by Merle Miller
Men like Merle Miller—and, yes, those guys in line for Logan’s Run—came out because they were sick and tired of the goddamn demeaning, degrading bullshit that LGBT people were subjected to. And by coming out at a time when it was so much more dangerous, personally and professionally, Miller helped to remake the world. Miller and all the gay men and lesbians who came out in the fifties, sixties, and seventies made the world a better, safer place for the gay men and lesbians who would come after them. They made it a better, safer place for me. They made it possible for a thirteen-year-old gay boy to lead a life where he never has to hide.
Writing in 1971—when homosexuality was still a crime in a majority of states—Miller observed, “I think social attitudes will change, are changing, quickly, too.”
When I came out in 1981, telling my Catholic parents I was gay didn’t just mean telling them I was like those guys at the movies that my mother had tried to pull me away from. It meant I would never marry, never have children, and that I would certainly never be trusted alone with someone else’s child.
But there I was, just four short decades after Miller wrote On Being Different, just three short decades after I sat down with my mother and forced the words “I’m gay” out of my mouth. There I was, sitting on a beach next to my husband, while our teenage son dove through waves with his friends, two boys who were entrusted to our care by their straight parents.
Thank you, Mr. Miller, for telling your story, thank you for your anger, thank you for fighting back against the demeaning, degrading bullshit. We couldn’t have made it to that beach without you.
DAN SAVAGE
Acknowledgments
The reissue of On Being Different was a joint effort of many. As the executrix of the Merle Miller Estate, I have been attempting for some time now to have some of his best-selling books reissued. For that reason, I am particularly grateful to Elda Rotor of Penguin Classics for agreeing to take the book on and publish a new edition. Thanks also to Dan Savage and Charles Kaiser, who came on board to write the foreword and the afterword, and who provided us with their wonderful insight, and to my literary agent, Nancy Barton, whom Charles calls the “godmother” of On Being Different, and rightfully so. Nancy worked by my side every step of the way from the onset and was as enthusiastic and excited as I was about the book. And finally, thanks to Merle Miller, whose courage gave us such an important book in the first place.
CAROL HANLEY
A Note on the Text
This edition of On Being Different was assembled with notes by Carol Hanley, executrix of the Merle Miller Estate.
On Being Different
WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A HOMOSEXUAL
JANUARY 1971
Edward Morgan Forster was a very good writer and a very gutsy man.1 In the essay “What I Believe,” he said:
I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I would have the guts to betray my country. Such a choice may scandalize the modern reader, and he may stretch out his patriotic hand to the telephone at once and ring up the police. It would not have shocked Dante, though. Dante places Brutus and Cassius in the lowest circle of Hell because they had chosen to betray their friend Julius Caesar rather than their country Rome.
It took courage to write those words, just as it does, at times, for anyone else to repeat them. In the early 1950s, when I wanted to use them on the title page of a book on blacklisting in television that I wrote for the American Civil Liberties Union, officials of the A.C.L.U. advised against it. Why ask for more trouble, they said. Being against blacklisting was trouble enough. Those were timorous days. “What I Believe” was included in a book of essays used in secondary schools, but it disappeared from the book around 1954 and was replaced by something or other from the Reader’s Digest. When I protested to the publisher, he said—it was a folk saying of the time—“You have to roll with the tide.” The tide was McCarthyism, which had not then fully subsided—assuming it ever has or will.
Forster was not a man who rolled with the tide. I met him twice, heard him lecture several times, was acquainted with several of his friends, and knew that he was homosexual, but I did not know that he had written a novel, Maurice, dealing with homosexual characters, until it was announced last November. On top of the manuscript he wrote: “Publishable—but is it worth it?” The novel, completed in 1915, will, after fifty-five years and the death of Forster, at last be published.
Is it worth it? Even so outspoken a man as Forster had to ask himself that question. It is one thing to confess to political unorthodoxy but quite another to admit to sexual unorthodoxy. Still. Yet. A homosexual friend of mine has said, “Straights don’t want to know for sure, and they can never forgive you for telling them. They prefer to think it doesn’t exist, but if it does, at least keep quiet about it.” And one Joseph Epstein said in Harper’s in September, 1970:2
…however wide the public tolerance for it, it is no more acceptable privately than it ever was…private acceptance of homosexuality, in my experience, is not to be found, even among the most liberal-minded, sophisticated, and liberated people.
…Nobody says, or at least I have never heard anyone say, “Some of my best friends are homosexual.” People do say—I say—“fag” and “queer” without hesitation—and these words, no matter who is uttering them, are put-down words, in intent every bit as vicious as “kike” or “nigger.”
Is it true? Is that the way it is? Have my heterosexual friends, people I thought were my heterosexual friends, been going through an elaborate charade all these years? I would like to think they agree with George Weinberg, a therapist and author of a book on therapy called The Action Approach, who says, “I would never consider a person healthy unless he had overcome his prejudice against homosexuality.”3 But even Mr. Weinberg assumes that there is a prejudice, apparently built-in, a natural part of the human psyche. And so my heterosexual friends had it, maybe still have it? The late Otto Kahn, I think it was, said, “A kike is a Jewish gentleman who has just left the room.”4 Is a fag a homosexual gentleman who has just stepped out? Me?
I can never be sure, of course, will never be sure. I know it shouldn’t bother me. That’s what everybody says, but it does bother me. It bothers me every time I enter a room in which there is anyone else. Friend or foe? Is there a difference?
When I was a child in Marshalltown, Iowa, I hated Christmas almost as much as I do now, but I loved Halloween.5 I never wanted to take off the mask; I wanted to wear it everywhere, night and day, always. And I suppose I still do. I have often used liquor, which is another kind of mask, and, more recently, pot.
Then, too, I suppose if my friends have been playing games with me, they might with justice say that I have been playing games with them. It took me almost fifty years to come out of the closet, to stop pretending to be something I was not, most of the time fooling nobody.
But I guess it is never easy to open the closet door. When she talked to the Daughters of Bilitis, a Lesbian organization, late in the summer of 1970, Kate Millett, author of Sexual Politics, said, “I’m very glad to be here. It’s been kind of a long trip…. I’ve wanted to be here, I suppose, in a surreptitious way for a long time, and I was always too chicken…. Anyway, I’m out of the closet. Here I am.”6
Not surprisingly, Miss Millett is now being attacked more because of what she said to the Daughters of Bilitis than because of what she said in her book. James Owles, president of Gay Activists Alliance, a militant, nonviolent organization concerned with civil rights for homosexuals, says, “We don’t give a damn whether people like us or not. We want the rights we’re entitled to.”
I’m afraid I want both. I dislike being despised, unless I have done something despicable, realizing that the simple fact of being homosexual is all by itself despicable to many people, maybe, as Mr. Epstein says, to everybody who is straight. Assuming anybody is ever totally one thing sexually.
Mr. Epstein says, “When it comes to
homosexuality, we know, or ought to know, that we know next to nothing”—and that seems to me to be true. Our ignorance of the subject is almost as great now as it was in 1915 when Forster wrote Maurice—almost as great as it was in 1815 or, for that matter, 1715. Freud did not add much knowledge to the subject, nor have any of his disciples, none that I have read or listened to, none that I have consulted. I have spent several thousand dollars and several thousand hours with various practitioners, and while they have often been helpful in leading me to an understanding of how I got to be the way I am, none of them has ever had any feasible, to me feasible, suggestion as to how I could be any different.
And that includes the late Dr. Edmund Bergler, who claimed not only that he could “cure” me but get rid of my writer’s block as well. He did neither. I am still homosexual, and I have a writer’s block every morning when I sit down at the typewriter. And it’s too late now to change my nature. At fifty, give or take a year or so, I am afraid I will have to make do with me. Which is what my mother said in the beginning.
Nobody seems to know why homosexuality happens, how it happens, or even what it is that does happen. Assuming it happens in any one way. Or any thousand ways. We do not even know how prevalent it is. We were told in 1948 by Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male that thirty-seven percent of all males have had or will have at least one homosexual experience between adolescence and old age. And last year a questionnaire answered by some twenty thousand readers of Psychology Today brought the same response. Thirty-seven percent of the males said that they had had one homosexual experience. (I will be speaking in what follows largely of male homosexuality, which has been my experience.)
Voltaire is said to have had one such experience, with an Englishman. When the Englishman suggested that they repeat it, Voltaire is alleged to have said, “If you try it once, you are a philosopher; if twice, you are a sodomite.”
The National Institute of Mental Health says that between three and four million Americans of both sexes are predominantly homosexual, while many others display what the institute delicately calls occasional homosexual tendencies.
But how do they know? Because the closets are far from emptied; there are more in hiding than out of hiding. That has been my experience anyway. And homosexuals come in all shapes and sizes, sometimes in places where you’d least expect to find them. If Jim Bouton is to be believed, in big league baseball and, if we are to go along with Dave Meggysey, in the National Football League. Nobody knows. The question as to who is and who isn’t was not asked in the 1970 census.
A Harris survey indicates that sixty-three percent of the American people feel that homosexuals are “harmful” to American society. One wonders—I wondered anyway—how those thirty-seven percent of the males with one admitted homosexual experience responded to the question. After how many such experiences does one get to be harmful? And harmful in what way? The inquisitive Mr. Harris appears not to have asked. Harmful. Feared. Hated. What do the hardhats find objectionable in the young? Their lack of patriotism and the fact that they are all faggots. Aren’t they? We’re in the midst of a “freaking fag revolution,” said the prosecutor in the Chicago conspiracy trial. At least that seems to be the politically profitable thing to say in Chicago.
In the 1950s, McCarthy found that attacking homosexuals paid off almost as well as attacking the Communists, and he claimed they were often the same. Indeed, the District of Columbia police set up a special detail of the vice squad “to investigate links between homosexuality and Communism.”
The American Civil Liberties Union recently has been commendably active in homosexual cases, but in the early fifties, when homosexuals and people accused of homosexuality were being fired from all kinds of Government posts, as they still are, the A.C.L.U. was notably silent. And the most silent of all was a closet queen who was a member of the board of directors, myself.
Epstein, a proclaimed liberal, said in Harper’s:
If a close friend were to reveal himself to me as being a homosexual, I am very uncertain what my reaction would be—except to say that it would not be simple…. If I had the power to do so, I would wish homosexuality off the face of this earth.
I could not help wondering what Epstein, who is, I believe, a literary critic, would do about the person and the work of W. H. Auden, homosexual and generally considered to be the greatest living poet in English. “We must love one another or die.” Except for homosexuals?
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
The great fear is that a son will turn out to be homosexual. Nobody seems to worry about a Lesbian daughter; nobody talks about it anyway. But the former runs through every level of our culture. In the song Peggy Lee recently made popular, “Love Story,” part of the lyric has to do with the son she and her husband will have, He’s got to be straight/We don’t want a bent one. In the Arpège ad this Christmas: “Promises, husbands to wives, ‘I promise to stop telling you that our youngest is developing effeminate tendencies.’”
And so on, and on. I should add that not all mothers are afraid that their sons will be homosexuals. Everywhere among us are those dominant ladies who welcome homosexuality in their sons. That way the mothers know they won’t lose them to another woman.
And, of course, no television writer would feel safe without at least one fag joke per script. Carson, Cavett, and Griffin all give their audiences the same knowing grin when that subject is mentioned, and audiences always laugh, though somewhat nervously.7
Is homosexuality contagious? Once again, nobody seems to know for sure. The writer Richard Rhodes reports that those tireless and tedious investigators Dr. William Masters and Mrs. Virginia Johnson of St. Louis have got into the subject of homosexuality.8 And Masters hinted to Rhodes that his clinical work had shown that “homosexual seduction in adolescence is generally the predetermining factor in later homosexual choice.”
One should not hold the indefatigable doctor to a “hint,” but the Wolfenden Committee set up by the British Government in the fifties to study homosexuality and prostitution found the opposite:
It is a view widely held, and one which found favor among our police and legal witnesses, that seduction in youth is the decisive factor in the production of homosexuality as a condition, and we are aware that this condition has done much to alarm parents and teachers. We have found no convincing evidence in support of this contention. Our medical witnesses unanimously held that seduction has little effect in inducing a settled pattern of homosexual behavior, and we have been given no grounds from other sources which contradict their judgment. Moreover, it has been suggested to us that the fact of being seduced often does less harm to the victim than the publicity which attends the criminal proceedings against the offender and the distress which undue alarm sometimes leads parents to show.
Martin Hoffman, a San Francisco psychiatrist who has written a book about male homosexuality called The Gay World, said in a recent issue of Psychology Today:
Until we know about the mechanisms of sexual arousal in the central nervous system and how learning factors can set the triggering devices for those mechanisms, we cannot have a satisfactory theory of homosexual behavior. We must point out that heterosexual behavior is as much of a scientific puzzle as homosexual behavior…. We assume that heterosexual arousal is somehow natural and needs no explanation. I suggest that to call it natural is to evade the whole issue; it is as if we said it’s natural for the sun to come up in the morning and left it at that. Is it possible that we know less about human sexuality than the medieval astrologers knew about the stars?
I know this. Almost the first words I remember hearing, maybe the first words I choose to remember hearing, were my mother’s, saying, “We ordered a little girl, and when you came along, we were somewhat disappointed.” She always claimed that I came from Montgomery Ward, and when I would point out that there was no baby department in the Monkey Ward ca
talogue, she would say, “This was special.”
I never knew what that meant, but I never asked. I knew enough. I knew that I was a disappointment. “But we love you just the same,” my mother would say, “and we’ll have to make do.”
We had to make do with a great many things in those days. The Depression came early to our house, around 1927, when my father lost all his money in the Florida land boom, and once we got poor, we stayed poor. “You’ll have the wing for supper, because this is a great big chicken and will last for days, and tomorrow you can take a whole leg to school in your little lunch pail and have it all to yourself.” Day-old bread, hand-me-down clothes that had once belonged to more prosperous cousins, holes in the soles of my shoes—all of it. I was a combination of Oliver Twist and Little Nell.
They say that the Depression and the World War were the two central experiences of my generation, and that may be. I certainly had more than enough of both, but I was never really hungry for food. It was love I craved, approval, forgiveness for being what I could not help being. And I have spent a good part of my life looking for those things, always, as a few psychologists have pointed out, in the places I was least likely to find them.
My baby blankets were all pink, purchased before the disaster, my birth. The lace on my baby dress was pink; my bonnet was fringed with pink, and little old ladies were forever peering into the baby buggy and crib, saying, “What an adorable little girl.” They kept on saying that until I got my first butch haircut, at four, just before I started kindergarten. Until then I had long, straight hair, mouse-brown, lusterless, and long hair was just as unpopular in Marshalltown then as it is now.
Not until college did I read that Oscar Wilde’s mother started him down the garden path by letting his hair grow and dressing him as a little girl.9 As Oscar said, “Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.”