Read the Book Cures by Martin Duberman - Essay Example

In this text, the writer documents his own struggle with his personalized homophobia between 1948 and 1973 when he ultimately manages to become successful, attaining his own freedom as a forthrightly gay person via his engagement with political activism. This is a wonderful book that gives a clear insight into the life of self-confessed gay person, as well as giving us a view of how life is for such persons. On reading the book, I definitely liked every bit of it as it is a reality that most people fear to face, though an emotional one.

The writer, first a very bright student, who later became a recognized historian, a successful author and a creative tutor. His remarkable predilection for academic success serves as a harbor away from his libido’s temptation and also as a fortification from his own psyche given to self-hatred and self-doubt when he is not filled with the duty of completing all the several projects at once (34-78). Eventually, after about twenty years of indifferent failed attempts at relinquishing his homosexuality, we find that be becomes successful, attaining his own freedom as a forthrightly gay person largely via his engagement with political activism. . Moreover, he captures outstandingly well the complexity as well as the indistinctness of his personal struggle by depicting himself as unquestionably harboring homophobic view whereas, concurrently, experiencing the enjoyment that comes with the homosexual intimacy (67-98).

Correspondingly, he paradoxically demonstrates the vainness of the ‘cures’ with tales of his developmental discovery of the subculture of gay and the enjoyment he gets from his experiences of homosexual sex whereas concurrently making trips every week to the psychiatrist who was supposed to help him get out of the ‘pathological’ inclinations or habits. His story clearly demonstrates that, during these twenty years, the secret was the norm. The freedom lobby group was in the hands of just a few whereas the large number of the lesbians and gays all over the country, who were struggling with personal self-hatred and their routine struggle for the physical and psychological survival, always paid very little attention or were never bothered at all concerning the growing movement for the freedom of an identity that they were dynamically attempting to refute (121-176).

Nevertheless, the writer himself, now well acquainted with the facts regarding the history of the liberation of lesbians and gays, does not make any claim to have realized its emergence and developments, to have embraced them on some occasions when he actually realized them, or to have even known their significance as they were growing. His own entrenched denunciation of homosexuality as being a pathological forced him to belittle the efforts of lesbian and gay proponents to gain sight and to fight the stigmatization of the society.

The internal struggles of Doberman