Allan Bérubé receives Distinguished Achievement Award

Allan Bérubé, groundbreaking author of the 1990 book Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two, has received the Monette/Horwitz Trust $7,500 Distinguished Achievement Award for his ongoing independent research, which endeavors to present a truer picture of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgendered people. The trust was established by celebrated author Paul Monette before his death from AIDS complications in 1995 in order to support and recognize research and scholarship that “help to counter the hatred and fear that destroy my people generation after generation…which challenge by truth the sickness of homophobia.” Bérubé’s social history of gays in World War II was later made into a documentary film directed by Arthur Dong. The film won both the 1994 Sundance Film Festival Special Jury Award for Excellence and the 1996 George Peabody Award for Excellence in Television Broadcasting. Bérubé’s current project, pending publication by Houghton Mifflin, is Dream Ships Sail Away: A Gay Odyssey Through the Golden Age of Luxury Liners, a narrative history about how cooks and stewards who worked on passenger liners during the time from the Great Depression to the cold war created one of the most democratic, multiracial, and pro-gay unions in the United States.