A Saving Remnant: The Radican Lives of Barbara Deming and David McReynolds

Description

Barbara Deming and David McReynolds first met in the early 1960s. She was an American feminist, writer and political activist with a deep commitment to non-violent struggle, repeatedly jailed for her participation in non-violent protests. He was the first openly gay man to run for President of the United States and had devoted his life to peace and justice. Both were left-wing radicals who also happened to be gay and whose paths crossed based on their common political concerns. Biographer and historian Martin Duberman here brings their stories to life.

Martin Duberman is Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at Lehman College and the Graduate School of the City University of New York. He was the founder and for ten years the first director of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the CUNY Graduate School. He has authored over twenty books, including James Russell Lowell, finalist for the National Book Award; Stonewall; the memoir Cures: A Gay Man's Odyssey; The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein, runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize in biography; and, most recently, Waiting to Land (The New Press). Duberman himself has received numerous awards, including the Bancroft Prize, the Lambda Book Award, the George Freedley Memorial Award, and, in 2008, the American Historical Association's Lifetime Achievement Award for Distinguished Scholarship.

". . . [D]etailed and absorbing . . . [a]t a time when the country's poor are struggling, war rages on and and the word "socialist" is mostly just an insult hurled at any left-leaning politician or policy, there is something refreshing and inspiring about this story of unabashed radicals at work." New York Times Book Review "[A] brilliant and remarkable biography . . . essential." -Choice "A fascinating dual biography . . . A Saving Remnant is an in-depth study of what it means to live the life of someone single-mindedly committed to a cause." The Gay and Lesbian Review Female presidential candidates and gay marriages were unimaginable during the middle of the twentieth century. Discrimination and marginalization were daily facts of life for anyone who wasn't a straight, white male. The fight for basic civil rights has always been fraught with struggle and strife. It was the common goals of equality and acceptance that led the lives of Deming, an out lesbian, and McReynolds, an openly gay man (the first to run for president of the U.S., on the Socialist Party ticket in 1980), to intersect in the socially turbulent 1960s. McReynolds, a left-wing writer and antiwar protester still alive and kicking at 81, was a friend and contemporary of Allen Ginsberg and Alvin Ailey. Deming, a feminist and tireless advocate for nonviolent social change who died of cancer in 1984, was romantically involved with artist Mary Meigs for nearly 20 years. Duberman, a well-respected history professor and Pulitzer Prize finalist, chronicles the fascinating lives and complex friendship of these two passionate, radical activists in this dazzlingly detailed dual biography. Booklist