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Allan Bérubé
(December 3, 1946 - December 11, 2007) U.S.A.

Allan Berube

Activist, historian, scholar

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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.

Bérubé studied at the University of Chicago before dropping out in his senior year to work against the Vietnam War; he came out in 1969 and settled in San Francisco. In the 1970s, Bérubé helped found the San Francisco GLBT Historical Society, which houses all of his papers.

Allan BerubeMoving 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.

Bérubé's best-known work, "Coming Out Under Fire," sprang from a box of letters exchanged between a dozen gay soldiers during World War II; a friend found the letters in a dumpster in the 1970s and passed them to Bérubé. The soldiers, who met at an army base in Missouri, were posted to different spots, but they wrote each other, often about their experiences being gay wherever they ended up. "I sorted them out and had a good cry", Bérubé said later. "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.

As the New York Times summarized, "Coming Out Under Fire" argues "that although gays were specifically barred from the armed forces from 1942 onward, homosexuality and military service, at least early on, were not as incompatible as they might seem. At the start of World War II, the military, desperate to meet enlistment quotas, quietly admitted gay people with the tacit understanding that they would be discreet about their sexuality. For many gay men and lesbians, Bérubé wrote, military service was actually a godsend: it took them away from small-town life and gave them their first opportunity to meet other gay people... Those early war years, Bérubé concluded, were the wellspring of the gay rights movement of the late 1960s and beyond."

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 stomach ulcers. He was sixty-one. He is survived by his life partner, John Nelson.

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Source: http://lgbt-history-archive.tumblr.com/

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