Cures: A Gay Man's Odyssey, Tenth Anniversary Edition Paperback – Deluxe Edition, April 27, 2002

Martin Duberman's book is very good if you wish to find out what it was like back when being gay was a crime that could land you in jail and worst. Things have changed a lot since then. But a shame based culture and society made for a very confused young man who it took years to shake off the negative psychology that he was treated to when he attempted to understand his difference. He made himself and others very unhappy until he finally learned how to accept himself and find happiness.

A bit dated. Gives a a good understanding of the history and challenges of those who suffer, as a result of social attitudes to a persons sexual orientation. However this book is limited to the male gender.

I loved this book. As a queer person, I'm starting to read more historical books about what things were like, and I'd definitely recommend Cures. Like I said in the headline, it's intensely moving to read about how a gay man saw his orientation (and identity!) as sick and in need of, well, curing. It made me feel incredibly lucky to live in a time where almost all psychologists understand that being queer is not an illness.I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who wants to know about what being gay was like in the 1940s-1970s (when the memoir takes place).

Martin Duberman has earned his stripes at the forefront of gay scholarship and civil rights. During the 1960s, he was known for his historical scholarship, especially his biography of Charles Francis Adams (son of President John Quincy Adams and father of Henry Adams); he also enjoyed fame as a playwright, primarily for "In White America," his play on race relations. After the mid-1970s, he became both a gay rights advocate and a chronicler of gays and lesbians in recent American history.Yet he wasn't always an outspoken pioneer of sexual liberation. For the first two decades of his adult life, he lived in a partially open closet. At best, he was contritely open about his homosexuality to selected friends and colleagues, but, like many other men and women, he had convinced himself that his identity was not only wrong but could somehow be controlled or even cured. This memoir recounts not only his struggle to accept himself but also the societal and "professional" attitudes that reinforced the view of homosexuality as a pathological condition.Much of the book details his excruciating and even comical adventures (a bizarrely appropriate word here) in psychotherapy, particularly with one psychologist whose own neuroses and lack of professional integrity, it eventually becomes clear, should have barred him from dispensing advice to patients, sick or healthy. Duberman pulls no punches, and he is most critical (and retrospectively ashamed) by some of his own exploits and by his many righteous or hypocritical stances taken against those who were comfortably or experimentally out of the closet. Often Duberman avoided self-evaluation, escaping into the comforting workaholic demands offered by his professional career or into the fleeting release provided by prescription drugs and various affairs with hustlers.Duberman's is a fascinating life--a man with three successful careers and two successive personal lives. Every once in a while his fascination with his own academic career carries him away; portions of the book might strike readers as a curriculum vitae in prose form. More valuably, however, he sets his memoir in its historical context, examining how social and medical opinions were eventually transformed by both events and research (much of which was unknown to Duberman until years later). For some readers today, it's hard to imagine the pressures and impossibilities of being gay half a century ago. For many others, the struggle continues, and this book may provide them with both comfort and counsel.

Martin Duberman's CURES is another gay journey book, albeit one more inline with Edmund White generation, the gay America of the closeted 1950s through Stonewall and into the 1970s. This tome stops before the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. True to the title, this memoir is about the cures that Duberman tries to deny his homosexuality, with lengthy details and explanations of his various psychotherapies, including over five years in a BOB NEWHART-type group therapy, as well as a variety of more new agey methods. The book too often wanders into the minutiae of being a college professor and the politics therein. By the end the discussion of the various and sundry post-Mattachine organizations blend as one. Better is the narrative of his playwriting experiences and the Off-Broadway productions in the late 1960s and 70s. The Fire Island exploits don't match Larry Kramer's FAGGOTS, but there does seem to be a spark of fun. The book, written in 1991, is more academic than the plethora of coming out bios published in the last 10 years, which provides an intimate glimpse of life before the Stonewall.

A compelling report of the author's experience as a gay academician at Princeton University in the long days before Stonewall.Duberman's writing is accessible to the reader. He communicates his journey through the landscape of attempts to "cure" his homosexual desires in an easy, poignent manner. As a gay history text, this book is invaluable. As an experience of one man's journey through decades of self-loathing because he was gay into a wellspring of pride and political action, this book is a must have. For everyone who has struggled with society's definition of who they are and evaluation of their worth as a human being, this book is the voice of support into he silence of the struggle.I highly recommend "Cures"

The book was delivered in the promised time period and condition. It's a great book, that I have read before. I wanted to give it to a friend who had 'trouble' coming out.

Historically interesting and significant. About 3/4 of the way through the book, I stopped reading because it was becoming redundant and uninteresting. Not the most interestingly written memoir but who am I to judge a courageous queer brother's life experiences. For me, it was slow and seemed to go on and on and on.