Henry D. Abelove is an American historian and literary critic, most of whose writings focus on the history of sex during the modern era. He is widely considered to be an important figure in the development of gay and lesbian studies and queer theory.  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 was born in 1945 in Montgomery, Alabama to Bernice Kasover Abelove, a homemaker, and to Leo Abelove, a grocer. When he was still a child, the family moved to Utica, New York, where he attended the public schools and also the religious school of Utica's Temple Beth-El. He was graduated from Harvard College A.B. magna cum laude in History in 1966, and he took a PhD in history at Yale University in 1978.
 He spent most of his professional career on the faculty of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. He began there in the history department, but in 1991 he switched his affiliation to the English department, where he remained until he retired in 2012. At Wesleyan he also directed the Center for the Humanities from 2000 until 2003 and again from 2004 until 2006. 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. He won Wesleyan's Binswanger Award for Excellence in Teaching in 1995. During and after his years at Wesleyan, he occasionally took up visiting appointments. He served as visiting associate professor of history at Brown University in 1990; as distinguished visiting professor of English at the University of Alberta in 1995; as the Stanley Kelly, Jr. Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton University in 2003–04; as the Fulbright Senior Specialist at the University of Antwerp in 2008; and, in 2012, following his retirement from Wesleyan University, as visiting professor of English at New York University. He also served as the inaugural F.O. Matthiessen Visiting Professor of Sex and Gender at Harvard University, the first endowed named chair in LGBT studies in the country.
 During his professional career, he won a variety of grants and awards including fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Danforth Foundation, the University of Utah Humanities Center, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, N.J., and the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University. The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader won the Lambda Literary Prize in 2004.
 Abelove is a gay man and has long been involved in queer activism, and was awarded the Michael Lynch Service Prize for Activism in Queer Studies Scholarship in 2008. He lives in New York City. He has a younger sister who lives in Maryland.