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

Introduction: Allan Bérubé and the Power of Community History

introduction Allan Bérubé and the Power of Community History john d’emilio and estelle b. freedman Allan Bérubé was a community historian. He believed passionately in the power of history to change the way individuals and even whole groups of people understand themselves and their place in society. He projected a vision of history as a world-changing tool. The stories he told about the past—in public talks, in slide shows, and in writing—propelled people into varieties of activism. Allan Bérubé built community wherever he went. In a 1992 keynote address delivered at a lesbian and gay studies conference in Quebec, Bérubé posed a question that captures the complexity of the life and the work represented in this collection. How, he asked, did “a Franco-American kid raised rural and working class in New England, whose earlier family history included no self-identified intellectuals or homosexuals —how did I learn how to become this new thing: a gay community-based historian?” (Chap. 10). How, indeed, did this 1960s conscientious objector and antiwar activist come to write the definitive history of lesbians and gay men in World War II? How did this college dropout become a self-taught, influential historian who in 1996 won a prestigious MacArthur Foundation “genius award”? In the process, how did he sustain his political activism, sharpen his own class and race consciousness, and continually inspire community building wherever he spoke or lived? Exploring these questions reveals not only the personal journey of an exceptional scholar-activist but also the broader phenomenon of the grassroots lesbian and gay history movement that emerged in the 1970s and laid the groundwork for the academic queer studies of the 1990s and beyond. 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), which was later adapted into a Peabody Award–winning documentary film, Bérubé also wrote extensively on the history of sexual politics in San Francisco and on the relationship between sexuality, class, and race.1 In addition • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 2 : introduction to the essays he published in the gay press and the talks and classes he gave on college campuses, for two decades he crisscrossed the country presenting highly popular historical slide lectures to lesbian and gay community audiences as well as to gatherings of union members and organizers. At the time of his death, he was in the middle of drafting an innovative book about the radical, interracial, and queer-friendly Marine Cooks and Stewards Union (mcsu) from the 1930s through the 1950s.2 We had the good fortune to encounter Allan in the late 1970s, soon after he made the commitment to write lesbian and gay history. As academic historians and political progressives exploring the history of sexuality, we found much common ground with him. We also forged deep mutual friendships that shaped our lives and work for decades. Like all who knew Allan, we were devastated by his sudden death from ruptured stomach ulcers in December 2007, just after his sixty-first birthday.3 As his friends and as trustees of his literary estate, we decided to make accessible his most influential published writings along with excerpts from his unfinished book project.4 The essays we have selected focus on four central concerns in Bérubé’s work. The first section collects his early excavations of lesbian and gay comAllan Bérubé in high school, Massachusetts, ca. 1964. Courtesy of the Allan Bérubé Collection at the glbths, San Francisco. introduction : 3 munity history, particularly for San Francisco; these essays reflect the sexual politics of the 1970s and 1980s. Part 2 explores the lives of lesbians and gay men during World War II, the project that culminated in Coming Out Under Fire; it includes pieces that illustrate Bérubé’s skills as a practitioner of oral history. Part 3 includes the more self-reflective and theoretical writing that characterized Bérubé’s work in the 1990s, as he turned his attention to the intersections of class, ethnicity, and sexuality and his own identity as a working-class and queer intellectual. In the final section, we have selected excerpts from his work-in-progress on the mcsu, in which he applies his insights into class and queerness to the history of a radical union. While there is some unavoidable overlap between a few of these...