You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

for you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hi, this is Michael Silverblad, and welcome to Bookworm.

My guest today is Martin Doberman, whose most recent book is Cures, A Gay Man's Odyssey, published by Dutton Books.

He's also the author, or rather editor, of Hidden from History, Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past,

a biography that came out two years ago of Paul Robeson, visions of Kerouac, and some award-winning plays. I first encountered his work

in around 1972 when a book of his about Black Mountain, that extraordinary college where

many artists, dancers, poets, all co-frequented. It was in that book on Black Mountain that Martin

Doberman, a noted historian, came out, and his subsequent life seems to be a working

out of that moment in a way.

This book, Yours, is a very unusual book for the moment in that it has chosen to be only about the period.

This is not about growing up gay now in the light of AIDS.

It's a book that takes its context from the immediate contemporary history of the time.

Why did you decide that?

Well, hard to answer because usually I'm asked, why did I stop when I did, instead of why did I focus on what I did? The particular story I tell in Cures, which runs roughly from the late 50s to the early 70s, has a decided arc for me.

It has a strong central theme, which is how one person emerged from the homophobic psychiatric environment of those years.

I knew when I reached the early 70s that I was finished,

and that's what I was finished with.

It's the story of a particular kind of emergence.

It's not the story of, and he and they lived happily ever

...