Aaron Belkin
Aaron Belkin (born March 12, 1966) is an American political scientist, researcher, and professor. He teaches political science at San Francisco State University and was the director of the Palm Center, a think tank focused on gender, sexuality, and the military. In 2011, he was the grand marshal of San Francisco’s LGBT Pride Parade. He is Jewish.
Belkin earned a bachelor’s degree in international relations from Brown University in 1988, then earned a master’s degree and a PhD in political science from the University of California, Berkeley. He attended Hawken School in Gates Mills, Ohio, where he was a friend and prom date of LGBTQ activist Roberta A. Kaplan.
From 1998 to 2009, Belkin was an associate professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He also taught psychology at Hunter College from 2005 to 2006. At UCSB, he helped found one of the center’s research centers at the Institute for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Research, which was later renamed the Palm Center and remained connected to the UC system even after it became an independent nonprofit.
At the Palm Center, Belkin’s work focuses on using social science to influence public opinion. He played a key role in the campaign to repeal the military’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell” (DADT) policy. His 2011 book, How We Won, explains the strategies used to end DADT and shows how building broad public support made it easier for politicians to address the issue, even though it took more than a decade. He argues that ending DADT would not destabilize the military, but gaining enough public and political support took many years. After the success of the DADT campaign, he moved on to discussing military service by transgender personnel. In addition to his books, Belkin writes regularly for the Huffington Post.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 08:05 (CET).