and LGBT Studies at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where he wrote Closeted Writing and Lesbian and Gay Literature: Classical, Early Modern, Eighteenth-Century (which, surprisingly, has yet to be featured on Oprah's Book Club), achieved the rank of associate professor, but never really adjusted to the desert heat.
Love and a better climate brought David to Los Angeles, where he was part of the Jewish Federation's New Leaders Project and the Selah Leadership Program's first LA cohort (he later served on Selah's national leadership team). In 2007, he became Action Research Director and then Political Director at SAJE (Strategic Actions for a Just Economy), directing the organization's equitable land-use and urban-planning campaigns, and creating People's Planning School, a grassroots popular-education program teaching the basics of urban planning for low-income communities threatened by gentrification and displacement.
