Cures: A Gay Man's Odyssey

Martin Duberman has earned his stripes at the forefront of gay scholarship and civil rights. During the 1960s, he was known for his historical scholarship, especially his biography of Charles Francis Adams (son of President John Quincy Adams and father of Henry Adams); he also enjoyed fame as a playwright, primarily for "In White America," his play on race relations. After the mid-1970s, he became both a gay rights advocate and a chronicler of gays and lesbians in recent American history. Yet he wasn't always an outspoken pioneer of sexual liberation. For the first two decades of his adult life, he lived in a partially open closet. At best, he was contritely open about his homosexuality to selected friends and colleagues, but, like many other men and women, he had convinced himself that his identity was not only wrong but could somehow be controlled or even cured. This memoir recounts not only his struggle to accept himself but also the societal and "professional" attitudes that reinforced the view of homosexuality as a pathological condition. Much of the book details his excruciating and even comical adventures (a bizarrely appropriate word here) in psychotherapy, particularly with one psychologist whose own neuroses and lack of professional integrity, it eventually becomes clear, should have barred him from dispensing advice to patients, sick or healthy. Duberman pulls no punches, and he is most critical (and retrospectively ashamed) by some of his own exploits and by his many righteous or hypocritical stances taken against those who were comfortably or experimentally out of the closet. Often Duberman avoided self-evaluation, escaping into the comforting workaholic demands offered by his professional career or into the fleeting release provided by prescription drugs and various affairs with hustlers. Duberman's is a fascinating life--a man with three successful careers and two successive personal lives. Every once in a while his fascination with his own academic career carries him away; portions of the book might strike readers as a curriculum vitae in prose form. More valuably, however, he sets his memoir in its historical context, examining how social and medical opinions were eventually transformed by both events and research (much of which was unknown to Duberman until years later). For some readers today, it's hard to imagine the pressures and impossibilities of being gay half a century ago. For many others, the struggle continues, and this book may provide them with both comfort and counsel.