THE LINE OF DISSENT

Queer activists’ fights for gay rights and other causes are explored in this probing collection of essays by Duberman.

In this work, the author, a City University of New York historian, has gathered pieces that appeared in the Gay & Lesbian Review and other publications, most of them biographical profiles that illuminate key aspects of the gay liberation movement. His subjects include Edward Sagarin, who broached the then-radical idea of gay self-acceptance in his 1951 book The Homosexual in America but later became a pariah in the movement for clinging to the belief that gayness is a psychological disorder; sexologist Alfred Kinsey, who exuberantly embraced a wide range of sexual behaviors as normal; Sylvia Ray Rivera, the celebrated trans activist who argued for opening a carefully buttoned-down gay rights movement to drag queens; Andrea Dworkin, the radical feminist who denounced sexism in the gay rights movement; Joe Carstairs, a lesbian and champion speedboat racer who did whatever she wanted, gender norms be damned; and the group Queers for Economic Justice, co-founded by the author, which calls for solidarity between unions, socialists, and gay rights groups. Throughout, Duberman advances a stalwart radicalism: He advocates for building broad alliances between embattled minorities, rejecting rigid sex roles, celebrating erotic fluidity, and questioning monogamous marriage and the nuclear family. Duberman’s sparkling, whip-smart prose mixes bracing political analysis with vivid, gossipy evocations of his subjects, many of whom he knew personally. His portrait of Dworkin, for example, brings out both her in-private gentleness—after an argument, she shyly presented him with a bouquet of flowers—and the strident maximalism of her theorizing (“She also reinforced my already strong conviction that women, gay men, and people of color were involved in a common political struggle against a shared oppressor: the dominance of the heterosexual White male”). The result is an absorbing set of dispatches from the queer revolution.

A colorful portrait gallery of gay leaders, full of compelling figures and challenging ideas.