Martin Duberman is an important figure in American history, a pioneer in both African-American and gay history, and an accomplished playwright and memoirist. We know a great deal about gay life in the United States since the 1950s through his autobiographical writings. I owe a great debt to Duberman. In 1972 he reviewed my first book, Homosexual: Oppression and liberation (1971), in glowing terms for the New York Times, an extraordinary boost for an emerging author. It is difficult, almost painful, to acknowledge that his latest book is deeply disappointing: parochial, polemical, and ungenerous.

One expects Americans to ignore the rest of the world, but Duberman largely ignores everything outside Manhattan. The first quarter of the book is devoted to a detailed account of New York’s gay liberation movement in the early 1970s, based heavily on the writings of a few participants. Duberman adds little that is not already accessible in books and film; he himself has written a book on the  riots, the mythic foundation event of gay liberation. That other radical gay groups emerged before the events in New York, in both California and Paris, does not shake the New York-centric conviction that what happens there determines events for the rest of us.

There is a parallel in Australia’s own queer history in the mythology surrounding Sydney’s Mardi Gras, even though the first march and subsequent riot in 1978 was only possible because lesbians and gay men had been building political organisations for almost a decade beforehand.

Duberman’s nostalgia for the radical politics of gay liberation is reflected in his contempt for the growing respectability of mainstream gay (now LGBTQI) movements, and their emphasis on winning acceptance in mainstream institutions. He is particularly scathing about the enthusiasm for marriage, which he sees as positioning ‘the movement squarely within the framework of a Norman Rockwell painting – the one already on its way to the attic’. I have some sympathy with this critique, particularly when marriage is seen as the overwhelming mark of acceptance, as against, for example, welcoming refugees fleeing persecution because of their sexuality. Oddly, despite Duberman’s constant complaints about the blinkers of the gay establishment, the plight of queer asylum seekers does not appear in Duberman’s list of neglected issues.

Unfortunately, Duberman reflects the American parochialism that he decries. He is right to complain that there is little awareness of the extent to which people in many parts of the world face violence, discrimination, and sometimes torture. Yet he himself bases a two-page summary of the global situation on a small number of journal articles, all written from within the United States. Given the richness of material now available, which recounts the situation in countries ranging from Indonesia to Jamaica, one might expect a historian to search a little further. If Duberman wants to criticise others for their lack of concern, he might begin with some serious exploration of his own.

Photograph from the Stonewall riots (Wiki Commons)

Running through this book is a rather bad-tempered pessimism, a sense that despite some gains, which Duberman acknowledges, the radical utopianism of early gay liberation cannot be achieved. ‘My own sense,’ he writes, ‘is that lying deep in the unexplored recesses of the psyche lies a terrified fear (easily transformed into hate) of differentness.’

For Duberman, the straight left is unable to fully accept sexual and gender diversity, while most queers want no more than to buy into an inegalitarian status quo. He points to a few small groups that he sees as combining what Nancy Fraser called the politics of redistribution with the politics of recognition, but he ends on a deliberately ambivalent note.

Martin Duberman (Photo via Seven Stories Press)Duberman has, of course, read extraordinarily widely – at least of American sources – and this can lead to fascinating digressions, usually based on articles that have provoked him. For someone who has himself written fiction, I found the neglect of creative writings disconcerting: surely we learn more about the changing mores of American gay life from a novelist like Edmund White than from random articles in the Huffington Post? For a book from a leading university press, Has the Gay Movement Failed? is somewhat careless in its referencing. At one point, Duberman quotes Sigmund Freud and Eldridge Cleaver without identifying the source.

Perhaps the best way to read this book is to imagine oneself sitting at tea with Martin Duberman on a rainy Manhattan afternoon, prepared for him to wander into informed, if highly opinionated, discussions of physiology, psychology, and adolescent sexuality. I only met Duberman a few times, and have had no contact for several decades, but reading his book reminded me of the ageing Gore Vidal, also cantankerous, dissatisfied with his country, and an equal mixture of erudition and strange ignorance.

Despite my reservations, Has the Gay Movement Failed? raises questions that are relevant to those of us outside the United States. If it leads readers to explore some of Duberman’s earlier books, especially his historical and autobiographical works, it will have served its purpose.