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Midlife Queer: Autobiography of a Decade, 1971-1981

by Martin Duberman

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Overview
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Overview

With searing self-appraisal and a keen sense of the world around him, acclaimed writer and gay activist Martin Duberman examines a wide range of issues in his personal and professional life and in the politics of the time from 1971 to 1981—from the early years of gay liberation to the first public reports of AIDS.
Duberman moves from the internecine battles in the academic world and within the budding gay rights movement to his own heart attack, sexual and romantic adventures, and search for fulfillment through new therapies and the world of theater. Peppered with gossip, wit, and tart observations of the New York theater and literary worlds, Midlife Queer stands as both a fascinating memoir and a record of an era.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

For historian, gay activist and playwright Duberman, the 1970s was not the complacent Me decade. In this searching, refreshingly optimistic memoir, he revisits his participation in gay rights struggles as well as in internal disputes with a movement he saw as too insular in its relative disregard of nonwhites, the poor and lesbians. He analyzes his relationship with his intrusive yet loving mother, whose protracted death from a malignant melanoma in 1977 had a deep, lingering impact. Duberman tried experimental LSD therapy, which proved disorienting, yielding only scattered insights. Another alternative psychotherapy, bioenergetics, unleashed floods of rage, tears and tenderness. His career as a dramatist was stalemated during the 1970s, which he blames partly on a cowardly producers' fraternity and partly on timid, anesthetized American audiences. After a major heart attack in 1979, at 49, Duberman spent a year recovering, moving beyond despair and self-recrimination to re-immersion in the gay rights movement. His relentless self-scrutiny reflects a continual search for ways to link the personal with the political. (May)

Library Journal

Historian/activist/playwright Duberman picks up approximately where he left off in Cures: A Gay Man's Odyssey (LJ 2/15/91), which chronicled his life from 1950 to 1970. Here, relying on excerpts from diary entries, he relates the ups and downs of his personal and professional activities: comically frustrated forays into LSD therapy and bioenergetics; a rocky reentry into the world of theater with his play Visions of Kerouac; battles with the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association, which refused to take seriously the study of sexuality, much less of homosexuality; disenchantment with sexism in the Gay Academic Union (which he helped found) and the National Gay Task Force (on whose founding board he served); and lessons learned from his heart attack at age 49. This poignant memoir's lapses into self-indulgence are offset by the author's sincere attempts to understand his place in a pivotal period of queer history. For larger biography collections.-James E. Van Buskirk, San Francisco P.L.

Tom Stoddard

Martin Duberman is not famous. His is not a household name - even in same-sex households. But unlike Vanna White, another best-selling author, he does have something to say, especially - but certainly not exclusively - to lesbians and gay men...

Duberman's most recent book, Midlife Queer recounts his life in the decades between 1971 and 1981, and while it embraces many aspects of his life, from his playwriting to his heart attack, it is of particular interest to gays because of Duberman's depiction of the gay movement&39;s emergence into mainstream American culture. Duberman was, among many other things, a founder of the National Gay Task Force and the Gay Academic Union. This book describes some of the victories, failures, and tensions of the infant movement before it had to confront either AIDS or Ronald Reagan.
— The Advocate

Kirkus Reviews

Duberman (History/CUNY) follows up his widely admired Stonewall (1993) with a sequence of gripe-filled autobiographical essays about the decade after the Stonewall riots.

In a preface, Duberman says he wanted to intermingle passages from his '70s diary with essays about the time, identifying and amplifying thematic connections between public and private life in order to "lay bare the limits of reliable historical memory." The method fails. Duberman was a leader in gay-rights organizations and campaigned hard for gay visibility in academia for much of the decade, but the conflicts between radical leftists and conservative reformers in the gay movement have been detailed elsewhere, far more cogently and without the obsessive gnawing at old grievances that suffuses the first half of this book. The author quotes from his own articles, diaries, and letters, but he seems to be not so much assembling different perspectives as combing his past writings for showy one-liners. He attempts to persuade us that his playwriting career was thwarted by a homophobic conspiracy of producers and influential critics, but the discussion comes off as self-serving. Having portrayed a public atmosphere bereft of intellectual vigor and full of petty procedural squabbles, Duberman takes up his private life in several comparatively straightforward chapters about emotional crises. When he delves into the protoNew Age forms of psychotherapy he pursued, he occasionally captures his own odd moods and those of the decade with genuine resonance. But the real-world details that vivify a memoir elude Duberman: his relationships and "sexual adventuring" are described almost entirely as abstract concepts, and though he taught college and lived in New York for the entire period under discussion, the details of his nonpolitical, nonacademic interests—home, friends, ordinary routine—remain ciphers.

Duberman talks about his habit of overrationalizing, which often made him miss out on full understanding of his emotional experiences. His book is crippled by the same flaw.