He is the cofounder of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, and author of several books including Before Pastoral (1983) and One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (1990).

[1][2][3] In 1977, Halperin served as Associate Director of the Summer Session of the School of Classical Studies at the American Academy in Rome.

[7] In 1990, he launched a campaign to oppose the presence of the ROTC on the MIT campus, on the grounds that it discriminated against gay and lesbian students.

[14] Halperin's book was published in 1990,[15] two years before the centenary of Charles Gilbert Chaddock's English translation of Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis.

[18] In her 1991 essay "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf", Camille Paglia finds in Halperin's work a prototypical example of rampant careerism in the humanities.

Paglia observes that Halperin's generation of academics is prone to a "contemporary parochialism" that eagerly cites hot-off-the-press articles without attempting to critically assess their objective merit in light of the intellectual tradition.

[20] Paglia's long review article was itself criticised in the following issue of Arion by W. Ralph Johnson and Thomas Van Nortwick.