On Being Different

by Merle Miller

  It had been the most exciting and fulfilling two hours of my life.

  And yet, when I finally walked out the door, my first thought was, “Well, I’ve gotten that out of my system. Now I can go back to girls!”

  A couple of weeks later, when I was back in London, where I was spending the rest of the summer, I picked up a ghastly man in the park and had an utterly disgusting experience.

  That led to nine months of celibacy.

  It was during this fallow period that Miller’s piece appeared, and it was a godsend. Though by now I may have considered myself bisexual, I was still quite undecided about which side of the great sexual divide I would end up on.

  Like anyone in my position in 1971, I knew what would happen if I ever declared myself publicly as a homosexual. As Miller wrote in the afterword to his article, closeted doctors and therapists had told him that coming out would mean losing their patients; “lawyers wrote that they would lose their practices; writers would lose their readers; a producer would not be able to raise the money for his next musical if…”

  I had grown up in the fifties and the sixties, when practically the only public homosexuals in America were James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg, Gore Vidal, and (the bisexual) Paul Goodman. There were no gay images on television (unless you count Paul Lynde and Liberace), no politicians in favor of gay rights (much less any who were out of the closet themselves), and no news coverage that didn’t share the tone of a notorious page-one story in The New York Times that appeared in 1963.

  It carried this headline:

  GROWTH OF HOMOSEXUALITY IN CITY

  PROVOKES WIDE CONCERN

  That article reported that “the presence [in Manhattan] of what is probably the greatest homosexual population in the world and its increasing openness…has become the subject of growing concern of psychiatrists, religious leaders and police.” The story—appearing in a bastion of American liberalism—declared that “the old idea, assiduously propagated by homosexuals, that homosexuality is an inborn, incurable disease, has been exploded by modern psychiatry, in the opinion of many experts. It can be both prevented and cured, these experts say.”

  That piece of conventional wisdom was integral to the nearly universal prejudice against gay people—the idea that the only healthy gay person was one who was desperately trying to become straight.

  But by the time Miller’s piece was published, the dignified example of the Civil Rights Movement had merged with the steam of the straight sexual revolution of the sixties to produce the blueprints for the gay revolution of the 1970s.

  Miller’s article was undoubtedly made possible by the Stonewall riots of June 1969, the first modern event that propelled a substantial number of people out of the closet. That, in turn, led to an explosion of activity to promote equal rights for gays and lesbians.

  “It was like fire, you know,” said Jim Fouratt, a founder of the Gay Liberation Front in New York City. “Like a prairie fire: Let it roar…. People were ready.”

  These first, tentative declarations that “gay is good,” first coined by Frank Kameny, provoked fear and loathing in a generation of liberals who firmly believed that gay people were the one minority that deserved neither equal rights nor any respect. Joseph Epstein was merely the first person to give voice to these prejudices in the post-Stonewall era—with a crudeness and a vehemence that are startling forty years later.

  It should be remembered that his piece was published in Harper’s when the magazine was edited by Willie Morris, a Southern hero to liberal writers everywhere—including Miller.* Miller was hardly alone in thinking Harper’s was “one of the best, maybe the best, magazine in the country.”

  The year 1970 marked the first time that three candidates running for a United States Senate seat from New York had all endorsed proposals for constitutional rights for gay people, as well as the repeal of the antisodomy law that made gay lovemaking a crime.

  And yet, as late as 1978, Jeff Greenfield—a former speechwriter for Robert Kennedy—wrote a cri de coeur in Manhattan’s very liberal Village Voice entitled “Why Is Gay Rights Different from All Other Rights?” Greenfield argued fiercely against a bill before the New York City Council that would ban job discrimination based on sexual orientation—one that, because of the fervent opposition of the Catholic Church, would not get passed until 1986.

  Greenfield wrote, “It is not a denial of a fundamental right to be refused promotion because of your companions,” and he called the fight for an antibias law for gays “a diversion from the business of working for political and social justice.” That, of course, was the opposite of the truth.

  Two decades later, when I contacted Greenfield to ask him if he had changed his mind, he retracted nothing.

  Once again, the real reason gay rights were “different from all other rights” was that they threatened Greenfield in a way that nothing else ever could.

  Miller had identified the reason why antigay prejudice would persist for so long among certain liberals:

  [H]omosexuals, unlike the blacks, will not benefit from any guilt feelings on the part of liberals. So far as I can make out, there simply aren’t any such feelings. On the contrary, most people of every political persuasion seem to be too uncertain of their own sexual identification to be anything but defensive. Fearful. And maybe it is contagious. Prove it isn’t.

  Certainly no one seemed more fearful of homosexuality than Joseph Epstein. At the end of his article, he wrote, “I find myself completely incapable of coming to terms with it.” He was appalled by “the brutally simple fact that two men make love to each other.” And he concluded by saying that nothing his sons “could ever do would make me sadder than if any of them were to become homosexual.” Though Epstein didn’t say it, the implication many drew was that even a homicidal son would make him less unhappy than a gay one.

  Epstein was a classic example of what therapist George Weinberg identified as “the homosexual problem” in Society and the Healthy Homosexual, the groundbreaking book he published in 1972. Weinberg wrote that it was the “problem of condemning variety in human existence.”

  What was extraordinary was how quickly the psychiatric profession would come around to Weinberg’s enlightened point of view—less than two years after his book was published. This was much more quickly than Miller and almost everyone else had imagined was possible.

  Miller’s pessimism on this point was perfectly understandable: For decades, psychiatrists had participated in massive medical malpractice, ensuring the unhappiness of thousands of gay patients by insisting that only a heterosexual orientation could make them “normal”—or happy. And they had come out against Miller’s article with “full force.”

  One psychiatrist went so far as to offer Miller free treatment, “because it is clear from your tone that you are in desperate, even frantic need of help.” This was a remarkable statement about an article that was notable for its calm and dispassion; unlike Epstein’s piece, there was nothing remotely “desperate” about it.

  So it was quite a surprise when the American Psychiatric Association gave the gay movement one of its most important victories of all time, just two years after Miller’s piece was published. On December 15, 1973, the board of the APA announced that it had voted thirteen to zero to remove homosexuality from its list of psychiatric disorders. The declaration was front-page news in The New York Times and in newspapers all across the country.

  Frank Kameny had been a crucial leader in the campaign to change the APA’s official policy. He was a giant among gay activists, and the intellectual father of many of the movement’s most important ideas. Kameny had been fired by the Army Map Service in the 1950s because he was gay, and the experience had transformed him into a lifelong advocate for equality.

  Several years before Miller’s article, Kameny had realized that “one of the major stumbling blocks to any progress was going to be this attribution of sickness,” because “an attribution of mental illness in our culture is devastati
ng.” As an astronomer with a PhD from Harvard, Kameny took a strictly scientific approach to the problem. He decided to read all of the relevant psychiatric literature so that he could reach his own conclusions.

  “The first thing was to find out if this was factually based or not,” he told me three decades later. “So I looked and I was absolutely appalled.”

  Everything he read was “sloppy, slovenly, slipshod, sleazy science—social and cultural and theological value judgments, cloaked and camouflaged in the language of science, without any of the substance of science. There was just nothing there…. All psychiatry assumed that homosexuality is psychopathological.”

  “It was garbage in, garbage out,” he concluded.

  Even to most of his fellow gay activists, this was a startling discovery. Until the mid-1960s, most of them had automatically assumed that homosexuality was a mental illness.

  I was twenty-three when the APA announced that decision. Four decades later I still remember it as a moment of supreme empowerment. As Kameny told The Washington Post in 2007, when the Smithsonian accepted his personal papers for its permanent collection, that day in 1973 was the moment when “we were cured en masse by the psychiatrists.”

  Perhaps as much as anything else, it was this action by the APA that enabled my generation—and all the generations that have followed—to have a positive self-image that was so different from the one most gay men had before the 1970s. For some, the transformation had arrived even earlier—as soon as the Stonewall riots occurred in June 1969.

  “Gay power!” Allen Ginsberg exclaimed the day after the riots. Inside the Stonewall Inn, he discovered, “the guys there were so beautiful—they’ve lost that wounded look that fags all had ten years ago.”

  Miller had noticed the same thing in the younger generation by 1971: “I’m not sure it’s a full-scale revolution yet,” he wrote, “but there’s been a revolt, and for thousands of young homosexuals, and some not so young, the quiet desperation…is all over. They are neither quiet nor desperate.”

  My friend Charles Gibson remembered gay life in Manhattan in the seventies this way:

  There was the thrill of living and the thrill of discovery. A feeling of being at the center of the universe. Discovering a new planet. Extending the frontier. It was like a university of life. There was nothing risky about sex that I can remember.

  That joyfulness and the sense of wild abandon that so many of us in the first generation of liberated gay men had embraced came to a crashing halt in July 1981, when a story in The New York Times announced the arrival of a strange and unusually virulent new disease—not yet identified—whose victims were mostly young gay men.

  For more than a decade—before drugs were discovered that would eventually make it a manageable disease for most of its American victims—we lived in a terrifying time. After the worst was behind us, this is how I described the way I had felt at the beginning of the crisis:

  If you are a sexually active gay man in America, being alive at the beginning of this epidemic feels like standing without a helmet on the front line of a shooting war. Friends are falling all around you, but no one even knows where the bullets are coming from. There are no weapons to defend yourself, no medicines for the wounded, and if you want to flee, when you start running you won’t know whether your own wounds are fatal—or nonexistent…. At the beginning, there was nothing but terror and mystery.*

  The AIDS epidemic would decimate my generation, killing off many of its most creative members before they were forty. My educated guess is that half of us died in New York and Los Angeles, and perhaps an even larger proportion in San Francisco. As Fran Lebowitz has pointed out, not only did AIDS rob us of many of our best artists; it also diminished the culture by killing off so many of the most intelligent members of their audience.

  The situation was made even worse by President Ronald Reagan, who took office the same year the epidemic was discovered—but never even said the word AIDS until the seventh year of his presidency.

  And yet, despite the trauma, this ghastly disease would also have many positive effects.

  For one thing, it accomplished something gay activists had been hoping for since the 1950s. As Miller had written, “homosexuals, the older as well as the younger, the ones in Brooks Brothers suits as well as those in black turtleneck sweaters have, I think, an obligation to declare themselves whenever they decently can.”

  By 1980, there had been extraordinary progress in reducing discrimination. More than 120 corporations, including AT&T and IBM, had adopted personnel policies guaranteeing equality to their gay employees, and more than forty towns and cities had laws or executive orders that did the same thing.

  But most professionals (including myself) still hadn’t come out of the closet by the end of the 1970s, because of a continuing fear about how such a declaration would affect us at the office. I worked at The New York Times throughout the seventies. Back then, its top editor was famously homophobic. A. M. Rosenthal, who was managing editor and later executive editor of the paper, once declined to make Walter Clemons a daily book critic, after his colleague, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, told Rosenthal that Clemons was gay. And the word gay was only allowed to appear in the paper inside quotation marks during Rosenthal’s regime. (Miller’s piece was published after Rosenthal had become managing editor, but before the Sunday magazine fell under Rosenthal’s control, a change that occurred when the daily and Sunday news departments were unified in 1976.)

  The year before the AIDS epidemic was discovered, there still wasn’t a single openly gay reporter or editor in the newsroom. Only after AIDS would it become obvious to everyone that there were gay people in every profession and every walk of life—from the actor Rock Hudson to the notorious red-baiter Roy Cohn.

  The epidemic produced another crucial step forward: AIDS united the community in a way that it never had been before. Until the 1980s, there was a deep gulf between gay men and lesbians. But when the epidemic arrived—even though they were mostly unaffected by it themselves—lesbians by the thousands selflessly reached out to their stricken gay brothers. They provided amazing care, as well as vital political support in the streets in the search for a cure.

  Finally, activists in ACT UP like Larry Kramer put enormous pressure on drug companies and the federal health bureaucracy to transform the way new drugs were tested, and to shrink the time between their discovery and their general use.

  At the height of the epidemic, The New York Times underwent a dramatic change in its attitude toward its gay employees, and gay subjects. This occurred when Max Frankel succeeded A. M. Rosenthal as executive editor in 1986. Almost immediately, Frankel made it clear to all of his gay colleagues that “whether they wanted to be openly gay, or whether they wanted to be relaxed, but not very openly gay, or whether they wanted to be secretly gay or lesbian, was their business, essentially, and not mine.” He also rapidly expanded the paper’s coverage of gay subjects.

  The changes were cemented in 1992 when Arthur Sulzberger was succeeded as publisher by his son, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. The younger Sulzberger was a child of the sixties who had made it clear to everyone that he would not tolerate an iota of prejudice toward any gay reporter or editor. A decade later the new publisher approved a change in the “Wedding” pages to “Weddings and Celebrations,” so that the Times could become one of the first newspapers to celebrate gay unions—nine years before gay marriage became legal in New York State.

  As I write these words, news of the decision by a three-judge panel of the federal court of appeals in San Francisco is coming across the Internet. The majority had declared that Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriages in California, is unconstitutional, because it serves no purpose other than to “lessen the status and human dignity” of gays.

  This was the third great victory for the gay movement to come out of the federal courts. The first one was Romer v. Evans, in 1996, when the Supreme Court invalidated an amendment to the Colorado state constitution th
at would have forbidden protection for gay people from discrimination.

  The second and most important one was Lawrence v. Texas. Announced at the very end of the court’s term on June 26, 2003, it was the decision that every gay activist had been waiting for since the movement began. It invalidated every sodomy law in the land, the statutes that had made our way of lovemaking a crime since the republic began. Linda Greenhouse, the great Supreme Court reporter for The New York Times, pinpointed the decision’s significance: “A conservative Supreme Court has now identified the gay-rights cause as a basic civil rights issue.”

  I don’t know whether the current Supreme Court will confirm today’s ruling in favor of marriage equality, or whether we will have to wait another twenty years before the very basic right to marry is extended to gays and lesbians throughout the land.* But I do know this: The last forty years have been the greatest time to be gay since the era of Aristotle.

  At one point Merle Miller wrote, “I couldn’t help thinking…how different my life would have been if I had been born homosexual in 1950.” (He was actually born thirty-one years earlier.)

  Well, I was born in 1950, and for a gay man like me, who, by chance, survived the AIDS epidemic unscathed, I cannot imagine any greater good fortune. I had my first gay sexual experience one year after the Stonewall riots. I never wasted a moment thinking of myself as sick. Throughout my entire adult life, I have experienced the fastest and greatest progress any minority group has ever achieved in America.

  Molly Ivins, the great crusading journalist from Texas, once wrote, “It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America.”