[2] 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.

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.

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.

[5] He was an English literature major at the University of Chicago from 1964 to 1968, but did not earn a degree,[a] 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 breaking with his working-class background.

[8][10] When closing the city's bathhouses became a political controversy early in the AIDS epidemic, he published "a still-definitive essay on the history and social function of gay baths".

[b] In the late 1980s, Bérubé belonged to the Forget-Me-Nots, an affinity group that performed civil disobedience at the United States Supreme Court during the 1987 Second National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights.

The book used interviews with gay veterans, government documents, and other sources to discuss the social and political issues that faced over 9,000 servicemen and women during World War II.

[8] Coming Out Under Fire won the Lambda Literary Award for outstanding Gay Men's Nonfiction book of 1990[13] Professional historians praised its research and the quality of Bérubé's prose.

Bérubé in later years liked to recall that Doris Kearns Goodwin called the book "remarkably evenhanded",[14] as if it were surprising he could be committed to both scholarship and political activism.

He provided Senator Edward Kennedy with questions to pose at those hearings and submitted as written testimony a paper titled "Historical Overview of the Origins of the Military's Ban on Homosexuals".

[18][19] In the documentary film Over Our Dead Bodies (1991) by video artist Stuart Marshall, he is interviewed along with Michael Callen and others on the development of AIDS activism.

[6] He received a Rockefeller grant from the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in 1994 to research a book on the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union,[c] which was left unfinished when he died.