Cures: A Gay Man's Odyssey, Tenth Anniversary Edition [Deluxe Edition] [Paperback]

Martin Duberman (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0813339545 | ISBN-13: 978-0813339542 | Publication Date: May 7, 2002 | Edition: Anniversary

This is the tenth anniversary edition of Cures: A Gay Man’s Odyssey, Martin Duberman’s classic memoir of growing up gay in pre-Stonewall America. The tale of his desperate struggle to “cure” himself of his homosexuality through psychotherapy is utterly frank and deeply moving. But Cures is more than one man’s story; it’s the vivid, witty account of a generation, of changing times, shifting social attitudes, and the rising tide of protest against received wisdom. For this tenth anniversary edition, Duberman has written a substantial new afterword that updates both his personal history and the ongoing struggle for a more just society.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Duberman gives a witty and searingly candid account of how he came to accept his homosexuality despite the efforts of psychotherapists intent on ``curing'' him of it.

Copyright 1992 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

"Western science has pursued the causes and cures of homosexuality with a zeal that has been almost comic--were it not for the tragic number of lives destroyed in the Process." Duberman, a noted playwright, historian, gay activist, and author of Paul Robeson ( LJ 1/89, a "Best Book of 1989") chronicles his slow emergence from the closet of the late 1960s by slaying the dragons of his deeply internalized homophobia. He candidly describes his involvement with 1960s psychoanalysis and his half-hearted desire to be heterosexual. Realizing that he must forge his own path to self-acceptance, he reaches out to gay rights groups formed after the pivotal Stonewall riots in 1969. As with his About Time: Exploring the Gay Past (Gay Pr. of New York, 1986), Duberman's memoir contributes to the documentation of homosexuality's history. Recommended for all libraries, particulary those with gay/lesbian studies collections. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 12/90.
- Kevin M. Roddy, Oakland P.L., Cal.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books; Anniversary edition (May 7, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0813339545
• ISBN-13: 978-0813339542
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #234,763 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Adventures in the closet, February 4, 2006

By 

D. Cloyce Smith (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Cures: A Gay Man's Odyssey, Tenth Anniversary Edition (Paperback)

Martin Duberman has earned his stripes at the forefront of gay scholarship and civil rights. During the 1960s, he was known for his historical scholarship, especially his biography of Charles Francis Adams (son of President John Quincy Adams and father of Henry Adams); he also enjoyed fame as a playwright, primarily for "In White America," his play on race relations. After the mid-1970s, he became both a gay rights advocate and a chronicler of gays and lesbians in recent American history.

Yet he wasn't always an outspoken pioneer of sexual liberation. For the first two decades of his adult life, he lived in a partially open closet. At best, he was contritely open about his homosexuality to selected friends and colleagues, but, like many other men and women, he had convinced himself that his identity was not only wrong but could somehow be controlled or even cured. This memoir recounts not only his struggle to accept himself but also the societal and "professional" attitudes that reinforced the view of homosexuality as a pathological condition.

Much of the book details his excruciating and even comical adventures (a bizarrely appropriate word here) in psychotherapy, particularly with one psychologist whose own neuroses and lack of professional integrity, it eventually becomes clear, should have barred him from dispensing advice to patients, sick or healthy. Duberman pulls no punches, and he is most critical (and retrospectively ashamed) by some of his own exploits and by his many righteous or hypocritical stances taken against those who were comfortably or experimentally out of the closet. Often Duberman avoided self-evaluation, escaping into the comforting workaholic demands offered by his professional career or into the fleeting release provided by prescription drugs and various affairs with hustlers.

Duberman's is a fascinating life--a man with three successful careers and two successive personal lives. Every once in a while his fascination with his own academic career carries him away; portions of the book might strike readers as a curriculum vitae in prose form. More valuably, however, he sets his memoir in its historical context, examining how social and medical opinions were eventually transformed by both events and research (much of which was unknown to Duberman until years later). For some readers today, it's hard to imagine the pressures and impossibilities of being gay half a century ago. For many others, the struggle continues, and this book may provide them with both comfort and counsel.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars An Interesting Read, December 13, 2008

By 

M. Chaney "Michael P. Chaney, Ph.D." (Sterling Heights, MI) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Cures: A Gay Man's Odyssey, Tenth Anniversary Edition (Paperback)

Historically interesting and significant. About 3/4 of the way through the book, I stopped reading because it was becoming redundant and uninteresting. Not the most interestingly written memoir but who am I to judge a courageous queer brother's life experiences. For me, it was slow and seemed to go on and on and on.

4.0 out of 5 stars Martin Duberman's CURES, November 13, 2011

By 

Stacy Helton (Chattanooga, TN) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cures: A Gay Man's Odyssey, Tenth Anniversary Edition (Paperback)

Martin Duberman's CURES is another gay journey book, albeit one more inline with Edmund White generation, the gay America of the closeted 1950s through Stonewall and into the 1970s. This tome stops before the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. True to the title, this memoir is about the cures that Duberman tries to deny his homosexuality, with lengthy details and explanations of his various psychotherapies, including over five years in a BOB NEWHART-type group therapy, as well as a variety of more new agey methods. The book too often wanders into the minutiae of being a college professor and the politics therein. By the end the discussion of the various and sundry post-Mattachine organizations blend as one. Better is the narrative of his playwriting experiences and the Off-Broadway productions in the late 1960s and 70s. The Fire Island exploits don't match Larry Kramer's FAGGOTS, but there does seem to be a spark of fun. The book, written in 1991, is more academic than the plethora of coming out bios published in the last 10 years, which provides an intimate glimpse of life before the Stonewall.