Henry D. Abelove is an American historian and literary critic, most of whose writings focus on the history of sex during the modern era.

[1] He is best known for his groundbreaking books The Evangelist of Desire: John Wesley and the Methodists (Stanford University Press, 1990) and Deep Gossip (University of Minnesota Press, 2003) along with The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (Routledge, 1993) (co-edited with Michele Aina Barale and David Halperin) which codified the fields of gay and lesbian studies and queer theory and provided them with their first teaching anthology.

He regarded classroom teaching as his primary work, and he taught courses on more than a dozen topics apart from queer theory.

These included Jewish history in the diaspora, Thoreau's Walden, the Enlightenment, and poetry and politics in 20th-century New York City.

Matthiessen Visiting Professor of Sex and Gender at Harvard University, the first endowed named chair in LGBT studies in the country.