Rubin is a prominent LGBT rights activist, and theorist of sex and gender politics.

• Her 1984 essay "Thinking Sex" is widely regarded as a founding text of gay and lesbian studies, sexuality studies, and queer theory.

• Having been raised in a middle-class Jewish home in South Carolina during Jim Crow, Rubin has written that her experiences growing up in the segregated South gave her "an abiding hatred of racism in all its forms, and a healthy respect for its tenacity.”