Taking the step from gay social activist to gay social historian was easy for Allan Bérubé - once he became aware that there was a gay and lesbian history to unearth. Twenty years ago, says Bérubé
"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."
No more. The independent scholar's research and writings - most notably his 1990 Lambda Literary Award-winning book Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II (Free Press) - have helped lay the groundwork for gay and lesbian studies. They've also earned him a MacArthur Fellowship, one of 20 such "genius" grants awarded in 1996.
But he also considers 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.
Moving to Boston, 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 a gay commune for craftspeople. 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.
They organized 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."
"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 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 is nationally recognized by universities, the media, and the government as a leading historian on gays in the military. He has taught and lectured on gay and lesbian history at the University of California, Santa Cruz and at Stanford University. He has written for numerous publications including Out/Look, The Advocate, Mother Jones, Gay Community News, Washington Blade and The Body Politic. Allan Bérubé was recently awarded a 1994 Rockefeller Residency Fellowship in the Humanities to develop his newest book, Queer and Gay Identities in the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union, 1930s to 1950s.
Bérubé died in Liberty, New York, of complications from two stomach ulcers. He is survived by his life partner, John Nelson; his mother; and three sisters.
