Renowned historian Martin Duberman reflects on a full life in ‘Reaching Ninety’
Renowned queer historian, playwright, author and LGBTQ activist Martin Duberman, 93, began writing stories when he was four. “They still exist,” Duberman, Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at City University of New York (CUNY), told the Blade in a telephone interview. “They’re with my papers at the New York Public Library.” Duberman doesn’t understand what drove him to create. “I’d write these moralistic tales,” he said, “hand-sewn inside covers.
About how Alice learned to do what her mother told her to do.” Duberman who has written some two dozen books as well as plays, hasn’t stopped writing.
Name most anything or anyone and he’s written about it: from the Stonewall Uprising to actor and civil rights activist Paul Robeson.
His memoir “Cures” recounts how mental health professionals tried to “cure” him of his “homosexuality.” When he was 70, he wrote “Haymarket,” a novel set in 1886 in Chicago during protests by labor activists.
