Martin Bauml Duberman (born August 6, 1930) is an American historian, biographer, playwright, and gay rights activist. Duberman is Professor of History Emeritus at Herbert Lehman College in the Bronx, New York City. Early life 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. His family used the money to move to Mount Vernon, New York and send Martin to the Horace Mann School, an elite private prep school. He would later graduate from Yale College and Harvard University. 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 (December 10, 1972) in The New York Times. A founder and keynote speaker of the Gay Academic Union (1973), he later founded and served as first director (1986–1996) 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 (a National Book Award finalist in 1966), Charles Francis Adams, Sr. (Bancroft Prize winner in 1961), 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. Duberman's play In White America won the Vernon Rice/Drama Desk Award for Best Off-Broadway Production in 1963. Two of his other plays, "Visions of Kerouac" (about writer Jack Kerouac; Little Brown, 1977) and Mother Earth (about activist Emma Goldman; St.