I don't know what to think about Martin Duberman's third memoir, Waiting to Land - A (mostly) Political Memoir, 1985-2008 (The New Press, 2009, 334p). I read it with pleasure and interest but was bothered from time to time by the very conventional leftist political opinions (even the Cuban Revolution seems to retain his favors, the Gulf War is criticized but there is no mention of the German Reunification...) expressed in some pages. Fortunately, most of the volume deals with gay issues. Martin Duberman was born in 1930. In Cures, published in 1992, his first autobiographical book, he recounted his struggles with his homosexuality, taking us up to 1970. His second memoir, Midlife Queer (1996), "centered on the 1970s, by which time he'd thrown his earlier doubts and become fully engaged in the worlds of gay politics and culture." Waiting to Land is far less personal, with few details about his private life, as he explains in the Preface: "Waiting to Land concentrates on different realms: public engagement and political struggle - and the inevitable controversy both arouse. Over the past twenty-five years, my political involvement has continued on a number of fronts, with my radicalization deepening, not dissipating, through the years. During the same period, the national gay movement has simultaneously increased in strength and changed its focus to an assimilationist agenda (gay marriage, gays in the military, etc.). The movement's shift in priorities has disquieted many of its left-wing members, myself included." The book, which takes us from 1985 to the present - with the bulk centering on the 1990s, mixes a commentary written by Duberman in 2008 with extracts from his diaries. Reading it is a great and entertaining introduction to the history of ideas in the gay rights movements. After all Duberman was the decisive force behind the creation of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the CUNY Graduate School, the first university-based research center of its kind in the United States. The last pages turn more personal and become even touching. Duberman, feeling old, depressed, lonely, becomes a member of SAGE (Services and Advocacy of GLBT Elders) and joins several of its discussion groups. But he is definitively at odds with the other members... "Anyway, sitting uncomfortably in a room full of fellow oldsters isn't going to do it for me. I keep hoping for a place to land, a sustainable community. The dream, improbable though it is, persists."
2009.07.12
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