breaking with his working-class background. He moved to Boston and there he became involved in politics for the first time, working with the American Friends Service Committee in opposition to the Vietnam War. He came out as gay in 1969. He moved to San Francisco in 1974 and continued to support himself with odd jobs, working for a time as a ticket-taker at the Castro Theatre. By 1979 he had launched what become his lifelong lecture and slideshow tour, presenting his latest research to audiences of lesbians and gay men, beginning with "Lesbian Masquerade" about women who dressed as men. When closing the city's bathhouses became a political controversy early in the AIDS epidemic, he published "a still-definitive essay on the history and social function of gay baths". He was a co-founder of the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project in 1978 and of the GLBT Historical Society there in 1985. He worked as a consultant on the documentary film The Times of Harvey Milk. He served from 1983 to 1986 as a member of the Lesbian and Gay Advisory Committee (now the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Intersex Advisory Committee) of San Francisco. In the late 1980s, Bérubé belonged to the Forget-Me-Nots, an affinity group that performed civil disobedience at the United States Supreme Court during the 1987 Second National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. In 1990, he published Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II, which examined the stories of gay men and women in the U.S. military between 1941 and 1945. The book used interviews with gay veterans, government documents, and other sources to discuss the social and political issues that faced over 9,000 servicemen and women during World War II. The work had its origins in a chance discovery. In the 1970s, a friend of one of Bérubé’s neighbors discovered a batch of letters that a dozen gay military personnel had exchanged during World War II after meeting at a military base in Missouri. Bérubé turned them into the basis of years of research and a prize-winning book, after presenting his work in progress "Marching to a Different Drummer" at more than a hundred venues. Coming Out Under Fire won the Lambda Literary Award for outstanding Gay Men's Nonfiction book of 1990 Professional historians praised its research and the quality of Bérubé's prose.