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August 6: Martin Duberman

lawrencebush
August 6, 2010

51032_duberman_martinMartin Duberman — biographer, historian, anti-racist playwright and pioneer of queer studies — was born on this date in 1930 in New York City. Duberman has been a tenured professor at Princeton and Lehman College and founded City University’s groundbreaking Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in 1991. His twenty books include a biography of Paul Robeson (1988); Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (1989); Cures: A Gay Man’s Odyssey (1991, about his traumatic efforts to change his sexual orientation during his middle, pre-Stonewall years); Stonewall (1994); The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein (2007); and Waiting to Land: A (Mostly) Political Memoir (2009). His award-winning play, “In White America” (1963), was filmed for television in 1970.

“Being Jewish — which is to say, inclined to feeling guilty about being alive and at the same time to feeling superior in suffering — predisposed [me] to the psychiatric notion of homosexuality as curse and apartness.” —Martin Duberman, Cures

Watch Martin Duberman deliver the 2012 Kessler Award Lecture on “Acceptance at What Price: The Gay Movement Remembered” (his talk begins at 34:16 after several introductions)