Duberman, Martin Bauml (b. 1930)
Historian, biographer, essayist, playwright, and academic, Martin Bauml
Duberman is an astute commentator on gender and race issues and a
pioneer in glbtq studies. A member of the pre-Stonewall generation who
recognized the historical significance of the gay movement, his own life
arc parallels the progress gay people have made toward social
acceptance.

This is the forty-third post in a series highlighting the best gay and
lesbian authors from the 20th century (with a few before and after that
period) who have recorded in
fiction, and nonfiction, the history of gay people telling what life is, and was, during an important time of history.

Born
in New York City on August 6, 1930, Duberman grew up in New York, the
son of a Jewish garment manufacturer who had immigrated from the Ukraine
and a second-generation American mother. Although he early evinced
interest in theater, his parents discouraged the stage as a potential
profession.

A
brilliant student, Duberman entered Yale in 1948 and graduated Phi Beta
Kappa in 1952. He then undertook graduate studies at Harvard, where he
earned a Ph. D. in American history in 1957.
Academic Star

From
1957 to 1961, Duberman taught as an instructor at Yale. His biography
of Massachusetts politician Charles Francis Adams (1961), based on his
Harvard dissertation, both won the prestigious Bancroft Prize in
American history and led to an appointment as Assistant Professor of
History at Princeton.
Duberman quickly rose through the academic
ranks at Princeton, becoming full professor in 1967. He published
prolifically on nineteenth-century abolitionists, African-American
history, and the growth of radical political movements. He also wrote a
series of plays.

Duberman's biography James Russell Lowell (1966)
was a finalist for the National Book Award. His best known play, In
White America (1963), which incorporates text from letters, diaries, and
court records to dramatize American race relations, won the Vernon
Rice/Drama Desk Award for Best Off-Broadway Production of the 1963
season and was filmed for television in 1970.
By 1971, however,
Duberman had become weary of the conservative smugness he detested at
Princeton. He felt alienated from most of his colleagues there as a
result of his sympathy for radical politics and their rejection of his
proposals for academic reform. He had been commuting to Princeton from
Greenwich Village since 1964, and that also served to distance him from
his colleagues, as did his interest in playwriting.

To be closer
to the heart of the New York theatrical scene, in 1971 Duberman accepted
a position at Lehman College, part of the City University of New York,
where he was named Distinguished Professor of History. The move from
Princeton to a less prestigious university reflected Duberman's growing
impatience with academic politics. It also marked an important new
beginning in his life.

Path to Acceptance
Despite his
spectacular success as an academic, Duberman was a very unhappy man in
the 1960s. While still an undergraduate at Yale, he had begun to have
sex with men, cruising parks, beaches, and bathhouses while maintaining
the image of a young heterosexual man. He experienced shame and disgust
for his homosexual desires even as he acted on them.

Deeply
disturbed by his homosexuality, Duberman underwent psychotherapy in
order to be "cured." In his 1991 memoir Cures: A Gay Man's Odyssey, he
describes the torturous fifteen-year process of attempting to change his
sexual orientation, which was not only abysmally unsuccessful but also
severely damaging to his self-esteem. His therapists reinforced the
societal homophobia that he had already internalized.

Gay Activist
Duberman
ended therapy in 1970. Thus, his belated acceptance of his orientation
coincided with the emergence of the post-Stonewall gay rights movement.
He began a cautious exploration of the literature and politics of
liberation. This exploration ultimately resulted in an ardent commitment
to contesting homophobia in academia and in society at large.
In
Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community (1972), his acclaimed study
of an innovative learning community in North Carolina, Duberman broke
the traditional academic boundary of objectivity. Convinced of the need
to be forthcoming about his perspective, he came out as a homosexual in
his analysis of the homophobic dismissal of the experimental college's
theater director. In doing so, he himself became subject to academic
homophobia.


Duberman served on the boards of the Lambda Legal
Defense Fund and the National Gay Task Force and was a co-founder of
the Gay Academic Union in 1973. Always critical of elitism and
privilege, he clearly saw the connections between gay rights and
feminism, and he acknowledged the debt both owed to the African-American
civil rights movement. He advocated the inclusion of lesbians in gay
movement organizations and attempted to move gay politics beyond the
single-issue focus of some of its spokespeople. While embracing gay
identity politics he critiqued its failure to subject itself to racial
and class analysis.



Playwright and Biographer
In
addition to scholarly works, Duberman has also authored a dozen plays
and a historical novel, Haymarket (2003). Seven of Duberman's plays that
explore gender issues are collected in Male Armor (1975). In these
pieces he examines the construct of male identity as a skin men use to
shield themselves from their own sexual and emotional energies.
For
example, "Payments" (1971), inspired by the hustler culture that
Duberman patronized when he was deeply closeted, explores the psychology
of a masculine man who self-identifies as straight while catering
sexually to male clients. "

Duberman's biography of Paul Robeson
(1989), the African-American singer, actor, and civil rights activist,
reflects the author's various interests in theater, African-American
history, radical politics, and liberation movements.
Gay Academic
Duberman
founded City University of New York's Center for Lesbian and Gay
Studies (CLAGS) in 1991. This program, one of the first such centers at a
prominent university, helped make gay and lesbian studies academically
respectable, as did his own research and publication in the field, which
includes not only scholarly accounts of gay history but also
first-person accounts of his own participation in the movement for
equality. CLAGS continues as a leader in the gay and lesbian studies
movement, sponsoring conferences and awarding research grants, as well
as focusing glbtq studies at CUNY.

In About Time: Exploring the
Gay Past (1986, 1991), a collection of his own essays, some of which
were published in the New York Native, Duberman excerpts and analyzes
archival source materials. In these essays, he frequently illustrates
how the gay and lesbian past has been obfuscated by policies of
libraries and other archives.

Stonewall (1994), Duberman's
account of a pivotal moment in the gay liberation movement, weaves six
personal narratives into a social history of the events leading up to
the Stonewall riots, as the homophile movement metamorphosed into the
gay liberation movement.

Midlife Queer: Autobiography of a
Decade (1996) is a memoir that takes a topical approach to gay movement
politics and scholarship between 1971 and 1981. Left Out: The Politics
of Exclusion (1999) compiles Duberman's essays on gender politics,
campus radicalism, civil rights, and anti-war activism.
Duberman also
serves as general editor of two Chelsea House series directed at young
people, one consisting of biographies of notable gay men and lesbians
and the other focused on Issues in Lesbian and Gay Life. In addition, he
is a frequent contributor of reviews and commentary to major
periodicals.

Informing all of Duberman's work is a grasp of the
power of narrative in shaping perceptions of social movements and their
relevance to individual lives. Given his personal story of growth from
internalized homophobia to gay activism, this emphasis is altogether
appropriate.

Writings
Charles Frances Adams, 1807–1886, Houghton, 1961.
In White America (play), 1963.
The Antislavery Vanguard: New Essays on the Abolitionists (editor), Princeton University Press, 1965.
James Russell Lowell, Houghton, 1966.
Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community, Dutton, 1972.
Male Amour: Selected Plays, 1968–1974, Dutton, 1975.
About Time: Exploring the Gay Past, Gay Presses of New York, 1986.
Paul Robeson, Knopf, 1988.
Hidden History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (co-editor), NAL, 1989.
Cures: A Gay Man's Odyssey, Dutton, 1991.
Stonewall, Dutton, 1993.
Midlife Queen: Autobiography of a Decade, 1971–1981, Scribner, 1996.
Left Out: The Politics of Exclusion: Essays, 1964–2002, Basic Books, 2002.
Haymarket (novel), Seven Stories Press, 2004.
"The Avenging Angel" (a reconsideration of John Brown), The Nation, May 23, 2005.
The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein, Knopf, 2007.
Radical Acts: Collected Political Plays, The New Press, 2008.
Waiting to Land: A (Mostly) Political Memoir, 1985-2008, The New Press, 2009.