Author Allen Berube Dies

He wrote "Coming Out Under Fire" about gays in the military during the WW II. I had the great pleasure of meeting him at a book signing when the book was first published. So sad. From the NYT"

Allan Bérubé, a MacArthur Award-winning independent scholar whose history of gay men and lesbians in the military in World War II is widely considered the definitive book on the subject, died on Tuesday in Liberty, N.Y. He was 61. A former resident of Manhattan, Mr. Bérubé had lived in Liberty in recent years.

The cause was complications of stomach ulcers, a friend, Wayne Hoffman, said.

“Coming Out Under Fire” (Free Press), published in 1990, explores the uneasy but at times surprisingly benign relationship between the United States military and its gay members.

Mr. Bérubé’s book was invoked frequently during the debate that simmered in the 1990s around President Bill Clinton’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which officially allowed gay people to serve in the military if they kept their sexual orientation secret.

“Coming Out Under Fire” was also the basis for a documentary film of that name, released in 1994.

The book sprang from a box of letters. One day in the 1970s, a friend of one of Mr. Bérubé’s neighbors salvaged from a Dumpster a cache of correspondence exchanged by a dozen gay G.I.’s 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 fetched up.

The letters found their way to Mr. Bérubé. “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.”

“Coming Out Under Fire” draws on interviews with dozens of men and women from all branches of the service. It argues that although gays were specifically barred from the armed forces from 1942 onward, homosexuality and military service, at least early on, were not as incompatible as they might seem.

At the start of World War II, the military, desperate to meet enlistment quotas, quietly admitted gay people with the tacit understanding that they would be discreet about their sexuality. For many gay men and lesbians, Mr. Bérubé wrote, military service was actually a godsend: It took them away from small-town life and gave them their first opportunity to meet other gay people.

On the whole, Mr. Bérubé found, gay service people who did their jobs ably were treated well by comrades and superiors. (Conditions worsened toward the end of the war, when the military stepped up its purges of homosexuals.) But those early war years, Mr. Bérubé concluded, were the wellspring of the gay-rights movement of the late 1960s and beyond.

Reviewing “Coming Out Under Fire” in The New York Times Book Review, Doris Kearns Goodwin called it “a timely and valuable perspective,” adding: “Mr. Bérubé tells his story with a clear and remarkably evenhanded voice.”

Read the rest here.

More later.
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