Allan Berube, a pioneering gay historian who chronicled the contributions and tribulations of gays and lesbians in the U.S. military during World War II, died Tuesday at a hospital near his home in Liberty, N.Y. He was 61.
The cause of death was complications from stomach ulcers, according to friend and fellow historian Jonathan Ned Katz.
Berube wrote "Coming Out Under Fire," a 1990 book that offered what is considered the first comprehensive examination of the roles gays played in the nation's armed forces during the war. The book earned strong reviews, led to a Peabody Award-winning documentary and brought a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship to the author, a college dropout and self-described community historian.
"Allan took great pride in his role as a community historian," said John D'Emilio, a history professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago who knew Berube for almost 30 years. "He was tickled at the idea that as a working-class kid who dropped out of college he could do history that was deep, important, respected and excited people. He just had a passion about these lives. He was really interested in people who were genuinely lost to history."
"Coming Out Under Fire" told tales of individual valor, tragedy and discrimination, but it also painted a larger picture of an unintended but powerful outcome of the war. World War II brought together hundreds of thousands of gays and lesbians in a same-sex environment -- military bases and fighting units -- an experience that bolstered their homosexual identity and laid the groundwork for the gay rights movement that would emerge a few decades later.
"It was a turning point for many homosexuals," Berube told the San Diego Union-Tribune in 1985. "It accelerated the process of finding other people like themselves."
Berube was born Dec. 3, 1946, in Springfield, Mass., and grew up in a trailer park in Bayonne, N.J., later moving back to Massachusetts. He attended a Massachusetts prep school on scholarship and earned money by washing the dishes of his classmates.
During the 1960s he was an activist against the Vietnam War. In the spring of 1968, a turbulent year of street violence and assassinations, his roommate at the University of Chicago was murdered, an event so dispiriting that Berube dropped out of school just before graduation.
The following year, he came out as a homosexual and joined a gay liberation collective in Boston. He later moved to San Francisco, where he lived at a gay commune.
