Allan Bérubé

Allan Bérubé born 3 December 1946 (d. 2007)

Allan Bérubé was an American historian specialising in gay and lesbian studies and a community activist.

Allan Ronald Bérubé was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. 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.

He first came to progressive political activism in opposition to the Vietnam war, working with the American Friends Service Committee in Boston in the late 1960s, after dropping out of the University of Chicago.

After coming out in 1969, Bérubé joined a gay liberation collective household. He later became a member of a gay commune for craftspeople in San Francisco, where he remained for many years. In 1978, Bérubé was one of the founders of the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project. He produced acclaimed slide shows that featured women who were living as men and married other women.

Bérubé is best remembered for his groundbreaking work of gay history, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II, published in 1990. The Lambda Literary Award–winning book was later adapted into a Peabody Award–winning documentary and was often cited in 1993 Senate hearings on the military’s ban on gay service members.

The book sprang from a box of letters. One day in the 1970s, a friend of one of Mr Bérubé’s neighbours salvaged from a dumpster 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 found themselves. '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.'

Bérubé was nationally recognised by universities, the media, and the government as a leading historian on gays in the military. He taught and lectured on gay and lesbian history at the University of California, Santa Cruz and at Stanford University. He wrote for numerous publications including Out/Look, The Advocate, Mother Jones, Gay Community News, Washington Blade and The Body Politic.

From the 1980s he organised the home offices of writers and researchers and the offices of small non-profit organisations. And he organised filing and storage systems for private research and archival collections (including periodicals, architectural plans, photographs and personal letters).

In the 1990s, he lived in Manhattan, and was active in the politics of Queer Nation, Out/Look, and Sex Panic! A MacArthur Foundation grant in 1996 allowed him to start writing a history of gay men in the Marine Cook and Stewards Union, a left-wing multiracial union for workers on passenger liners, where gay men lived relatively open lives. He said it was in part inspired by anger at a new stereotype of gay equalling 'white and well-to-do'.

In the latter years of his relatively short but significant life, Bérubé lived with his partner John Nelson in Liberty, NY, in the Catskills. There, he owned a bed & breakfast, and operated Intelligent Design, a store selling mid-century modern collectibles and was an active member of the community.

Bérubé died in December 2007 of complications from two stomach ulcers. He was 61.

Allan Bérubé - historian of gays in military - San Francisco Chronicle
Obituary - The Guardian