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My Desire for History: Essays in Gay, Community, and Labor History

My Desire for History: Essays in Gay, Community, and Labor History

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This anthology pays tribute to Allan Berube (1946-2007), a self-taught historian and MacArthur Fellow who was a pioneer in the study of lesbian and gay history in the United States. Best known for his Lambda Literary Award-winning book Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II (1990), Berube also wrote extensively on the history of sexual politics in San Francisco and on the relationship between sexuality, class, and race. John D'Emilio and Estelle Freedman, who were close colleagues and friends of Berube, have selected sixteen of his most important essays, including hard-to-access articles and unpublished writing. The book provides a retrospective on Berube's life and work while it documents the emergence of a grassroots lesbian and gay community history movement in the 1970s and 1980s. Taken together, the essays attest to the power of history to mobilize individuals and communities to create social change.

ISBN-13: 9780807871959

Media Type: Paperback(1)

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press

Publication Date: 06-01-2011

Pages: 344

Product Dimensions: 6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.90(d)

Allan Berube (1946-2007) was an independent scholar and community historian.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

In his smart, heart-felt, and now classic essays on class, labor, race, gender, and sexuality in lesbian, gay, and transgender history, Allan Berube lives again. An excerpt from his unfinished book about the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union and his editors' moving overview of his life and work ensure that, though Berube has left us, his soul keeps marching on.—Jonathan Ned Katz, historian, co-director of OutHistory.org



This collection of Allan Berube's finest essays offers a history of gay and lesbian movements, the challenges, frustrations, triumphs, and despair that characterized these movements, and a remarkably honest and vitally important critical assessment of the varied approaches that constituted this activism. Thanks to the work of D'Emilio and Freedman, two preeminent scholars of sexuality, Berube's extraordinary words and life are now accessible to all.—Leisa D. Meyer, The College of William and Mary

Table of Contents

Introduction. Allan Bérubé and the Power of Community History John D'Emilio Estelle B. Freedman 1

Part I A Community Historian: Exploring Queer San Francisco

1 Lesbian Masquerade 41

2 Behind the Specter of San Francisco 54

3 Don't Save Us from Our Sexuality 62

4 Resorts for Sex Perverts: A History of Gay Bathhouses 67

Part II A National Historian: Reexamining World War II

5 Marching to a Different Drummer: Lesbian and Gay GIS in World War II 85

6 Coming Out Under Fire 100

7 Rediscovering Our Forgotten Past 113

8 The Military and Lesbians during the McCarthy Years 125

Part III A Working-Class Intellectual: Personal Reflections on Identities

9 Caught in the Storm: AIDS and the Meaning of Natural Disaster 147

10 Intellectual Desire 161

11 Sunset Trailer Park (with Florence Bérubé) 182

12 How Gay Stays White and What Kind of White It Stays 202

Part IV A Labor Historian: Queering Work and Class

13 Class Dismissed 233

14 "Queer Work" and Labor History 259

15 Trying to Remember 270

16 No Race-Baiting, Red-Baiting, or Queer-Baiting! The Marine Cooks and Stewards Union from the Depression to the Cold War 294

Acknowledgments 321

Index 323