Herek was born in 1954, the youngest of four children. He briefly attended the University of Nebraska at Omaha, but dropped out to devote himself to political activism. He later received his B.A. degree from the University of Nebraska at Omaha, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis. He completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Yale University, followed by a year of teaching at Yale. He then joined the faculty at the City University of New York Graduate Center. In 1989, he returned to UC Davis, first as a research psychologist and then, since 1999, as a tenured professor.
