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<div class="field-item"><p>AN INSPIRING AND broad-ranging queer
historian, Allan Bérubé died at the age of 61 on December 11, 2007. He
left us with major contributions of exciting historical work, but also
important unfinished work that needs to be continued.</p>
<p>Bérubé’s allegiance was not to the academy but to the movement and
community. Bérubé’s histories, as he put it, were about the lives of
ordinary lesbians and gay men. He was not formally trained as a
historian. Instead his remarkable skills grew out of his decade long
involvement in the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project and
the broader grassroots queer history movement based on developing ways
to return our history to our communities.</p>
<p>Some of his earliest work with the History Project was on women who
cross-dressed and passed as men. Bérubé’s historical work, while
centering on gay and queer experiences, always examined the ways in
which sexuality, class, race and gender relations are made in and
through each other. Sexuality, for him, was thought and practiced in
relation to class, race and gender.</p>
<h3>Marching To A Different Drummer</h3>
<p>I first met Allan Bérubé when he was doing his wonderful slide show
on U.S. gay and lesbian experience in World War II, called “Marching to
A Different Drummer,” at the Sex and the State lesbian and gay history
conference in Toronto in 1985. This slide show was a groundbreaking
investigation of how the new same-gender segregated contexts that men
and women were thrown into in the military and war industry during the
war mobilizations allowed for many “coming out” experiences.</p>
<p>At the same time the purging of queers from the U.S. military with
the label of “homosexual” expelled people from “straight” society,
creating the basis for groups of people to begin to create openly gay
and lesbian spaces in some of the larger U.S. cities in the postwar
years.</p>
<p>Bérubé’s research was based on the discovery of people’s letters and
diaries, interviews with gay and lesbian veterans, and critical
examination of declassified government documents. He had a delightful
ability to bring to life the stories of the people he talked to through
his animated readings of their words, and the combination of this with
photos and archival materials in his slide show. At the time his work
helped to inspire my involvement in queer historical work in the
Canadian context, including looking into what happened to queers in
Canada during World War II.</p>
<p>Bérubé continued his detailed research and produced his widely known
award winning book Coming Out Under Fire, The History of Gay Men and
Women in World War Two in 1990. This is the decisive history of queers
in the United States during this war, and reoriented historical inquiry
on a number of fronts. Crucial to his method in writing the book was
the process of taking the slide show on the road, where he learned a
great deal from the comments and critiques of his audience members as
he was able to engage “in an ongoing public dialogue with the
communities whose histories I was documenting and to which I belonged.”
(Coming Out Under Fire, x)</p>
<p>As he wrote:</p>
<p>"The massive mobilization for World War II propelled gay men and
lesbians into the mainstream of American life. Ironically the screening
and discharge polices, together with the drafting of millions of men,
weakened the barriers that had kept gay people trapped and hidden at
the margins of society. Discovering that they shared a common cause,
they were more willing and able to defend themselves, as their ability
to work, congregate, and lead sexual lives came under escalating attack
in the postwar decade." (Coming Out Under Fire, 255).</p>
<p>This was followed up with the movie version of Coming Out Under Fire in 1994.</p>
<h3>Working-Class Queer Intellectual Desires</h3>
<p>I next encountered Allan Bérubé when I heard his amazing keynote
address at the La Ville en Rose, Quebec Lesbian and Gay Studies
Conference in Montreal in 1992. Here he crossed the different
boundaries of his life, trying to bring these fragments together: his
white Quebecois historical roots as a Franco-American; his
working-class background; his coming out as gay; and his contradictory
engagement with middle-class academic and intellectual projects.</p>
<p>In the 1870s and 1880s his ancestors left Quebec because the land
they were allowed to own could no longer support their growing
families. They found jobs in New England during its industrial boom.
His family had to deal with the pressures of assimilation and adopted
various survival strategies, which began to collapse by the time he was
young.</p>
<p>Bérubé lived much of his working-class life in poverty but was
partially able to escape this background by getting into college.
However he dropped out of college, a response to a combination of
financial, psycho-sexual, and class anxiety. Another intersecting
crisis lived in his life was coming to terms with his erotic desires
for men. In San Francisco he became part of a developing gay community
and engaged with lesbian and gay history.</p>
<p>Following his intellectual desires he stayed largely autonomous from
the academic world in order to avoid becoming a middle-class academic
separate from working-class life. He also rejected narrow views of the
gay community that were:</p>
<p>"(B)uilt partly by white, middle-class-identified, college-educated
gay men around a belief that homosexuality could and should stand alone
as the organizing principle for our lives and work — as if our
homosexualities had not been significantly shaped by our race, gender,
and class.... what I experienced most directly as a white gay man with
little money and no college degree was how the gay community reproduced
class hierarchies. There were many gay restaurants, disco parties,
conferences, resorts, and bathhouses I couldn’t afford."</p>
<p>It is a mistaken idea that gay community or gay activism can stand
alone as gay. They are all made possible by past civil rights, ethnic,
class, and women’s struggles... The white, male, and middle-class
separation of gay from these other struggles and histories is one of
the many predictable consequences of a larger process of
Americanization that I know too well from my family’s class and ethnic
history. (“Intellectual Desire,” 60)</p>
<p>In this talk Bérubé described where he had come to in his
intellectual struggles: I do my work now in the borderlands between
social classes, between the university and the community, between
heterosexual and homosexual, between educated speech and down-to-earth
talk, between Franco-American and Quebecois, between my family and the
gay community, between the past and the present ... These temporarily
bridged distances and unexpected combinations have become a workshop in
which it seems possible to make the gay, intellectual, working-class,
and Franco-American parts of myself reinforce each other rather than
split me apart. (“Intellectual Desire,” 62)</p>
<h3>No Red-Baiting! No Race-Baiting! No Queer Baiting!</h3>
<p>As a result Bérubé focused on doing queer multi-racial working-class
histories. The last time I met him we did a participatory workshop
together on queer union histories at the first Canadian Labour Congress
Pride conference in Ottawa in 1997. At this conference he also
presented his powerful slideshow on the Marine Cooks and Stewards
Union, which became his major area of research after Coming Out Under
Fire.</p>
<p>This slideshow built on what he had learned from doing “Marching to
A Different Drummer” but focused more specifically on developing a
queer, working-class, anti-racist history in his numerous presentations
to union and queer (and sometimes queer union) audiences.</p>
<p>The Marine Cooks and Stewards Union (MCS) represented service
workers such as waiters, laundrymen, and messmen who labored in
horrible conditions on West Coast passenger liners. It developed into
one of the most democratic and diverse unions in the United States in
the 1930s and 1940s, with an acceptance of both African American and
gay members. The struggles MCS members waged for better working
conditions and justice led them to understand that they needed to stand
together and to not let themselves be divided along lines of race and
sexuality.</p>
<p>Bérubé explored the connections of class, race and sexuality in the
life of this union. Former members of MCS told him that gay men made up
the majority of the stewards on many passenger lines. Decades before
the first U.S. gay rights organizations, the MCS won the first on the
job protection for gay workers. There were so many gay men in the union
that straight stewards were often also queer-baited and understood how
such baiting was a tactic used to divide workers. Gay men were accepted
because they were workers just like any other.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, after World War II the combination of shrinking work
opportunities and the McCarthyite anti-communist and anti-queer
witch-hunts had a devastating impact on the MCS. Under the federal
Maritime Security Program developed to keep “Communists and other
subversives” off the ships and off the waterfront the Coast Guard began
screening seamen believed to be threats to “national security.”</p>
<p>At this time “sex perverts” were also considered threats to
“national security.” While many workers resisted this national security
campaign they were unable to succeed given the fervent anti-communist
mobilizations of the time.</p>
<p>Before it was torn apart the MCS provided an example of a left-wing,
democratic, anti-racist and pro-queer union. In an interview Bérubé
spoke of why this historical work is so important:</p>
<p>"Telling stories about what happened can really encourage people who
feel like the task is too big to accomplish in the present ...
Especially what was going on in the 30s — talk about hopeless
situations — things were already bad and then the Depression hit, but
that was one of the most creative times of union organizing. People did
try to tackle these issues [race and homosexuality] and didn’t fail, or
succeeded for surprising lengths of time. (Davis, “The Marine Cooks and
Stewards Union,” New Socialist, 25)</p>
<p>Although Bérubé continued work on this important book project, to be
titled Shipping Out, it remained unfinished at the time of his death."</p>
<p>Bérubé understood the important use of historical work for movement
political struggles. In the midst of the campaigns to close down gay
bathhouses in the context of the AIDS panic in the mid-1980s he wrote
historically based declarations to buttress arguments for keeping the
bathhouses open as important community, social and sexual spaces for
men who had sex with men. To do this we needed to move beyond liberal
notions of the right to privacy:</p>
<p>"The dominant legal defence of gay baths at the time was based on a
right-to-privacy argument that attempted to avoid explicit discussions
of gay male sexuality and desire. I wanted to construct an alternative
defence of gay baths that was based on their long history as sexual
institutions, and on the right of gay citizens to use them for
associational purposes that were sexual as well as social and
political." (The History of Gay Bathhouses, 187)</p>
<p>Here Bérubé establishes an important queer right to sexual and
social space based in the historical creation and defense of these
spaces. As the mainstream of the gay movement moved away from defense
of the sexual needs and rights of queer people, Bérubé spoke out for
the need to re-focus on the sexual politics of queer liberation. He was
a consistent sex radical and supporter of pro-sex feminism in viewpoint
and action.</p>
<p>When the struggle to end the exclusion of gays and lesbians from the
U.S. military heated up, Bérubé wrote a detailed history of the U.S.
ban on homosexuals in the military for Senator Edward Kennedy; this
report was submitted to the 1993 record of the hearings on homosexuals
in the military.</p>
<p>In the last years of his life Bérubé moved to Liberty, New York,
where he was very involved in village politics and in preserving the
beauty and green character of the area.</p>
<p>Bérubé was a committed queer working-class community-based
historian. We need many more such historians who can grapple with the
questions that he engaged with. Bérubé’s historical work needs to be
continued and extended today. This is history that is useful in our
struggles, assisting us in grasping what took place in the past while
clarifying how we can resist in our historical present. Doing more
grassroots community-based history is the best tribute we can give to
Allan Bérubé.</p>
<h3>Sources:</h3>
<p>Entry on Allan Bérubé in Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia at <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Berube">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Berube</a>.</p>
<p>Allan Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire, The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two, (New York: The Free Press, 1990).</p>
<p>Allan Bérubé, “Intellectual Desire,” in Susan Raffo, ed., Queerly Classed, (Boston: South End Press, 1997), 43-66.</p>
<p>Allan Bérubé, “The History of Gay Bathhouses,” in Dangerous
Bedfellows, eds., Policing Public Sex, Queer Politics And the Future of
AIDS Activism (Boston: South End Press, 1996), 187-220. Scarlett C.
Davis, (“No Race Baiting, Red-Baiting, or Queer Baiting, The Marine
Cooks and Stewards Union Knew Differences are Small, Solidarity is
Key,” The Dispatcher (February 1997): 6-7. Reprinted in New Socialist,
V.3, No.3, June-July 1998, 10, 11 and 25.</p>
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