Allan Berube
From Philosopedia
Contents |
TENTATIVE - do not quote until approved
Allan Bérubé (3 December 1946 - 12 December 2007)
Bérubé, who was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, lived with his family in Monson, Massachusetts, before moving with them to a waterfront trailer park near Bayonne, New Jersey, and with a scholarship graduated in 1964 from the Mount Hermon School for Boys (now the Northfield Schools) in Mount Hermon, Massachusetts.
The University of Chicago Dropout
Accepted at the University of Chicago, Bérubé from 1964 to 1968 was an English Literature major. He became a dropout in 1968, explaining
- "the assumption was that . . . you couldn't write gay American history, because there were no sources. Everything was covered up or censored or burned or never existed. Invisible, hidden."
The University of Chicago's "Class News" reported that the school had helped to give him the skills he needed to read the primary documents so crucial to his research:
- But he also considered his final year at the University, 1968, "one of the main influences on his life and his activism. As an antiwar protestor about to lose his student draft deferment, he started applying for conscientious-objector status and doing draft counseling. Then came the April assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. After the riots that followed, Bérubé and his roommate, Roy Gutmann, AB '68, worked with the Quakers to collect food and clothing for the victims. A few weeks later, Gutmann was killed in a racial incident. Bérubé left school and town."
- Moving to Boston, he attended Harvard Summer school in 1968. He did full-time draft counseling and antiwar organizing with the American Friends Service Committee. Having begun to come out in 1969, he decided to join a "gay liberation collective household." In 1974 he headed to San Francisco's famed Haight-Ashbury neighborhood and joined another gay commune, this one for craftspeople.
- Bérubé snickers a bit when he recalls his hippie days: "People I talk to in their early 20s say, 'Oh, that's way cool. You were really '70s. Did you have long hair, did you do macramé?' And yes, I did."
- It was Jonathan Katz's 1976 book, Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A.: A Documentary that led Bérubé to his life's work. "It made me realize that I could see myself and people like me in history," he explains simply. Inspired, he read old newspapers, searched used-book stores, and met like-minded people. In 1978 they formed the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project.
- "The products of what we did were not articles in scholarly journals," Bérubé says. "We would do slide shows, public presentations, panels. People would pay to go see it, and that's what funded our work. We were in a continual dialogue with the communities whose histories we were doing."
University of Chicago historian John D'Emilio wrote of Bérubé's being a dropout:
- He was tickled at the idea that as a working-class kid who dropped out of college he could do history that was deep, important, respected and excited people. He just had a passion about these lives. He was really interested in people who were genuinely lost to history
Coming Out
In the late 1960s, after dropping out of the University of Chicago, he worked with the American Friends Service Committee in Boston.
In the early 1970s he was a pioneer activist in Boston who helped set up innovative recycling programs and other community-based Ecology Action projects.
In 1978, he was one of the founders of the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project. His slide showed women who dressed and passed as men – and married other women.
In his 1990 book, Coming Out Under Fire, Bérubé examined the roles gays played in the nation's armed forces. It took him ten years, led to a Peabody Award-winning documentary, and in 1996 brought him a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation "genius grant."
A University of Chicago classmate described how the book originated:
- Coming Out Under Fire emerged from a box of hundreds of letters exchanged among a circle of gay GIs from Missouri. A friend of a friend found the letters while cleaning out a house and gave them to Bérubé. "I sorted them out and had a good cry," he says. "It really captured my heart and raised a lot of questions, so I started doing research."
- The book includes information from those and other letters, diaries, about 70 oral-history interviews, and thousands of pages of declassified military documents. Tracing the origins of the military's antigay policy in World War II, his book was often referred to in 1993 Senate hearings on that policy and was the basis for the documentary film Coming Out Under Fire.
- Bérubé's current research, on the Marine Cooks & Stewards Union, was inspired by his interviews with WWII veterans who had also belonged to the now-defunct union. This union, which represented the workers who cooked, cleaned, and served on big passenger liners in the Pacific from the 1930s to the 1950s, welcomed gay men and allowed an open culture of "queens."
- With the MacArthur money, Bérubé is buying a video camera to capture his interviews visually as well as orally, hoping to produce a documentary and a book. And, despite teaching since 1990 as adjunct faculty at universities on the West Coast and in New York, his funds grew tight last year, and Bérubé was on the verge of giving up his research work. The fellowship, he says, will allow him to remain independent.
- "A lot of lesbian and gay studies now is being done in the academy, for academics, in a jargonistic language that is inaccessible to nonacademics," Bérubé says. Inaccessible is exactly what he doesn't want gay and lesbian history to be.--K.S.
Elaine Woo told other details of his life and his 1990 work:
- Coming Out Under Fire told tales of individual valor, tragedy and discrimination, but it also painted a picture of an unintended but powerful outcome of the war. World War II brought together hundreds of thousands of gays and lesbians in a same-sex environment - military bases and fighting units - an experience that bolstered their gender identity and laid the groundwork for the gay rights movement that emerged decades later.
- During the 1960s he was an activist against the Vietnam War. In spring 1968, his roommate at the University of Chicago was murdered, a tragedy so dispiriting that Mr. Berube dropped out of school just before graduation.
- The following year he came out as a homosexual and joined a gay liberation collective in Boston. He later moved to San Francisco, where he lived at a gay commune.
- After reading Jonathan Katz's 1976 book Gay American History, he was inspired to work in the same field. In 1978, he helped found the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project.
- Mr. Berube's reputation as a researcher led him to a treasure trove of historical material.
- A neighbor's friend had found hundreds of World War II-era letters and pictures in a Dumpster. When he noticed they included correspondence by gay soldiers, he took them home and stored them. In 1979 he gave them to Berube after learning of his passion for gay history.
- The letters had been written by a group of gay soldiers at an army base in Missouri, who maintained their correspondence after being shipped out around the country and overseas. They wrote about what their lives were like at their various postings, the gay bars they found, romances they developed and problems they faced as homosexuals in the military.
- "He saw history as a form of activism, a way of bringing people together," said Katz, an independent scholar like Mr. Berube. "You experienced that when you went to one of these slide shows. You wouldn't be alone in front of the television set going to this group event. The history telling had a social aspect."
The Documentary
Berube co-wrote with filmmaker Arthur Dong a television documentary based on his book that won several awards, including a Peabody. His work was cited in Senate hearings on the military's anti-gay policies in 1993.
Impact
Martin Duberman, distinguished professor of history emeritus at the City University of New York, called Bérubé’s book “superb…not only in terms of his prose style, which was absolutely lucid and even elegant, but also in terms of the very fine-spun analysis. Allan was not one to create shallow generalizations about either a given individual or a series of events. He was utterly meticulous and utterly careful. No one will ever, I think, have to redo the book on World War II, and you can almost never say that about a historian or a given piece of historical research.”
Last Years
During the last decade of his life, he traveled the country presenting slide shows about his current research, and he lectured on gay and lesbian history at Stanford University and the University of California, Santa Cruz. He wrote stories for numerous publications, including Mother Jones, Gay Community News, The Advocate, The Washington Blade, Out/Look, and the Body Politic. He also published articles in several anthologies, including White Trash (which included a rare personal essay in which he recounted his childhood in a trailer park in Bayonne, N.J.) and Policing Public Sex, in which he detailed the history of gay bathhouses.
Living in Liberty, N.Y., in the Catskills, he owned Carrier House Bed and Breakfast and operated INTELLIGENT DESIGN, a store selling mid-century modern collectibles. Since the 1980s, he had organized the home offices of writers and researchers and the offices of small non-profits. And he organized filing and storage systems for private research and archival collections (including periodicals, architectural plans, photographs and personal letters).
Berube’s partner, John Nelson, said, “Allan just loved it when people walked into the Liberty story, looked around, and were happy.” Bérubé was twice elected a trustee of the village of Liberty.
“Allan was extremely proud of helping to preserve Liberty’s historic character,” said Katz. “Allan initiated the successful nomination of Liberty’s whole Main Street as a historic district, saved from demolition a major building with a classic 1950s façade, and bought and renovated the Shelburne Playhouse, one of the last remaining performance halls that were once part of the area’s many hotels.”
At the time of his death, Bérubé had been working on a history of queer working class men in the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union in the 1930s and ’40s, a project for which he received a Rockefeller Residency Fellowship in the Humanities from the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at CUNY.
According to Katz, Bérubé's death at the age of 61 was due to sudden complications following the discovery of two stomach ulcers.
