The past fifty years have seen significant shifts in attitudes toward LGBTQ people and wider acceptance of them in the United States and the West. Yet the extent of this progress, argues Martin Duberman, has been more broad and conservative than deep and transformative. One of the most renowned historians of the American left and LGBTQ movement, as well as a pioneering social-justice activist, Duberman reviews the fifty years since Stonewall with an immediacy and rigor that informs and energizes. He revisits the early gay movement and its progressive vision for society, and puts the left on notice as failing time and again to embrace the queer potential for social transformation. Acknowledging the elimination of some of the most discriminatory policies that plagued earlier generations, he takes note of the cost--the sidelining of radical goals on the way to achieving more normative inclusion. Illuminating the fault lines both within and beyond the movements of the past and today, this critical book is also hopeful: Duberman urges us to learn from this history to fight for a truly inclusive and expansive society. --back cover.

For the past fifty years, prize-winning historian Martin Duberman’s groundbreaking writings have established him as one of our preeminent public intellectuals. Founder of the first graduate program in LGBT studies in the country, he is perhaps best known for his biographies of Paul Robeson, Lincoln Kirstein, and Howard Zinn—works that have been hailed as “magnificent” (USA Today), “enthralling” (The Washington Post), “splendid” and “definitive” (Studs Terkel, Chicago Sun-Times), and “refreshing and inspiring” (The New York Times). Duberman is also an equally gifted playwright and essayist, whose piercingly honest memoirs Cures and Midlife Queer have been called “witty and searingly candid” (Publishers Weekly), “wrenchingly eloquent” (Newsday), and “a moving chronicle” (The Nation). His writings have explored the shocking attempts by the medical establishment to “cure” homosexuality; Stonewall, before and after; the age of AIDS; the struggle for civil rights; the fight for economic and racial justice; and Duberman’s vision for reclaiming a radical queer past from the creeping centrism of the gay movement. The Martin Duberman Reader assembles the core of Duberman’s most important writings, offering a wonderfully comprehensive overview of our lives and times—and giving us a crucial touchstone for a new generation of activists, scholars, and readers.