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Radical Acts: Collected Political Plays
by Martin Duberman
The New Press
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Martin Duberman is known as one of today's preeminent queer historians. Along with Jonathan Ned Katz, Lillian Faderman and George Chauncey, he helped invent the idea of gay and lesbian history. But Duberman is a playwright as well. Radical Acts: Collected Political Plays (The New Press, $18.95) is his second volume of collected plays, bringing together works that span almost 50 years and a swathe of American history much wider.

Duberman became famous as a playwright in 1963 with the award-winning off-Broadway production of In White America, which uses only original historical documents brought together in a dramatic collage. Employing texts such as slave narratives, speeches by politicians, Jim Crow laws, sermons, and pro- and anti-slavery propaganda, Duberman wove a powerful portrait of the course of race and racism, resistance and revolution in the US over 300 years.

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Some 45 years later, In White America remains not just readable but deeply moving. Partly it's that Duberman simply knows how to tell a story. The alternative ending for the play -- the original closed with the protests at Little Rock, Arkansas -- is from Lincoln's second annual message to Congress: "Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We will still be remembered in spite of ourselves."

This message carries through all the works here. Mother Earth is a terrific play about Emma Goldman -- anarchist, free lover, revolutionary and early champion of queer freedom. Duberman captures his subject's liberty-loving spirit while making political and dramatic sense of quarrels within the American anarchist movement. Duberman situates Goldman both her own time and also firmly within contemporary political debates.

Visions of Kerouac is a free-wheeling retelling of the life of Jack Kerouac -- author of the groundbreaking On the Road -- as he drinks and drugs his way through eros-tinged friendships with Neal Cassedy and Allen Ginsberg. Driving the play is Duberman's fascination with the American man -- the central theme in his earlier collection -- Male Armor: Selected Plays 1968-1974. The plays there were short and often powerful, but felt like sketches of works in progress. In Visions of Kerouac those sketches really come into their own and the play is a powerful exploration of the Beat literary scene in the 1950s as well as a harsh look at what it meant to be a man -- straight, gay or whatever -- during that time. There are moving moments here -- such as the death of Kerouac's father -- and the play relies consistently on the actual written and spoken words of its subjects.

The most exciting piece in the collection is Posing Naked, which deals with the life and troubles of Arvin Newton, a professor of American literature at Smith College. In the 1960s -- after sending some photographs of male nudes to friends -- Newton was arrested for interstate pornography. The ensuing trial ruined his reputation as a scholar, and under pressure, he gave up other names of people in the "ring." This is the one play in the collection that does not use direct historical documentation -- making it both dramatically freer, and emotionally more direct. The bulk of all of the "facts" here are true -- but Duberman has invented dialogue, emotions, motives and desires that animate them.

Taken in its entirety Radical Acts is a tribute not only to Duberman's talents as a historian, but his enormous empathy and generosity to humans and their endless follies and victories.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com