Martin Bauml Duberman
(1930 - living) U.S.A.
Historian and writer
Duberman was born in New York City, the son of a Russian Jewish father from Ukraine, eventually the founder of a dress-manufactoring company, and a second generation Jewish Austrian-American mother. His early interest in theatre discouraged by his parents, Duberman turned instead to academic pursuit.
An exceptional student, he entered Yale University in 1948, graduating in 1952, and received his MA and PhD from Harvard University. From 1957 to 1961, he was history instructor at Yale. He bacame assistant professor at Princeton University, then full professor in 1967.
Until his postgraduate studies at harvard, Duberman remained closeted and  thereafter spent years of vacillating between a string of unsuccessful gay affairs and the psychiatrist's couch. Until in 1971 he abandoned therapy and came out. In exposing a shocking instance of homophobia in his history Black Mountain, An Exploration of Community, Duberman himself was the target of homophobic attacks from his academic peers.
Subsequently, Duberman dwelved into gay activism on academic, public and private, levels. With fellow gay scholars, he founded the Gay Academic Union (1973) and joined the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.
In 1971, Duberman resigned from Princeton to become Distinguished Professor of History in the field of gay and lesbian studies at Lehman College, the City University of New York. He is one of the first scholars to document the history of gay people; in his autobiography Cures: A Gay Man's Odyssey, he recalls his struggle to accept his homosexuality, after spenging fifteen years in various forms of psychotherapy to "cure" his "sickness".
His work include:
- Charles Francis Adams (1962)
- In White America (1963)
- Payments (1971)
- Black Mountain, An Exploration of Community (1972)
- About Time: Exploring the Gay Past (1986)
- Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (1989)
- Cures: A Gay Man's Odyssey (autobiography, 1991)
- Stonewall (1993)
Excerpts from: Aldrich R. & Wotherspoon G., Who's Who in Contemporary Gay and Lesbian History, from WWII to Present Day, Routledge, London, 2001
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