NONFICTION - April 28, 1991

CURES: A Gay Man’s Odyssey by Martin Duberman (E. P. Dutton: $19.95; 301 pp.). Martin Duberman’s mother used to warn him never to walk through a park alone for fear of the sick people who lingered within. But one night in college, he found himself wandering through Yale University’s “green” after too many drinks and stopping near a gay man, whom he began to fondle. “I had become ,” he realized, “the person my mother had warned me about.” Later that night, Duberman stayed in the shower for hours, “cleaning, cleaning.”

It was a ritual of forgetting and denial that he practiced until recently, from psychiatrist’s offices (“Your heterosexual yearnings can be unblocked,” he is told) to academe, where he became a historian: a “comparably painless collective memory” which offered refuge from personal memory. “Cures” is an eloquent act of remembrance. Duberman’s gay pride is still in evolution (he fictionalizes the names of his friends), but his rebellion against the homophobic culture that left him feeling emotionally stunted and physically crippled is resolute.