A graduate of
Columbia University, Waugh wrote film criticism and history articles for publications such as
Jump Cut and
The Body Politic before publishing his first book,
Show Us Life: Towards a History and Aesthetics of the Committed Documentary, in 1984. His 1996 book,
Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from Their Beginnings to Stonewall, took 13 years to research and write. Its release was delayed eight full months after its initial planned publication date, due to difficulty finding a printer willing to handle the book's sexually explicit
homoerotic imagery. He is a two-time
Lambda Literary Award nominee, garnering nominations in the Visual Arts category at the
15th Lambda Literary Awards in 2003 for
Out/Lines: Underground Gay Graphics From Before Stonewall, and at the
17th Lambda Literary Awards in 2005 for
Lust Unearthed: Vintage Gay Graphics from the DuBek Collection. He is also the recipient of the SCMS (Society for Cinema and Media Studies)
Katherine Singer Kovács Book Award for
The Conscience of Cinema: The Work of Joris Ivens, 1912-1989. Waugh has also served on the board of
Cinema Politica, has been active with the
Quebec Gay Archives, and is coeditor with
Matthew Hays of the
Queer Film Classics series of 19 monographs on LGBT film, published by
Arsenal Pulp Press. In 2013 Waugh,
Ryan Conrad and Cinema Politica raised funds on
Indiegogo to produce and distribute a documentary film about the Russian LGBT organization
Children-404. In 2010, Waugh and filmmaker Kim Simard launched the Queer Media Database Canada-Québec, an online database project to collect and publish information about LGBT films and videos made in Canada and the personalities involved in their creation. The project was based in part on his 2006 book
The Romance of Transgression in Canada: Queering Sexualities, Nations, Cinemas. ==Works==