LGBT Book, Film & Video Blog

Allan Bérubé's Gift to History

By John D'Emilio

THE OBITUARY OF ALLAN BÉRUBÉ that appeared in The New York Times began with a reference to his MacArthur Fellowship and then moved on to Coming Out Under Fire (1990), his groundbreaking history of gay men and lesbians during World War II. Such obvious attention to these two markers as the signal achievements of his life is understandable. The MacArthur award labeled Allan a “genius,” and a book about World War II planted him squarely in the mainstream of American history. As a topic, it is readily legible to almost everyone as “important.”

I think of Allan differently. “Public intellectual” is a contemporary phrase that perhaps comes closer to capturing who he was and what he did, but even that distorts my picture of him. Public intellectual conjures images of tenured academics of high repute—my former dean, Stanley Fish, pops to mind—who, besides composing their scholarly studies, also publish op-eds in the Times and The Washington Post or essays in The New Republic. Or, these days, they blog and are quoted by other bloggers. That still isn’t Allan.

Allan was a community historian. He believed passionately in the power of history to change the way individuals and even whole groups of people understood the world and their place in it. Except for short interludes, such as the year he held a Rockefeller Fellowship at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in New York, he was always without formal—and paid—connections to the institutions that sustain intellectual and cultural work. He reported, so to speak, to the people whose history he wrote about. He most cared about how community members—LGBT folks—responded to his talks and his writings, not in the sense of craving their approval, but more as evidence that the history he uncovered was having an impact.

Allan’s death has made me think about the state of GLBT community history. Much has changed in the decades since he and a random collection of folks scattered across the country began digging into a queer past. Some of that change has been for the better, some perhaps not. By most measures, there is more queer history circulating in the public sphere than ever before. But one could also argue that this history is more detached than ever before from the community it describes.

• More of Allan Bérubé's Gift to History@ the Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide Magazine
• More on Coming Out Under Fire

posted by Tom Jackson @ Tuesday, June 17, 2008