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

By the time their paths first crossed in the 1960s, Barbara Deming and David
McReynolds had each charted a unique course through the political and social worlds of the American left. Deming, a feminist, journalist, and political activist with an abiding belief in nonviolence, had been an out lesbian since the age of sixteen. The first openly gay man to run for president of the United States, on the Socialist Party ticket, McReynolds was also a longtime opponent of the Vietnam War—he was among the first activists to publicly burn a draft card after this became a felony—and friend to leading activists and artists from Bayard Rustin to Quentin Crisp.

In this remarkable dual biography, the prize-winning historian Martin Duberman
reveals a vital historical milieu of activism, radical ideas, and coming to terms with homosexuality when the gay rights movement was still in its nascent stages. With a cast of characters that includes intellectuals, artists, and activists from the critic Edmund White and the writer Mary McCarthy to the young Alvin Ailey and Allen Ginsberg, A Saving Remnant is a brilliant achievement from one of our most important historians.

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.