LGBT Book, Film & Video Blog

Allan Berube, a MacArthur Award-winning independent scholar whose history of gay men and lesbians in the military during World War II is widely considered the definitive book on the subject, died Tuesday in Liberty, N.Y. He was 61.

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

"Coming Out Under Fire," published in 1990, explored the uneasy but, at times, surprisingly benign relationship between the U.S. military and its gay members.

Berube's book was invoked frequently during the debate that simmered in the 1990s around President Clinton's "Don't ask, don't tell" policy, which officially allowed homosexuals to serve in the military if they kept their sexual orientation secret.

"Coming Out Under Fire" also was the basis for a documentary of the same name, released in 1994.

The book sprang from a box of letters.

One day in the 1970s, a friend of one of Berube's neighbors salvaged from a trash bin a cache of correspondence exchanged by a dozen gay GIs 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 Berube. Scholar wrote definitive tome on gay GIs in WWII
Denver Post, CO