Cures : a gay man's odyssey / Martin Duberman.
Record details
- ISBN: 0525249559 :
- Physical Description: 305 p. ; 24 cm.
- Publisher: New York, N.Y., U.S.A. : Dutton, 1991.
Search for related items by subject
Subject: | Duberman, Martin B. Gay men > United States > Biography. Homosexuality > Psychological aspects. |
Available copies
- 1 of 1 copy available at GRPL.

BookList Review
Cures : A Gay Man's Odyssey
Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
When in his history of the great experimental college, Black Mountain (Doubleday, 1972), Duberman announced that he, like a few of the school's prominent figures, was homosexual, it caused quite a fuss. It also betokened, his autobiography imparts, his final cure from the bane of homosexuality, a cure accomplished not by the psychotherapy he endured, but by coming out. It took him more than 20 years to get to that public announcement, from the time when a fortune-teller proffered him the first cure at age 18 ("join our gypsy family so that I can be constantly by your side") through a distinguished career as a scholar, teacher, and playwright. Personally, alongside his professional triumphs he was suffering, entirely consensually, through psychiatric indignities that seem scarcely credible these days. Fortunately, he also allowed himself gay friends and gay love, and he could not stifle the inquisitiveness and skepticism that had led him to black civil rights and antiwar activism. At last, those qualities got him into gay activism. Although the fact that Duberman's a professor may turn off some, his testimony is both affecting and a gay liberation document of the first water. ~--Ray Olson

Library Journal Review
Cures : A Gay Man's Odyssey
Library Journal
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
``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. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review
Cures : A Gay Man's Odyssey
Publishers Weekly
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Historian, playwright, gay activist, Duberman was treated for some 20 years by a succession of psychotherapists who attempted to ``cure'' him of his homosexuality. How he gradually came to embrace his sexual orientation as normal is the focus of this searingly candid, sometimes painful, affecting autobiography-- one man's odyssey from self-sabotage to self-acceptance. Coming out, for Duberman, was a tortuous process that led him from anarchism to yoga to men's consciousness-raising groups. One therapist berated him for his ``refusal to change''; another denounced him as ``passive'' and ``devious,'' and when a fellow therapy-group member physically attacked the author the therapist did nothing to intervene. Including a frank account of his love affairs, this intense confessional is full of witty self-deflation as Duberman critiques his own stances on political, sexual and intellectual debates of the last three decades. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved