by Merle Miller
PENGUIN CLASSICS
ON BEING DIFFERENT
MERLE MILLER was born in a small town in Iowa in 1919 and attended the University of Iowa and the London School of Economics. Miller was awarded two Bronze Stars for bravery during World War II, both of which he later returned out of protest for American action in Vietnam. After the war, he worked as an editor at Harper’s and Time magazine and was a contributing editor for The Nation. His books include the best-selling novels That Winter (1948) and A Gay and Melancholy Sound (1962), a comic nonfiction narrative about writing for television called Only You, Dick Daring! (1964), and several best-selling presidential biographies, including Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman (1974). In 1971, he responded to a homophobic article written by Joseph Epstein in Harper’s with the raw, personal, and indicting essay that became On Being Different, making him one of the first prominent Americans to come out publicly. Miller died in 1986.
DAN SAVAGE is the author of the syndicated column “Savage Love” and the editorial director of The Stranger, Seattle’s weekly newspaper. He is a regular contributor to public radio’s This American Life and the author of Savage Love (1998); The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant (1999); Skipping Towards Gomorrah: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Pursuit of Happiness in America (2002); and The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage, and My Family (2005). In 2010, Savage and his husband, Terry Miller, created the It Gets Better Project, which provides support to LGBT youth through video testimonials and a book of anecdotal essays.
CHARLES KAISER is a former reporter for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, and a former press critic for Newsweek. He has also written for The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian (London), New York magazine, and Vanity Fair, among others. He is the author of 1968 in America (1988) and The Gay Metropolis (1997), a history of gay life in America that won the Lambda Literary Award and was a New York Times Notable Book. Kaiser is a founder and former president of the New York chapter of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association. He has taught journalism at Columbia and Princeton, where he was the Ferris Professor of Journalism.
MERLE MILLER
On Being Different
WHAT IT MEANS TO BE
A HOMOSEXUAL
Foreword by
DAN SAVAGE
Afterword by
CHARLES KAISER
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3
(a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia
(a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand
(a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,
Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in the United States of America by Random House, Inc. 1971
This edition with a foreword by Dan Savage and an afterword by Charles Kaiser
published in Penguin Books 2012
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Copyright © Merle Miller, 1971
Foreword copyright © Dan Savage, 2012
Afterword copyright © Charles Kaiser, 2012
All rights reserved
A large portion of this book first appeared in The New York Times Magazine, January 17, 1971, as
“What It Means to Be a Homosexual.”
Letters by Merle Miller published by arrangement with the Estate of Merle Miller
Obituary by Ralph Martin reprinted by permission of Ralph Martin
Fragments from a foreword by Frank Kameny published by arrangement
with the Estate of Merle Miller
ISBN: 978-1-101-60356-7
CIP data available
Printed in the United States of America
Set in Sabon
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
ALWAYS LEARNING
PEARSON
In memory of Merle and David
Contents
Foreword by DAN SAVAGE
Acknowledgments
A Note on the Text
ON BEING DIFFERENT
What It Means to Be a Homosexual, January 1971
Afterword, May 1971
Afterword by CHARLES KAISER
Appendices
A: Miller’s reply to a friend who was critical of the article
B: Miller’s letter to his former wife, Elinor
C: Ralph Martin’s obituary for Miller
D: Fragments from Frank Kameny’s foreword to On Being Different
Notes
Foreword
Terry found a vacation rental for us in Hawaii.
The house was just steps from the beach—a very important detail for my husband—and it had six bedrooms. That’s not the kind of vacation home we can typically afford, but there had been a last-minute cancellation, some other family had forfeited a large deposit, and my husband, ever the bargain hunter, got us a deal.
Six bedrooms! We invited two other couples, both gay, to join us. They were thrilled. Our thirteen-year-old son invited two of his friends, both straight, to join his boring gay dads and their boring gay friends at the beach for two weeks. Their parents were thrilled.
I was sitting on a beach on that vacation in the summer of 2011, exactly forty years after Merle Miller’s essay “What It Means to Be a Homosexual” first appeared in The New York Times Magazine, when I opened this book. As my son and his friends roughhoused in the surf with Terry and the livelier halves of the two couples who joined us, I read this passage:
The fear of it simply will not go away, though. A man who was once a friend, maybe my best friend, the survivor of five marriages, the father of nine, not too long ago told me that his eldest son was coming to my house on Saturday: “Now, please try not to make a pass at him.”
He laughed. I guess he meant it as a joke; I didn’t ask.
And a man I’ve known, been acquainted with, let’s say, for twenty-five years, called from the city on a Friday afternoon before getting on the train to come up to my place for the weekend. He said, “I’ve always leveled with you, Merle, and I’m going to now. I’ve changed my mind about bringing——— [his sixteen-year-old son]. I’m sure you understand.”
I said that, no, I didn’t understand. Perhaps he could explain it to me.
He said, “——�
�� is only an impressionable kid, and while I’ve known you and know you wouldn’t, but suppose you had some friends in, and…?”
Our son, D.J., whom we’ve raised since birth, jokingly came out to his boring gay dads as straight when he was eleven; both of the teenage boys he invited to Hawaii with us were straight. And the parents of D.J.’s friends? They were straight, and they all understood.
Which is why they didn’t hesitate to say yes. The parents of D.J.’s friends knew they could trust us and our friends—four gay men they’d never met—alone with their sons. (They also knew that their sons would be eating decent meals, brushing their teeth twice a day, and getting to bed at a relatively decent hour; Terry and I have a reputation among D.J.’s friends and their parents for being joy-killing, rule-enforcing hard-asses.)
What worried Miller’s friends—the “it” that his friends and acquaintances feared—was seduction. Gay men, given access to young boys, would “seduce” them into the gay lifestyle. My parents used to believe that. Among the questions I got when I came out to my family was whether an older gay man had ever seduced me.
I have known quite a few homosexuals, and I have listened to a great many accounts of how they got that way or think they got that way. I have never heard anybody say that he (or she) got to be homosexual because of seduction.
I have known quite a few heterosexual parents since Terry and I adopted D.J. nearly a decade and a half ago. Despite the fact that more same-sex couples are adopting today than ever before, Parentlandia remains overwhelmingly straight. And not once in all the time since we became parents has a straight parent expressed to us the slightest anxiety about his or her son or daughter spending time with D.J., or with us, or with our gay and lesbian friends, despite the best efforts of “Christian” conservatives to prop up the old bigotries and fears.
Have I mentioned that one of D.J.’s dads is a notoriously filthy-minded sex-advice columnist, a recovering drag queen, and a political bomb-thrower?
It has gotten better. Not perfect.
Better.
Billy Lucas was a fifteen-year-old kid growing up in Greensburg, Indiana. Lucas wasn’t openly gay—he may not have been gay at all—but he was perceived to be gay by his peers and relentlessly bullied. Classmates told him to kill himself, they told him he didn’t deserve to live, they told him that God hated him, and one day Lucas went home and hanged himself in his grandmother’s barn. His mother found his body.
Lucas’s death moved me and Terry to start the It Gets Better Project. The idea was simple: There were LGBT kids who couldn’t picture futures with enough joy in them to compensate for the pain they were in now. We wanted to reach these bullied and isolated lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth before other kids harmed themselves; we wanted to talk to them about the future, about their futures. (It’s important to emphasize that not all LGBT kids are bullied or isolated.) We were particularly interested in reaching LGBT kids who were growing up in places like Greensburg, Indiana, and other parts of the country where there aren’t support groups for queer kids or Gay-Straight Alliances in the schools.
We hoped that by sharing our stories, and encouraging other LGBT adults to do the same, we could give these kids hope, yes, but not just hope. We were also sharing coping strategies and ways to make it better.
Four weeks after we posted the first “It Gets Better” video to YouTube, the president of the United States uploaded his own “It Gets Better” video. (It took Ronald Reagan seven years to even say the word AIDS—it has gotten better.) More than forty thousand videos have been posted as of this writing. They have been viewed more than fifty million times, and we have heard from thousands of LGBT kids who have been inspired by the project.
The It Gets Better Project has generated a lot of goodwill and raised awareness about the plight of bullied LGBT youth. But the project was motivated by anger. Kids were being brutalized and bullied—sometimes bullied to death—for being gay. And the LGBT kids who needed to hear from us most were the ones whose family members and communities were least likely to approve of their sexuality. LGBT kids are four times likelier to attempt suicide; LGBT kids whose families are hostile—LGBT kids who are being bullied by their own parents—are at eight times greater risk for suicide.
When we uploaded that first video, it was with a sense of defiance. We were going to talk to these LGBT kids whether their parents wanted us to or not. We were going to talk to them whether their preachers wanted us to or not. We were going to talk to them whether their teachers wanted us to or not. These kids were being told that LGBT people were sick, sinful, and unhappy, and we were going to expose the lies and call out the liars.
Anger motivated us to start the It Gets Better Project just as anger motivated Miller to write his groundbreaking essay. Gay people were coming out and demanding their rights in the wake of the Stonewall riots, which prompted an explosion of commentary, much of it as bigoted, misinformed, and vile as the insults that Billy Lucas had to face every day. Miller, in an explosive coming-out scene, announced to two colleagues that he was “sick and tired of reading and hearing such goddamn demeaning, degrading bullshit about me and my friends.”
That exchange—that anger—led Miller to write “What It Means to Be a Homosexual” (later published in the book On Being Different), and to come out in the most public possible way. The social change we’ve witnessed over the last forty years was never a given. Change began when men like Merle Miller decided that they had had enough and that they had to stand up for themselves and their friends.
I am sick and tired of reading and hearing such goddamn demeaning, degrading bullshit about me and my friends.
In that single sentence Miller captured the anger that has motivated LGBT activists from the Mattachine Society to the Stonewall riots to ACT UP to the It Gets Better Project. What are LGBT rights activists but people who grew sick and tired of reading and hearing such goddamn demeaning, degrading bullshit about themselves and their friends and decided to speak up and fight back?
That’s what the LGBT movement is at its core: people standing up for themselves and their friends and lovers and all the LGBT kids out there; LGBT people facing down the liars, and confronting the bullshit. Gay people of Miller’s generation knew that gay life, as described by the shrinks and the bigots, looked nothing like gay life as they lived it. Miller, in anger, came to the defense of himself and his friends and helped to change the world. Today, in anger, we come to the defense of LGBT kids we don’t know, gay kids growing up in parts of the country where goddamn demeaning, degrading bullshit is being screamed in the faces of LGBT youth.
I’m often asked if I wish there had been an It Gets Better Project when I was a gay kid growing up on the north side of Chicago.
There was.
It wasn’t on YouTube, which didn’t exist when I was a kid, or on television, which didn’t acknowledge the existence of gay people when I was a kid, and the president of the United States certainly wasn’t a part of it. Here’s what the It Gets Better Project looked like in 1976: I was with my mom and dad and siblings at Water Tower Place, an upscale shopping mall near downtown Chicago. We were going to the movies—Logan’s Run—and in front of us in line were two young gay men. They were holding hands. I was maybe eleven years old—old enough to be aware, painfully so, of being different from other boys. My mother glared at the gay men in line, shook her head, and said, “They’re weird,” to my father, and put a protective hand on my shoulder and pulled me closer to her.
While my parents could only see perverted weirdos—not out of malice; it was the only thing their upbringing allowed them to see—I saw a future for myself. I was different like them; they were different like me. I was going to grow up to be like them. And they didn’t look unhappy. They looked like they were in love. They looked free. Just by being out, just by being themselves, just by telling the truth about themselves publicly, those guys in that line at Water Tower Place gave me hope.
[The] closets ar
e far from emptied; there are more in hiding than out of hiding. That has been my experience anyway.
I don’t think that’s the case today; not in the West, at any rate. Our closets aren’t empty, of course, but the closet case is the exception now, not the rule. (And the closet cases—the Haggards and Craigs and Rekerses—are ridiculous figures, not tragic ones.) In 1971, when he was fifty and just coming out publicly, Miller was blown away by the strength, self-possession, and impatience of gay men and lesbians who were coming out in their early twenties. Ten years later—in 1981—I would come out to my family when I was still in high school. Today, as I sat working on this foreword, a letter arrived for me from the father of a thirteen-year-old boy. His son—a seventh-grader—had just come out to him, and he wanted some advice on parenting a gay kid. We’ve gone from the world Merle Miller describes in On Being Different to a world where thirteen-year-old boys are coming out to their families. It has gotten better.
But you can’t know how far you’ve come if you don’t know where you started. Gay men and lesbians don’t bring up the next generation of gays and lesbians; our history isn’t passed from parent to child. That’s why it’s critically important for gay men and lesbians, for bisexual and transgender people, to read this book.
Straight people who know they have LGBT family members, friends, and coworkers should also read this book, as should straight people whose LGBT family members, friends, and coworkers have yet to come out to them. By which I mean to say, all straight people should read On Being Different. Straight people should read it because the movement for LGBT equality is also the story of straight liberation. It’s a story about straight people being liberated from their prejudices and their fears; of straight people finally seeing through the goddamn demeaning, degrading bullshit; of straight people regaining the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender family members and friends that their prejudices cost them.