A noted historian and leading gay activist describes his personal struggle to come to terms with his homosexuality and his search for a therapy that could transform him into a "normal" man
 
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.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
 
From Library Journal
"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.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.