Duberman was born into a Jewish family. His father, born in Ukraine, was initially a manual laborer but later founded a successful clothing business that sold uniforms to the government during World War II. They used the money to move to Mount Vernon, New York and send Martin to the Horace Mann School, an elite private prep school. Duberman is gay.
Activism
In 1968, he signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. He was jailed, as a member, for a sit-in protest on the floor of the US Senate. His numerous essays on "The Black Struggle," "The Crisis of the Universities," "American Foreign Policy," and "Gender and Sexuality" have been collected in two volumes of his essays: The Uncompleted Past and Left Out: The Politics of Exclusion, 1964-1999. He came out as a gay man in an essay in The New York Times. A founder and keynote speaker of the Gay Academic Union, he later founded and served as first director of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the CUNY Graduate School. In 1997 he edited two volumes, "A Queer World" and "Queer Representations" containing selections from the Center's conferences. He was also a member of the founding boards of the National Lesbian and Gay Task Force, Lambda Legal Defense Fund, and Queers for Economic Justice.
Writing
He has written more than 25 books on subjects such as James Russell Lowell, Charles Francis Adams, Sr., Black Mountain College in the book Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community, Paul Robeson, the Stonewall riots, Howard Zinn, and the Haymarket affair, The Martin Duberman Reader-2013 and the memoir Cures: A Gay Man's Odyssey, 1991, 2002. His 2007 book The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein was runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize. His play In White America won the Vernon Rice/Drama Desk Award for Best Off-Broadway Production in 1963. Two of his other plays, "Mother Earth", and "Visions of Kerouac" have received multiple productions. A collection of his plays, "Radical Acts" was published in 2008. He edited two series, "The Lives of Notable Gay Men and Lesbians," and "Issues in Gay and Lesbian Life." He also won three Lambda Awards one for Hold Tight Gently: Michael Callen, Essex Hemphill, and the Battlefield of AIDSin 2015 and two for Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, an anthology he co-edited; a special award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for his "contributions to literature", 1988 winner of the Manhattan Borough President's Gold Medal in Literature, 1989 winner of the NYPL's George Freedley Memorial Award for "best book of the year" for "Paul Robeson". His numerous other awards include the 1995 Public Service Award from the Association of Lesbian and Gay Lawyers, the 1996 Public Service Award from the Association of Gay and Lesbian Psychiatrists, the 2007 Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Historical Association, the Founding Father award, HGLC, the 2008 Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement in Non-Fiction, Bill Whitehead Award, 2009, Disting. Writing award, The Antioch Review, 2010. In 2012 Amherst College conferred on him an Honorary Degree, Doctor of Humane Letters. Duberman received an honorary Doctor of Letters from Columbia University, May, 2017. Duberman's novel, Jews Queers Germans, was published by Seven Stories Press in March, 2017. His most recent novel, Luminous Traitor: The Just and Daring Life of Roger Casement, a Biographical Novel, was published by the University of California Press in November 2018.
