Born in 1946 into a working-class family and raised first in New Jersey and then in western Massachusetts, Allan Bérubé attended the University of Chicago on a scholarship. There he became involved in the movement against the U.S. war in Southeast Asia; his activism led him to drop out of college before graduating. Moving to Boston, he was a member of the collective that created Fag Rag, a major gay liberation periodical of the 1970s. He relocated to San Francisco in 1973, where he lived for the next two decades.

 After reading Jonathan Ned Katz’s Gay American History, Bérubé decided to self-train as a community historian. He was one of the founders in 1979 of the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project. His first research project was about women in the 19^th and early 20^th century who lived as men (who later would be understood as transmen), and he prepared a slide lecture that he titled “Lesbian Masquerade.” He first presented it in San Francisco in 1979 to a large enthusiastic audience, and soon he was traveling across the country presenting it in many cities. This visibility led to a number of LGBTQ elders approaching him and offering him their private archives of historical materials, including a large cache of letters written by gay GIs during World War II. Bérubé then developed a new slide lecture, “Marching to a Different Drummer,” about gay, lesbian and bisexual members of the armed forces during World War II, and in 1990 published the book, Coming Out Under Fire. His research on World War II and the military led to his active engagement in activist efforts in the early 1990s to eliminate the ban on LGBT servicemembers.

In 1996, Bérubé was awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship – the so-called annual “Genius Awards” – which allowed him to embark on a major new research project, a study of the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union in mid-twentieth century America.  It was a progressive labor union that joined issues of class, race, and sexual identity together. Bérubé passed away in December 2007 before he was able to complete the book. A collection of his essays, My Desire for History, was published in 2011.

To learn more, check out No Red-Baiting! No Race-Baiting! No Queen-Baiting! by Allan Bérubé