Radical scholar and activist Martin Duberman assembles a representative cross section of his writings in Left Out, an anthology that includes essays on racial politics and gay and lesbian history, as well as critiques of U.S. foreign policy, campus radicalism, and several other topics. Whether he's discussing his experiences working on his acclaimed biography of Paul Robeson or the early years of the National Gay Task Force, Duberman writes with visible passion--giving free rein to his humor and keeping his occasional fury in check. Among the highlights in Left Out are "The 'Father' of the Homophile Movement," a long biographical essay about Donald Webster Cory, also known as Edward Sagarin (who wrote a pioneering account of homosexual life in the 1950s but later became a staunch critic of the movement for acceptance of gays), and "Kinsey's Urethra," a caustic pan of a heavily moralistic biography of sex researcher Alfred Kinsey.
From Publishers Weekly
An award-winning historian who has written extensively on the African-American civil rights struggle, feminism, American imperialism and gay and lesbian liberation, Duberman is also a playwright (In White America) and distinguished professor of history at Lehman College and the Graduate School of the City University of New York. This collection of 31 essays, book reviews and commentaries (many of which appear here in revised versions) chart nearly four decades of political conflict in the United States, in what amounts to an extended meditation on how "exclusion" has functioned as a pivotal force in U.S. history. A self-proclaimed radical who considers himself "a confirmed if qualified patriot... dismayed at our shortcomings... but a tempered optimist about our potential," Duberman sensitively portrays how the struggle for individual and collective freedom coexists with severe state and social oppression. In a 1964 essay, "The Northern Response to Slavery," he discusses why many antislavery Northerners refused to become abolitionists. In "The (Contested) New History of Gays and Lesbians," a 1998 piece in which he examines the philosophical and historical ramifications of labeling historical figures "gay," Duberman combines traditional academic research with common sense and finely tuned moral persuasion. From the student rebellions of the 1960s to the Vietnam War to the racism of the gay movement, he elucidates both the contradictions and shortcomings, as well as the enormous successes, of American radicalism and political struggles for freedom. (Nov.)
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