Sean Cahill
Adjunct Assistant Professor of Public Administration

 

For the past two decades, Sean Cahill has been a leader the fight for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) equality and science-based HIV prevention and care. Cahill currently serves as Managing Director of Public Policy, Research and Community Health at Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York. Cahill’s policy priorities have included advocating for a national AIDS strategy, defunding abstinence-only-until-marriage, repealing the federal funds ban on syringe exchange, and repealing the HIV entry ban. Cahill oversees prevention efforts funded by CDC, SAMHSA, and state and local agencies targeting gay and bisexual men, women, immigrants, youth, and older adults. He serves on the HIV Health and Human Services (Ryan White) Planning Council of New York City, as well as on the Planning Council’s Policy Committee and Priority Setting and Resource Allocation Committee. He is a member of the Sexual Minority Assessment Research Team, which works to add sexuality questions to federal surveys.

 

Cahill led successful efforts to get a $1.4 million appropriation into the FY09 budget to fund the development of a national AIDS strategy through the Office of National AIDS Policy, and to include research and prevention targeting men who have sex with men in Africa and the Caribbean in the reauthorization of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief in 2008.

 

Cahill directed the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute from 2001 to 2007, where he created seminal research on demographics, poverty/homelessness, family recognition, aging, voting, and the anti-gay movement. In the late1990s he chaired the Lesbian and Gay Political Alliance of Massachusetts. Cahill is the author of Same-sex marriage in the United States: Focus on the facts (2004: Lexington), and co-author of Policy issues affecting lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender families (2007: University of Michigan) and the forthcoming Education policy issues affecting lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth (in press, University of Michigan). He has published many articles and book chapters, most recently “Black and Latino same-sex couple households and the racial dynamics of anti-gay activism,” in Black sexualities: Probing powers, passions, practices, and policies (Battle, J. and Barnes, S., Editors, 2010: Rutgers University Press).