Gay City News salutes the great Martin Duberman

Martin Duberman — Marty to his legions of fans, friends, and former students — is a national queer treasure.
Duberman was the first, and for too long the only, prominent public intellectual of the first order to embrace the nascent, post-Stonewall gay liberation movement and join its militant ranks. He is rightly considered the father of gay studies programs in universities. He played a crucial role in founding the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and in sustaining it at its beginnings, spearheaded the formation of the Gay Academic Union, was one of the first board members of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, and at the beginning of this decade launched Queers for Economic Justice.

And for four decades this prolific and gifted author and teacher, with more than 20 books to his credit — many of them important milestones in queer culture — has churned out a never-ending stream of scintillating essays, articles, columns, and opinion pieces devoted to dissecting our past, prodding our present, and envisioning new futures for queers of all stripes, styles, classes, colors, and genders, while vigorously defending queer activism against the misconceived and ignorant assaults on “identity politics” from the blinkered homophobes on the left as well as the vicious reactionaries on the right.

“Waiting to Land: A (Mostly) Political Memoir, 1985-2008,” just published by New Press, is Duberman’s third volume of autobiographical reminiscence. The first, “Cures: A Gay Man’s Odyssey,” published in 1991, was a bestseller that, beginning from 1948, chronicled with wit and political acuteness his personal, conflicted struggle during the 1950s and 1960s with the dominant theology of heterosexuality as the only permitted path to salvation — years of painful and useless tortures at the hands of psychiatrists trying to rid himself of his same-sex desires, all the while having an extensive erotic life with men. In tracing his path to personal liberation as a gay man, this book also provided an invaluable historical record of what life was like in those years when homosexuality was still a love that dared not speak its name — even for an Ivy League intellectual and academic, active playwright and friend of theatrical luminaries, and respected historian — a time when queers were officially condemned as “sick” and made criminals by the state.