Allan Bérubé: Gay papers remember him
Allan Bérubé, a pioneering gay historian who was also a renaissance man of sorts - as an anti-war organizer during the Viet Nam War, the proprietor of a bed & breakfast in the Catskills, the owner of an antiques and collectibles business and more recently an office design firm, and the recipient of a "genius grant" from the John D. and Catherine T. McArthur Foundation - died on December 11.
Raised in a trailer park in Bayonne, about which he wrote in the anthology "White Trash," and residing in recent years in the Catskills community of Liberty, where he served as a village trustee, Bérubé was 61. Jonathan Ned Katz, a gay historian colleague and friend of Bérubé, said his death was caused by sudden complications from stomach ulcers.
According to a 1997 edition of the University of Chicago Class Notes, Bérubé was a student there in 1968 when the assassination of Martin Luther King sparked racial unrest. Responding to the human tragedy in their midst, Bérubé and his roommate, Roy Gutmann, worked with the Quakers to collect food and clothing for people who lost their homes. But, when a racial incident led to the killing of Gutmann, , Bérubé quit school and left Chicago for Boston.
In Boston, Bérubé worked as an anti-war organizer with the American Friends Services Committee, came out in 1969, and joined a "gay liberation collective household," according to the U of C publication. By 1974, he had moved to San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, settling into another gay commune, this one for craftspeople. He soon became involved with the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project.
Spurred by Katz's groundbreaking 1976 book "Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the USA," the Project employed the emerging discipline of social history to examine the long-buried documentary history of queers in all walks of life, from prominent intellectuals and artists to working men and women. Bérubé was among those who traveled the country holding seminars about the extraordinary stories the Project had uncovered of gay men and lesbians who built fulfilling lives and relationships for themselves despite the long odds of cultural and legal sanctions.
It was at one of these lectures in a church basement in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the late 1970s that this reporter first encountered Bérubé.
In 1990, Bérubé published "Coming Out Under Fire," a history of gay soldiers whose homosocial networks forged during World War II empowered many of them to publicly acknowledge their homosexuality, in spite of official military hostility that led to the "undesirable" discharge of more than 9,000 servicemembers in five years. ...
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Raised in a trailer park in Bayonne, about which he wrote in the anthology "White Trash," and residing in recent years in the Catskills community of Liberty, where he served as a village trustee, Bérubé was 61. Jonathan Ned Katz, a gay historian colleague and friend of Bérubé, said his death was caused by sudden complications from stomach ulcers.
According to a 1997 edition of the University of Chicago Class Notes, Bérubé was a student there in 1968 when the assassination of Martin Luther King sparked racial unrest. Responding to the human tragedy in their midst, Bérubé and his roommate, Roy Gutmann, worked with the Quakers to collect food and clothing for people who lost their homes. But, when a racial incident led to the killing of Gutmann, , Bérubé quit school and left Chicago for Boston.
In Boston, Bérubé worked as an anti-war organizer with the American Friends Services Committee, came out in 1969, and joined a "gay liberation collective household," according to the U of C publication. By 1974, he had moved to San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, settling into another gay commune, this one for craftspeople. He soon became involved with the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project.
Spurred by Katz's groundbreaking 1976 book "Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the USA," the Project employed the emerging discipline of social history to examine the long-buried documentary history of queers in all walks of life, from prominent intellectuals and artists to working men and women. Bérubé was among those who traveled the country holding seminars about the extraordinary stories the Project had uncovered of gay men and lesbians who built fulfilling lives and relationships for themselves despite the long odds of cultural and legal sanctions.
It was at one of these lectures in a church basement in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the late 1970s that this reporter first encountered Bérubé.
In 1990, Bérubé published "Coming Out Under Fire," a history of gay soldiers whose homosocial networks forged during World War II empowered many of them to publicly acknowledge their homosexuality, in spite of official military hostility that led to the "undesirable" discharge of more than 9,000 servicemembers in five years. ...