Wesley Phelps earned his Ph.D. in History and a Graduate Certificate in the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality in 2010 from Rice University.  He accepted the CSWGS Distinguished Alumnus Award in January of 2025 after delivering a lecture concerning the subject of his most recent book, Before Lawrence v. Texas: The Making of a Queer Social Movement, to an audience of CSWGS graduate students. 

Before Lawrence v. Texas traces the 136-year history of legal challenges to Texas sodomy laws prior to the landmark Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas in 2003.  It received the Carol Horton Tullis Memorial Prize from the Texas State Historical Association in 2024.

Professor Phelps is an Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of History at the University of North Texas.  He studies US LGBTQ history and the history of the United States South in the twentieth century, with a particular interest in grassroots democracy, race and sexuality, and social and political activism.  He teaches courses on US and Texas LGBTQ History, the South since the Civil War, and the 1960s.  In his research, he is particularly interested in how democracy operates at the grassroots level and how marginalized groups of people have struggled to participate in the democratic experiment.  Much of his recent work focuses on the gay and lesbian rights movement in Texas.