Allen Irvin Bernstein

Allen Irvin Bernstein (June 19, 1913 – September 8, 2008) was a gay Jewish American World War II veteran who in 1940 wrote a defense of homosexuality entitled Millions of Queers (Our Homo America), a 149-page unpublished typescript that was discovered in the National Library of Medicine in 2010 by Randall L. Sell, associate professor at Drexel University School of Public Health, and was published online at OutHistory in March 2014. The essay is notable for its argument that homosexuals should not be stigmatized or condemned by society, at a time when homosexual acts were crimes in all parts the country. It also provides insight into gay life and relationships in the United States during the 1930s and before, based on what Bernstein learned from his gay friends and acquaintances as well as on his wide reading and research in literary and sociological sources.

Not to be confused with Alan Bernstein.

LGBT historian and author Jonathan Ned Katz calls the extended essay "a rich document of homosexual American history" and notes that "as a sociological, anthropological, and historical survey and personal polemic, [it] anticipates and most resembles a book published eleven years after it: The Homosexual in America: A Subjective Approach (1951), by the married sociologist Edward Sagarin, using the pseudonym Donald Webster Cory. Like Sagarin, Bernstein accepted many of the negative clichés about homosexuals, but argued that they should not be persecuted under the law."

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