Remembering Community Historian Allan Berube

Irvine -- As 2007 comes to an end, we remember friends and activists who have passed on.

On Subversity's New Year's Eve show, we celebrate and honor the engaged life of Allan Berube, a community historian, who documented the lives of gays in the military, and who received a MacArthur Foundation award. His book, Coming Out Under Fire, was developed into a film by documentary filmmaker Arthur Dong. Berube, who helped found the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco, died December 11, 2007.

We talk with several fellow travelers of Berube's, including fellow historian Gerard Koskovich and activist Amber Hollibaugh about Berube's role in the gay liberation movement and his impact on a whole new generation of queer scholarship and activism.

Gerard Koskovich is a San Francisco-based editor, writer, historian, and rare book dealer and collector. He is the staff liaison for the American Society on Aging's Lesbian and Gay Aging Issues Network. His entry on LGBT archives and libraries in the United States is forthcoming in the three-volume reference work LGBTQ America Today (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2008). Recent publications include an extensive French-language portfolio on the GLBT Historical Society published in volume 6 of Triangulere (Paris: Editions Christophe Gendron, December 2006), an annual review of queer arts and culture, and "The 'Modest Collection' of Bud Flounders: How 5,400 Gay Novels Came to Green Library," published in the fall 2005 issue of Imprint, the journal of the Associates of the Stanford University Libraries. Amber Hollibaugh, senior strategist at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, formerly was the director of education, advocacy and community building at SAGE (Services and Advocacy for GLBT Elders). She was the first director of the Lesbian AIDS Project at Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC) in New York. She is a well-known activist, artist, writer and community organizer. She is author of My Dangerous Desires: a Queer Girl Dreaming Her Way Home. She also co-produced and directed The Heart of the Matter, a documentary about women's sexuality and HIV risk, which won the 1994 Sundance Festival Freedom of Expression Award and ran on the PBS series, P.O.V.

Have a safe and productive new year!
See obituaries:
New York Times: obit.
Los Angeles Times: obit.
Bay Area Reporter: obit
Sullivan County Democrat: obit.

To listen to the entire show, click here: