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Martin Bauml Duberman (born August 6, 1930)

Martin Bauml Duberman (born August 6, 1930) is an American historian, philosopher, playwright, and gay-rights activist. He is the Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at Lehman College and the Graduate School of the City University of New York and was the founder and first director of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the CUNY Graduate School. He has authored over twenty books including James Russell Lowell (a National Book Award finalist), Paul Robeson, Stonewall, and the memoir Cures: A Gay Man's Odyssey. He is also a neoabolitionist scholar, as evidenced by his edited collection of essays, The Antislavery Vanguard. His play In White America won the Vernon Rice/Drama Desk Award for Best Off-Broadway Production in 1963.

In 1968, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. Around the same time, he wrote an article in the Partisan Review "criticiz[ing] SNCC and CORE for being 'anarchists,' for rejecting the authority of the state, for insisting that community be voluntary, and for stressing, along with SDS, participatory instead of representative democracy."

He wrote that:
SNCC and CORE, like the Anarchists, talk increasingly of the supreme importance of the individual. They do so, paradoxically, in a rhetoric strongly reminiscent of that long associated with the right. It could be Herbert Hoover . . . but it is in fact Rap Brown who now reiterates the Negro's need to stand on his own two feet, to make his own decisions, to develop self-reliance and a sense of self-worth. SNCC may be scornful of present-day liberals and 'statism,' but it seems hardly to realize that the laissez-faire rhetoric it prefers derives almost verbatim from the classic liberalism of John Stuart Mill.
In 2007, Duberman published The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein, a biography of the man who was the force behind George Balanchine's New York City Ballet.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Bauml_Duberman


Martin Duberman - N.Y.C, 1987, by Robert Giard (http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/dl_crosscollex/brbldl_getrec.asp?fld=img&id=1081945)
American photographer Robert Giard is renowned for his portraits of American poets and writers; his particular focus was on gay and lesbian writers. Some of his photographs of the American gay and lesbian literary community appear in his groundbreaking book Particular Voices: Portraits of Gay and Lesbian Writers, published by MIT Press in 1997. Giard’s stated mission was to define the literary history and cultural identity of gays and lesbians for the mainstream of American society, which perceived them as disparate, marginal individuals possessing neither. In all, he photographed more than 600 writers. (http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/digitallibrary/giard.html)


Further Readings:

Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community by Martin Duberman
Paperback: 616 pages
Publisher: Northwestern University Press (March 13, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0810125943
ISBN-13: 978-0810125940
Amazon: Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community

With exceptional research, interviews and anecdotes, Duberman details the brief, lively history of Black Mountain College in western North Carolina. The influence of this experimental community continues to the present (the faculty and alumni included Anna and Josef Albers, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Jonathan Williams, among many others). The struggle to keep the College fiscally solvent from year-to-year, as often happens at any instution, becomes paramount to the story, but doesn't detract from the intellectual achievement of Black Mountain -- or diminish the artistic clashes of its participants. In the 1970s, the founding of the Naropa Institute, the Jack Kerouac School of Disemobodied Poetics, and other experiments in community would find echoes in the history of Black Mountain College. This is an entertaining and informative history, and essential reading for anyone interested in mid-20th century literature and art.

Stonewall [Illustrated] by Martin Bauml Duberman
Reading level: Ages 18 and up
Paperback: 352 pages
Publisher: Plume; First Edition edition (May 1, 1994)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0452272068
ISBN-13: 978-0452272064
Amazon: Stonewall [Illustrated]

On June 28th, 1969, the Stonewall, a gay bar in New York's Greenwich Village, was raided. But instead of the routine compliance expected by the police, patrons and a growing crowd decided to fight back. The five days of rioting that ensued changed forever the face of gay and lesbian life. This book tells the story of what happened at Stonewall, recreating those nights in detail through the lives of six people who were drawn into the struggle for gay and lesbian rights. Their stories combine into a portrait of the repression that led up to the riots, which culminates when they triumphantly participate in the first gay rights march of 1970.

A Saving Remnant: The Radical Lives of Barbara Deming and David McReynolds by Martin Duberman
Hardcover: 336 pages
Publisher: New Press, The (March 1, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1595583238
ISBN-13: 978-1595583239
Amazon: A Saving Remnant: The Radical Lives of Barbara Deming and David McReynolds

By the time their paths first crossed in the 1960s, Barbara Deming and David McReynolds had each charted a unique course through the political and social worlds of the American left. Deming, a feminist, journalist, and political activist with an abiding belief in nonviolence, had been an out lesbian since the age of sixteen. The first openly gay man to run for president of the United States, on the Socialist Party ticket, McReynolds was also a longtime opponent of the Vietnam War—he was among the first activists to publicly burn a draft card after this became a felony—and friend to leading activists and artists from Bayard Rustin to Quentin Crisp.

In this remarkable dual biography, the prize-winning historian Martin Duberman reveals a vital historical milieu of activism, radical ideas, and coming to terms with homosexuality when the gay rights movement was still in its nascent stages. With a cast of characters that includes intellectuals, artists, and activists from the critic Edmund White and the writer Mary McCarthy to the young Alvin Ailey and Allen Ginsberg, A Saving Remnant is a brilliant achievement from one of our most important historians.

More Particular Voices at my website: http://www.elisarolle.com/, My Ramblings/Particular Voices


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Tags: essayist: martin duberman, particular voices
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