[Marxism] Allan Bérubé

[Louis Proyect]

NY Times, December 16, 2007
Allan Bérubé Is Dead at 61; Historian of Gays in Military
By MARGALIT FOX

Allan Bérubé, a MacArthur Award-winning independent scholar whose 
history of gay men and lesbians in the military in World War II is 
widely considered the definitive book on the subject, died on Tuesday in 
Liberty, N.Y. He was 61. A former resident of Manhattan, Mr. Bérubé had 
lived in Liberty in recent years.

The cause was complications of stomach ulcers, a friend, Wayne Hoffman, 
said.

“Coming Out Under Fire” (Free Press), published in 1990, explores the 
uneasy but at times surprisingly benign relationship between the United 
States military and its gay members.

Mr. Bérubé’s book was invoked frequently during the debate that simmered 
in the 1990s around President Bill Clinton’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” 
policy, which officially allowed gay people to serve in the military if 
they kept their sexual orientation secret.

“Coming Out Under Fire” was also the basis for a documentary film of 
that name, released in 1994.

The book sprang from a box of letters. One day in the 1970s, a friend of 
one of Mr. Bérubé’s neighbors salvaged from a Dumpster a cache of 
correspondence exchanged by a dozen gay G.I.’s during the war. The men, 
who had met at an Army base in Missouri, were posted to different spots, 
but they continued to write — in particular about what it was like to be 
gay wherever they had fetched up.

The letters found their way to Mr. Bérubé. “I sorted them out and had a 
good cry,” he told the University of Chicago alumni magazine in 1997. 
“It really captured my heart and raised a lot of questions, so I started 
doing research.”

“Coming Out Under Fire” draws on interviews with dozens of men and women 
from all branches of the service. It 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, Mr. 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.

On the whole, Mr. Bérubé found, gay service people who did their jobs 
ably were treated well by comrades and superiors. (Conditions worsened 
toward the end of the war, when the military stepped up its purges of 
homosexuals.) But those early war years, Mr. Bérubé concluded, were the 
wellspring of the gay-rights movement of the late 1960s and beyond.

Reviewing “Coming Out Under Fire” in The New York Times Book Review, 
Doris Kearns Goodwin called it “a timely and valuable perspective,” 
adding: “Mr. Bérubé tells his story with a clear and remarkably 
evenhanded voice.”

A longtime community organizer, Mr. Bérubé was also active in the civic 
life of Liberty, a former Catskill resort lately grown careworn. In a 
project that attracted considerable attention in the news media, he 
arranged to have the Munson Diner, a derelict Hell’s Kitchen landmark 
from the 1940s, moved there from Manhattan.

Allan Ronald Bérubé was born in Springfield, Mass., on Dec. 3, 1946. 
(His family name is pronounced BEH-ruh-bay.) His father was a television 
cameraman for NBC, a job that in the early days of the medium was more 
glamorous than lucrative; Allan spent part of his childhood living with 
his family in a trailer park in Bayonne, N.J.

Mr. Bérubé studied at the University of Chicago before dropping out in 
his senior year to work against the war in Vietnam. He came out as gay 
in 1969 and later settled in San Francisco, where, in the 1970s, he 
helped found the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project.

Mr. Bérubé’s approach to history was pragmatic rather than academic: he 
traveled the country giving illustrated lectures on gay military history 
and other subjects. (He did teach at several universities, among them 
Stanford; the University of California, Santa Cruz; and Portland State 
University in Oregon.) In 1996, he was awarded a MacArthur “genius grant.”

After living in Manhattan in the 1990s, Mr. Bérubé moved to Liberty a 
half-dozen years ago. In 2005, he convened a group of investors to buy 
the Munson Diner and transport it, in its faded chrome-and-neon 
splendor, from 11th Avenue and 49th Street to Liberty. After extensive 
refurbishment, the diner opened there last month.

Mr. Bérubé is survived by his companion, John Nelson; his mother, 
Florence A. Bérubé of Monson, Mass.; and three sisters, Florence J., of 
Westfield, Mass.; Annette, of Mint Hill, N.C.; and Dianne Taylor of 
Healdsburg, Calif. At his death, he was working on a history of gay men 
in the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union in the 1930s and afterward.

Though “Coming Out Under Fire” deals with a serious subject, it also has 
moments of deep subversive levity. At one point in the book, Ben Small, 
a gay former Army Air Corpsman, talks about a drag show he organized 
while stationed on a tiny atoll near New Guinea. For costumes, he 
ordered a stack of gold lamé dresses from San Francisco.

Mr. Small recalled the day the glittering package arrived. “Well, here’s 
everybody in the office from the lieutenant on down trying on dresses!” 
he told Mr. Bérubé. “Everybody suddenly becomes a drag queen!”