Martin Duberman: Why LGBT Activism Needs to Return to Its Radical Roots

[DonViejo]

Martin Duberman, veteran LGBT activist and historian, argues in his new book that modern activism has lost its way—and lost its spark—in pursuit of mainstream acceptance.

SAMANTHA ALLEN
06.30.18 9:42 PM ET

Renowned LGBT historian Martin Duberman, who turns 88 this August, says he has no nostalgia for the early, pre-Stonewall days of the gay movement.

Growing up in what he now ironically refers to as “liberated Manhattan,” and entering young adulthood in the 1950s, he remembers the extreme risks of being gay in public.

“I lived through it,” Duberman tells The Daily Beast. “When we went out at night to cruise or whatever, we would carry in our wallets the names of the one or two lawyers in New York who could get us out of jail if we were entrapped by a plainclothes cop.”

And yet, if this venerated scholar and author has a message for the current mainstream of the LGBT movement, it’s this: They need to look backwards for inspiration—back to the radical gay politics of the early 1970s that were, in turn, a direct response to the suffocating mid-century oppression that queer people of his generation bore.

Duberman, a pioneering gay activist and one of the original founders of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, has written over two dozen books and several plays over the last five decades. He has been especially concerned with cataloging queer and radical history, from the abolitionist movement to the Stonewall riots to the AIDS crisis.

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