Housed at the Graduate Center, CUNY, CLAGS sponsors public programs and conferences, offers fellowships to individual scholars, and functions as a conduit of information.

Past executive directors include Martin Duberman, Alissa Solomon, Jill Dolan, Paisley Currah, Sarah Chinn, James Wilson, and Kevin Nadal.

Many CLAGS founders claim that initial conversations about a research institute on lesbian and gay people began in Duberman's living room in 1985.

"My aim was political as well as intellectual: I felt that lesbian and gay scholars had much to tell the mainstream world about gender and sexuality and that their findings needed to be widely disseminated, not least as a way to contest right-wing propaganda about homosexuality as degenerate and criminal.

"[1] Duberman also described the intentionality of gender parity, in that they attempted to ensure that both lesbian women and gay men were included in the leadership and membership of the center.

[2] The inaugural LGBTQ Scholars of Color Conference gathered 200 attendees at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

[14] Past winners of the Kessler Award include: Joan Nestle, Martin Duberman, Susan Stryker, Judith Butler, Jonathan Ned Katz, Cathy J. Cohen, Edmund White, Barbara Smith, Cheryl Clarke, Richard Fung, Sarah Schulman, Gayle Rubin, John D'Emilio, Urvashi Vaid, Monique Wittig, Samuel R. Delany, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Cherríe Moraga, Isaac Julien, Adrienne Rich, Douglas Crimp, and Carole Vance[14][15] In 2016, the Kessler winner was Dean Spade, whose talk was titled "When We Win We Lose: Mainstreaming and the Redistribution of Respectability".

The recipient of the award engages in a public conversation with the CLAGS executive director on topics related to LGBTQ communities.

It was titled "Lesbian and Gay History", and Susan Stryker discussed her experience the conference as a reference point of the climate of the LGBT community during the early transgender movement.