by Merle Miller
The great joy of the last fifty years in America is this: As the great architectural historian Vincent Scully observed almost a decade ago,
Ours is a time which, with all its agonies, has…been marked most of all by liberation. I think especially of the three great movements of liberation which have marked the past generation: black liberation, women’s liberation, gay liberation. Each one of those movements liberated all of us, all the rest of us, from stereotypical ways of thinking which had imprisoned us and confined us for hundreds of years. Those movements, though they have a deep past in American history, were almost inconceivable just before they occurred. Then, all of a sudden in the 1960s, they burst out together, changing us all.
Merle Miller’s landmark piece was a vital, courageous step in this magnificent transformation of America.
CHARLES KAISER
* And when Morris published a memoir of his New York years two decades later, he offered no apology for Epstein’s vile diatribe. Morris even pretended that the gay demonstrators who had invaded Harper’s offices were there to protest a single paragraph of Epstein’s piece.
* From The Gay Metropolis, p. 279.
* On May 9, 2012, Barack Obama became the first sitting president to support the legalization of same-sex marriage. Citing gay and lesbian members of his staff “who are in incredibly committed monogamous relationships” and “soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors” who “feel constrained…because they are not able to commit themselves in a marriage,” the president said, “I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.” His announcement carried considerable political risk in a presidential election year—and it electrified everyone who had been battling for marriage equality.
APPENDICES
Appendix A
Part of Miller’s reply to a friend who was critical of his article for The New York Times:
“[P]eople are being fired, not being hired, being demeaned and debased, busted, ridiculed, denied every human right…because we are homosexual…. There may be a time when words like homosexual will disappear from the human language, but that has not yet happened, and in the meantime we are in trouble because of what we are. Until that fact is faced, until people have the guts to say what they are, until they demand that the laws be changed, until they say damn the attitudes of the smug and the timid and the uncaring, nothing will change. And this despite the voices of the young…and because of the silence of the middle-aged pretending to be something they are not….”
Appendix B
A letter from Merle Miller to his former wife, Elinor, written a few weeks before “What It Means to Be a Homosexual” ran in the January 17, 1971, issue of The New York Times Magazine.
January 4, 1971.
Dear Elinor—Well, November came and went, and there doesn’t seem to be much to say about that except if it hadn’t been for your grain of salt…. That’s how the ocean got started…. I have been working very hard and, oddly, rather effectively, I think. The novel, now called What Happened, will go to the typist on the 31st, and then I am maybe going to Florida for a couple of weeks to see John Glenn for Harper’s…. The most important other activity will show up in the Times Magazine on January 17, the lead piece, and it has to do with me and homosexuality and my life and times (small t). It was an almost impossible piece to write…and if it hadn’t been for your old friend Victor Navasky, I wouldn’t have. But I did. I think it is important that what I say be said, and so, like Kate Millett, I came out of the closet in full and in print…. You will see that the marriage is in passing mentioned, and I hope you will not be upset by it…. The piece is called, the Times just telephoned, What It Means to Be a Homosexual. Now you really can’t get more direct than that, can you? At least it’s not cute…. The photographer was here all day taking nine hundred pictures, and altogether, whatever happens, it is, I suppose, going to change my life somewhat—but really? how…. The Times seems to think it is the best piece of writing they have had in some time, and so do I…. Had lunch with Aaron Asher the other day and he asked of you…. You read that David Segal died. My God. At 48. I went to the funeral, my first in five years, and, as I thought at the time, the next one will have to be my own. Except I don’t want one…. I came up in the elevator with Bob Gottlieb, and he didn’t speak, and I didn’t speak, though I did think that the wrong people die. Sometimes…. Of course two days have passed since I wrote the previous page, and I have now received two copies of the uncorrected gallies. I enclose one. So that you will know…. It is very much cut from the original, and while the cutting doesn’t please me, it was done intelligently enough, just missed some nuances…. And, of course, after all of those photographs, they are only going to use one…. But there I am, complaining, as usual, and it is a good thing to have the piece in the magazine, and I do think that it is important for someone to say the things I said…. My last crusade, that…. And hoodlums from Brewster will no doubt come wearing sheets…. And, since the damn thing is syndicated and since the Des Moines Register uses the Times service and will no doubt reprint it…I figure Dora’s phone will start ringing about 7 a.m…. Write or call or something. The depressing months are here, when getting up and down the driveway is a 45-minute chore, and nobody is going to send me to Brazil this year. I’d probably be kidnapped anyway.
love,
mmmm.
Appendix C
An obituary for Merle Miller by Ralph G. Martin (b. 1920), who was one of Miller’s good friends and is an author of several biographies and nonfiction books.
Just about the time Merle was dying—and I didn’t know it—I was interviewing someone in Jerusalem. There in the man’s study was Merle’s book on Truman. I knew Merle would be pleased when I came back and told him how good I felt but I knew just what he’d say: “Sure you felt good, Ralph, but you would have felt a lot better if it was one of your books!” And he’d be right, of course.
A few days later, when my wife called to tell me of Merle’s death, I thought of his book on that shelf in Jerusalem and, again, I could hear Merle saying, “See, I’m not really dead!”
And, again, he would be right. Merle is alive on bookshelves all over the world. But that doesn’t help his friends very much, does it?
Most people pass through life and never touch anybody—they never touch anybody at all. They never make waves. They never fight City Hall. Merle touched the lives of a great many people. Merle was always making waves. He was always fighting City Hall. I once told him: Merle, the difference between you and me is that we both get angry at injustice—but you stay angry longer.
Merle was angry at a lot of things. He was angry at phonies. He was angry at stupidity. He was angry at bigotry. The word “liberal” may now be a wishy-washy word to many people, but to Merle it was always a political compass, a proud banner that stood for decency and dignity.
Merle was a class act. He had quality. He had taste; he had style. He had a great sensitivity, an enormous talent, an absolute honesty. And he had courage.
When homosexuality was a whispered word in a dark closet, Merle came out of the closet with that New York Times Magazine piece, saying, “Look, we’re human beings too!”
Merle was not only a warm, wonderful human being, and a great writer, but he was also an excellent editor. Merle was my editor on the European edition of Yank, the Army Weekly in World War 11. One of the reasons he was so good at editing combat copy was because he had been such a superb combat correspondent himself, in the Pacific. It was Merle who got me to write a long series after the war, telling the history of it in terms of the average soldier. That gave me the confidence to start writing books. I owe Merle a lot for that.
During the Adlai Stevenson campaigns, I once edited a daily newspaper at the convention and Merle dropped in to help out. If the cause was good, Merle was there. Anyway, I asked him to edit something John Steinbeck had written for us, probably in betwee
n drinks. Merle cut it quickly into two paragraphs and he was right, and we ran it that way.
Merle was never impressed with celebrities, and he hated parties. He also hated funerals, and, again, I can hear him saying, “Especially this one.”
In these past years, Merle and I talked at least once a week on the phone. It always made my day. He always had something witty or outrageous or sparklingly perceptive to say. Now I feel emptier and older and lonelier.
The Times obit was wrong about Merle. It said he had no survivors.49 For many, many years, his close family has been his longtime companion David Elliott and his dear friend and assistant, Carol Hanley. There was his former wife, Elinor Green, who remained a lifetime friend. Then of course, there is that book on that shelf in Jerusalem, and all the other shelves around the world. And, again, there are the rest of us. And nobody dies as long as people love and remember.
Speaking at the last reunion of Yank and The Stars and Stripes, Merle said, “We are the survivors.” Now one of the best and most talented of the survivors is gone. Damn it, Merle, we shall miss you. We shall miss you very very much.
Appendix D
Frank Kameny was born on May 21, 1925, and passed away on October 11, 2011, while in the process of writing a foreword to this edition of On Being Different. He was a leading figure of the gay rights movement, drafting legislation to overturn antisodomy laws, fighting the classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder, and pioneering the argument for gay rights as civil rights in front of the Supreme Court. Kameny’s papers are housed at the Library of Congress, and his original protest and picket sign are at the Smithsonian Institute. Below are fragments from his work in progress for this edition that he shared with the Merle Miller Estate on June 30, 2011.
Merle’s book provides a fascinating insight into a period of rapid transition on relevant issues.
I am convinced that had he written the book a year later—certainly three—his subtitle, “What It Means to Be a Homosexual,” would have been “What It Means to Be Gay,” and that figures into my text as a central theme.
While gay has been used inside the community for a very long time (rumored back to the 1890s), it was quite unknown generally into the late sixties. But then the change came fast. As late as 1968–69 we were still having meetings of NACHO—the North American Conference of Homophile Organizations. By mid and late ’69 we had the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activists Alliance.
I had coined the slogan “Gay Is Good” in 1968, and “Gay Pride” had appeared. Merle was aware of those and cites them, but general usage hadn’t yet recognized them.
Now, of course, gay is recognized by dictionaries as a fully standard synonym for “homosexual” as both [noun] and adjective and no longer colloquial or substandard.
That change was occurring in 1971 and is epitomized in [Merle’s] book as read today.
Notes
1. Edward Morgan Forster (1879–1970) was an English novelist, essayist, and short story writer, best known for his novels examining class difference and hypocrisy through a lens of sympathetic and humanitarian understanding.
2. Epstein’s article was titled “Homo/Hetero: The Struggle for Sexual Identity.”
3. George Weinberg coined the word homophobia, meaning a psychological malady, or an irrational state of mind of those who harbor prejudice against homosexuals.
4. Otto Kahn (1867–1934) was a philanthropist and patron of artists such as Hart Crane, George Gershwin, and Arturo Toscanini.
5. Jonathan Ned Katz (b. 1938), author of Gay American History and The Invention of Heterosexuality, used this Halloween quote of Miller’s in his 1972 play, Coming Out!, a documentary about gay and lesbian life and liberation.
6. Kate Millett (b. 1934) is a writer who was active in feminist politics in the late 1960s and 1970s. She became a committee member of NOW (the National Organization for Women) in 1966.
7. Johnny Carson (1925–2005), Dick Cavett (b. 1936), and Merv Griffin (1925–2007) were all hosts of popular late-night talk shows.
8. Richard Rhodes (b. 1937) is an American journalist, historian, and author of fiction and nonfiction, including The Making of the Atomic Bomb, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize.
9. Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) was an Irish writer and poet who became one of London’s most popular playwrights in the early 1890s.
10. Jack Armstrong was a character on an old-time juvenile radio show of the same name that aired from 1922 to 1950. Jack, the daring and all-American boy, was often called on to rescue his friends. The show was sponsored by General Mills, and during each broadcast, boys and girls were instructed to tell their moms to buy Wheaties.
11. Liberty was a weekly, general-interest magazine published from 1924 to 1950. At one time it was ranked the second-greatest magazine in America. (The Saturday Evening Post was first.) As a young boy growing up in Marshalltown, Iowa, Miller sold the magazine door to door.
12. Charles Atlas (1892–1972) developed a bodybuilding program that was best known for its successful, long-running advertising campaign.
13. The Daily Iowan was the University of Iowa newspaper. Miller worked as a staff reporter there while attending college.
14. Yank, the Army Weekly was a magazine published by the U.S. Army during World War II. It was written by enlisted rank soldiers only and was made available to soldiers, sailors, and airmen serving overseas.
15. Nadezhda von Meck (1831–1894) was a Russian businesswoman best known for her artistic patronage to Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, whom she supported financially for thirteen years so he could devote himself full-time to composing.
16. Miller married Elinor Green, a promotion manager for Simon and Schuster, on Valentine’s Day, 1948. The marriage lasted a little over four years, but the two remained friends throughout Miller’s lifetime. In talking of the marriage several years after the divorce, Miller said, “My homosexual drives were so much stronger than they ever were before or since that I said I’ve got to get out of this situation or it’s going to kill me.”
17. Gore Vidal (b. 1925) is an author, essayist, screenwriter, and playwright. His book The City and the Pillar was one of the first major American novels to feature open homosexuality.
18. Eldridge Cleaver (1935–1998) was a leading member of the Black Panther Party.
19. Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson, contains twenty-two short stories featuring various characters’ struggles to overcome loneliness and isolation.
20. Miller stated in his introduction to the republication of What Happened that as for being homosexual, he had thought he was the only one in town and quite possibly the world. “I had heard peculiar rumors about Oscar Wilde, but couldn’t get any of his books out of the public library. They were in the restricted room in which I believe no one under the age of forty or so was allowed. I did manage to borrow for a price a copy of a book called Thirteen Men from a local rental library, and one of the thirteen was distinctly odd. I remember he kissed his roommate, also male, in Penn Station, which at the time was a crime no doubt punishable by death.”
21. The Boise homosexuality scandal refers to a sweeping investigation of a supposed “homosexual underworld” in Boise, Idaho, that began in 1955. By the time the investigation wound down in January of 1957, at least 1,500 people had been questioned, sixteen men had faced charges, and fifteen of them had been sentenced to terms ranging from probation to life in prison. The reasons behind both the start and end of the investigation are unclear. In a book titled The Boys of Boise: Furor, Vice, and Folly in an American City, the journalist John Gerassi suggests that a gay millionaire known as “The Queen” was the target of the probe, although he was never charged. The scandal highlighted the tension between the perception of homosexuality as a mental illness requiring treatment and homosexual sex as a criminal act mandating punishment.
22. The Boys in the Band was a 1968 off-Broadway play by Mart Crowley that became a movie in 1970. Both the play and the movie were among the very first
in America to revolve entirely around gay characters—aside from one (possibly) straight man.
23. In an article titled “Sexual Snobbery: The Texture of Joseph Epstein” (LA Weekly, August 30–September 5, 2002, vol. 24, no. 31), David Ehrenstein stated, “[W]hat should never be forgotten is that we never could have pulled off the sit-in without Miller, who gave us our most crucial piece of counsel: ‘Don’t worry, Midge won’t call the cops right away.’” Midge Decter was the executive editor of Harper’s, whom Merle had previously worked with.
24. Two accounts of the Stonewall riots by noted gay historians are Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution by David Carter (St. Martin’s Press, 2004) and Martin B. Duberman’s Stonewall (Dutton, 1993).
25. The Mattachine Society, founded in 1950, was one of the earliest homosexual rights advocacy organizations in the United States. Chicago’s short-lived Society for Human Rights, founded in 1924, preceded it.
26. The novel, when completed, was titled What Happened, and published by Harper and Row in 1972. It was republished in 1980, by St. Martin’s Press.
27. Miller’s home in Brewster, New York, often referred to as the “glass house,” or “prism in the pines,” was designed by the well-known architect Ulrich Franzen.
28. Miller was fifty-two years old when he wrote On Being Different.
29. Miller said that for the first time in his life, he was faced with the fact that he really could not complain nor had the right to say this piece was stupid, unless he was willing to say, “The reason I know it’s stupid is because I am homosexual.”
30. William F. Buckley Jr. (1925–2008) was an American conservative, author, and founder of the magazine National Review. He also hosted the television show Firing Line from 1966 to 1999.
