A National Treasure -- The Memoirs of Gay Rights Pioneer Martin Duberman

Reviewed: Waiting to Land: A (Mostly) Political Memoir, by Martin Duberman (New Press, 2009) $26.95, 352 pages

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.

In “Midlife Queer: Autobiography of a Decade: 1971-1981,” which appeared in 1998, Duberman chronicled his romantic, professional, and political experiences as a liberated, out gay man, taking us from the birth of the gay liberation movement to the beginnings of the AIDS plague, an account peppered with tartly humorous and gossipy commentaries on the New York literary and theatrical milieus in which he moved, and textured by his political involvements as a man of the left with the burning issues of the day.

Duberman has always been an unapologetic, uncategorizable, and non-sectarian radical. As an inquisitive adolescent in the early 1960s, I first encountered him in the pages of the influential but now-defunct Partisan Review, one of the premier journals of modernism, where his writing appeared alongside that of regular contributors like Susan Sontag, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Dwight Macdonald, Irving Howe, Clement Greenberg, Doris Lessing, and Saul Bellow. As I recall, the first essay of his I read in PR was on the problems of race, at a time when the black civil rights movement was roiling the nation.

By the time he ended his pointless therapy and joined the early gay liberation movement in 1970, Duberman was already noted as one of our most discerning historians and commentators on racial matters. He published prolifically on 19th century abolitionists and African-American history, as he rose from an instructor at Yale to an assistant professor of history at Princeton. His best-known play, “In White America” (1963), which used text from letters, diaries, and court records to dramatize American race relations, was awarded the Vernon Rice/ Drama Desk Prize for Best Off-Broadway Production, and was filmed for television in 1970. Duberman’s 1961 biography of Charles Francis Adams, a prominent anti-slavery politician and the son of President John Quincy Adams, who as Lincoln’s ambassador to England kept the British from siding with the Confederacy during the Civil War, won the prestigious Bancroft Prize for history; and his 1966 biography of the anti-slavery poet James Russell Lowell was a finalist for the National Book Award.