Allan Bérubé (pronounced BEH-ruh-bay; December 3, 1946 – December 11, 2007) was a gay American historian, activist, independent scholar, self-described "community-based" researcher and college drop-out, and award-winning author, best known for his research and writing about homosexual members of the American Armed Forces during World War II. He also wrote essays about the intersection of class and race in gay culture, and about growing up in a poor, working-class family, his French-Canadian roots, and about his experience of anti-AIDS activism. Bérubé's principal work of history was the 1990 book Coming Out Under Fire, which examined the lives of gay men and women in the U.S. military between 1941 and 1945. It won the Lambda Literary Award for outstanding Gay Men's Nonfiction Book of 1990 and was adapted as a documentary film of the same name in 1994 with a screenplay that Bérubé co-wrote. The film received a Peabody Award for excellence in documentary media in 1995. Bérubé received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1996. He received a Rockefeller grant from the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in 1994. For about twenty years beginning in 1979, Bérubé was interviewed about his work in publications including Time, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Advocate, Christopher Street, Gay Community News, and the San Francisco Examiner. His many radio and television appearances included interviews by Studs Terkel, Sonia Freedman on CNN, and two by Terry Gross on National Public Radio's Fresh Air. Biography Allan Ronald Bérubé was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, on December 3, 1946, the eldest of four children born to a rural, working-class, French Canadian, family. For a time in his childhood his family lived in trailer parks in Connecticut and New Jersey, while his father worked as a poorly paid cameraman for NBC. While he was a teenager, the family returned to his grandparents' farming community in Massachusetts. For his last year of high school he attended the Mount Hermon School for Boys in Mount Hermon, Massachusetts, on scholarship, graduating in 1964. After registering for the draft as required at age 18, he sought and received conscientious objector status. He was an English literature major at the University of Chicago from 1964 to 1968, but did not earn a degree, dropping out in what he later described as a panic based on the political turmoil of 1968, confronting his sexuality, anxiety about paying for his education, and guilt about