Allan Bérubé
American gay historian (1946–2007)
Allan Bérubé (pronounced BEH-ruh-bay; December 3, 1946 – December 11, 2007) was a gay American historian, activist, independent scholar, self-described "community-based" researcher and college drop-out, and award-winning author, best known for his research and writing about homosexual members of the American Armed Forces during World War II. He also wrote essays about the intersection of class and race in gay culture, and about growing up in a poor, working-class family, his French-Canadian roots, and about his experience of anti-AIDS activism.
Bérubé's principal work of history was the 1990 book Coming Out Under Fire, which examined the lives of gay men and women in the U.S. military between 1941 and 1945. It won the Lambda Literary Award for outstanding Gay Men's Nonfiction Book of 1990 and was adapted as a documentary film of the same name in 1994 with a screenplay that Bérubé co-wrote. The film received a Peabody Award for excellence in documentary media in 1995.
Bérubé received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1996. He received a Rockefeller grant from the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in 1994. For about twenty years beginning in 1979, Bérubé was interviewed about his work in publications including Time, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Advocate, Christopher Street, Gay Community News, and the San Francisco Examiner. His many radio and television appearances included interviews by Studs Terkel, Sonia Freedman on CNN, and two by Terry Gross on National Public Radio's Fresh Air.
Biography
Allan Ronald Bérubé was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, on December 3, 1946, the eldest of four children born to a rural, working-class, French Canadian family. For a time in his childhood his family lived in trailer parks in Connecticut and New Jersey, while his father worked as a poorly paid cameraman for NBC. While he was a teenager, the family returned to his grandparents' farming community in Massachusetts.
The public source identifies “Allan Bérubé” as american gay historian (1946–2007). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Allan, Bérubé and American.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1518086. VIAF identifies the subject as 181258312. The Library of Congress control number is n88292815. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1946, 2007, 1990 and 1941.
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This entry incorporates text from “Allan Bérubé” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.