On Being Different Read online

  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…?”

  I suggested that he not come for the weekend. I have never molested a child my whole life through, never seduced anybody, assuming that word has meaning, and, so far as I know, neither have any of my homosexual friends. Certainly not in my living room or bedroom. Moreover, 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.

  But, then, maybe it is contagious, floating in the air around me, like a virus. Homosexuals themselves often seem to think so. How else can you explain the self-pitying The Boys in the Band?22

  Martin Hoffman, the San Francisco therapist I mentioned earlier, says:

  Self-condemnation pervades the homosexual world and, in concert with the psychodynamic and biological factors that lead toward promiscuity, makes stable relationships a terrific problem. In spite of the fact that so many homosexuals are lonely and alone, they can’t seem to find someone with whom to share even part of their lives. This dilemma is the core problem of the gay world and stems in large measure from the adverse self-definitions that society imprints on the homosexual mind. Until we can change these ancient attitudes, many men—including some of our own brothers, sons, friends, colleagues and children yet unborn—will live out their lives in the quiet desperation of the sad gay world.

  Perhaps. None of my homosexual friends are any too happy, but then very few of my heterosexual friends—supposed friends, I should say—are exactly joyous, either. And as for the promiscuity and short-term relationships, neither of those has been quite true in my case, and only recently I attended an anniversary party of two homosexuals who had been together for twenty-five years, reasonably constant, reasonably happy. They still hold hands, though not in public, and they are kind to each other, which is rare enough anywhere these days.

  Late in October, 1970, members of the Gay Activists Alliance staged an all-day sit-in at Harper’s to protest the Epstein article, surely the first time in the 120-year history of the magazine that that has happened.23 And as Peter Fisher, a student at Columbia who helped organize the sit-in, kept saying, “What you don’t understand is that there’s been a revolution.”

  I’m not sure it’s a full-scale revolution yet, but there’s been a revolt, and for thousands of young homosexuals, and some not so young, the quiet desperation that Hoffman talks about is all over. They are neither quiet nor desperate.

  The whole thing began with an event that has been compared to the Boston Tea Party or the firing on Fort Sumter: the Stonewall Rebellion.24 On June 28, 1969, the police started to raid a gay bar in the West Village, the Stonewall Inn. The police are forever raiding gay bars, especially around election time, when they also move in on West 42d Street. And in the past, what you did was, you took the cops’ abuse, and sometimes you went off with only a few familiar epithets or a hit on the head. And sometimes you were taken to the station on one charge or another and, usually, released the next morning.

  But that is not what happened on June 28, 1969. A friend of mine who was there said, “It was fantastic. The crowd was a fairly typical weekend crowd, your usual queens and kids from the sticks, and the people that are always around the bars, mostly young. But this time instead of submitting to the cops’ abuse, the sissies fought back. They started pulling up parking meters and throwing rocks and coins at the cops, and the cops had to take refuge in the bar and call for reinforcements…. It was beautiful.”

  That was the beginning, and on the anniversary last summer between five thousand and fifteen thousand gay people of both sexes marched up Sixth Avenue from Sheridan Square to the Sheep Meadow in Central Park for a “gay-in.” Other, smaller parades took place in Chicago and Los Angeles, and all three cities survived the sight and sound of men with their arms around men and women kissing women, chanting, “Shout it loud, gay is proud,” “Three-five-seven-nine, Lesbians are mighty fine,” carrying signs that said, “We Are the People Our Parents Warned Us Against,” singing “We Shall Overcome.”

  And something else perhaps even more important happened during the 1970 elections. When Arthur J Goldberg, running for Governor of New York, paid what was to have been a routine campaign visit to the intersection of 85th and Broadway, more than three dozen members of the G.A.A. were waiting for him. They shook his hand and asked if he was in favor of fair employment for homosexuals and of repeal of the state laws against sodomy. Goldberg’s answer to each question was, “I think there are more important things to think about.”

  But before the election Goldberg had issued a public statement answering yes to both questions, promising as well to work against police harassment of homosexuals. The candidates for senator, Richard Ottinger and Charles Goodell, also issued statements supporting constitutional rights for homosexuals. Of course, Governor Rockefeller and Senator Buckley, the winners, remained silent on those issues, but Representative Bella Abzug, one of the earliest supporters of G.A.A., won, and so did people like State Assemblyman Antonio Olivieri, the first Democrat elected in the 66th Assembly District in fifty-five years. Olivieri took an ad in a G.A.A. benefit program that served to thank the organization for its support.

  Marty Robinson, an extremely vocal young man, a carpenter by profession, who was then in charge of political affairs for G.A.A., said that “this election serves notice on every politician in the state and nation that homosexuals are not going to hide any more. We’re becoming militant, and we won’t be harassed or degraded any more.”

  John Paul Hudson, one of the alliance’s founders, said: “G.A.A. is a political organization. Everything is done with an eye toward political effect…. G.A.A. adopted this policy because all oppression of homosexuals can only be ended by means of a powerful political bloc.”

  For an organization only a little more than a year old and with only 180 paid-up members, G.A.A. has certainly made itself heard. And that, according to Arthur Evans, another fiery member, is just the beginning. He said, “At the end of June we had a statement that gay is good. We had a joyous celebration, as is right. But today we know not only that gay is good, gay is angry. We are telling all the politicians and elected officials of New York State that they are going to become responsible to the people. We will make them responsible to us, or we will stop the conduct of the business of government.” Well.

  Small wonder that the Mattachine Society, which for twenty years has been trying to educate straight people to accept homosexuals, is now dismissed by some members of G.A.A. and the Gay Liberation Front as “the N.A.A.C.P. of our movement.”25

  Laws discriminating against homosexuals will almost surely be changed. If not this year, in 1972; if not in 1972, in 1976; if not in 1976…

  Private acceptance of homosexuals and homosexuality will take somewhat longer. Most of the psychiatric establishment will continue to insist that homosexuality is a disease, and homosexuals, 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.

  I have never infected anybody, and it’s too late for the head people to do anything about me now. Gay is good. Gay is proud. Well, yes, I suppose. If I had been given a choice (but who is?), I would prefer to have been straight. But then, would I rather not have been me? Oh, I think not, not this morning anyway. It is a very clear day in late December, and the sun is shining on the pine trees outside my studio. The air is extraordinary clear, and the sky is the color it gets only at this time of year, dark, almost navy-blue. On such a day I would not choo
se to be anyone else or any place else.

  AFTERWORD

  MAY 1971

  “…There it was, out at last, and if it seems like nothing very much, I can only say that it took a long time to say it, to be able to say it, and none of the journey was easy….”

  —Merle Miller

  Before I started work on the essay that appeared in The New York Times Magazine in January, I did not intend writing anything factual on the subject; I certainly did not intend writing so personal a piece. True, the narrator of the first-person novel on which I have been working for three years is a homosexual, but that isn’t me. For one thing, his name is George Lionel, and isn’t disguise one of the uses of fiction?26

  I have no taste for self-revelation, and I had had quite enough of crusades. I was perfectly willing to sign an occasional ad for the Times supporting this good cause or that. And I still considered myself a radical, more closely akin to the new left than the old, but homosexuality was not about to be my last crusade. I was not even sure it was a proper subject for a crusade.

  Yes, I knew that a little more than a year before, there had been a rebellion against the cops at a gay bar named the Stonewall in Manhattan. Fine, but since moving into a glass house in the country—somebody once called it “the glass mausoleum”27—I am an infrequent visitor to gay bars and was never comfortable in them.

  Yes, I knew that last summer several thousand people had marched up Sixth Avenue and into Central Park for a gay-in. But my diminishing energies and enthusiasms seemed to be exhausted by once in a while making a speech or marching in a protest against the war in Southeast Asia. Gay radicalism was for the young; at my age, my principal concerns were more for my digestion than for politics—or sex.28

  And then the Epstein article appeared in Harper’s, and I was both outraged and saddened. First of all, I was an alumnus of the staff of the magazine and was still a contributor, and I considered its editors friends. I also thought it was one of the best, maybe the best, magazine in the country. Yet here was a piece filled with the most blatant bigotry, the most juvenile mistakes. And with this, to me, terrifying statement: “…If I had the power to do so, I would wish homosexuality off the face of the earth. I would do so because I think that it brings infinitely more pain than pleasure to those who are forced to live with it.”

  Genocide, followed by the humanizing afterthought. Would it not be as human to wish all blacks off the face of the earth because of the pain?…All Jews?

  Elinor Green, who was once my wife and is still my friend, was in the glass house for the Labor Day weekend; she read the piece. First, she said, she thought it was tedious, but, yes, it was also outrageous; it was harmful and hurtful, but what could one do?

  I realized then that in all the years I have known Elinor, almost twenty-five, married for more than four, we had never discussed the subject of homosexuality, never mentioned that I was one. And we didn’t that day or night.

  I don’t know what to make of that silence; I’m not proud of it, but judging from the letters I’ve received since the piece appeared, many of them from married men, such silence is not uncommon in American life today.

  …I have been married for more than twenty years, have a daughter who is twenty and in college, and another who is eighteen and will start college in the fall. We have a beautiful home and, I feel, a good life together…. For me the thrills, excitements, and beauties of sex have always come from men…. I would like to open the door and have gay friends to my house and have the knowledge accepted…Has this ever been done successfully? If so, how? How can you change a person’s mind when “homosexual” is a very dirty word, although they have lived over twenty years with one, lovingly.

  The day Elinor left I called my friend of twenty-five years, Bob Kotlowitz, who was then executive editor of Harper’s. I told Bob, who is a brave and generous man, that I thought Epstein’s article was an outrage, and he said, “A great many intelligent people feel the way he does, Merle.”

  I said, “Do you feel that way?”

  He thought for a moment, and then he said, “Oh, I suppose, more or less.”

  That was the time for me to have said, “After all these years, is that what you think of me?” But I didn’t. The moment passed. It passed as it had passed so many hundreds of times before, so many thousands of times before.

  A young homosexual friend recently said, “It’s no secret that you, that one, has such-and-such color hair, is yea high, weighs thus and so, and so on, but when you keep one part of yourself secret, that becomes the most important part of you.”

  And that is true, I think; it may be the most important truth of all.

  A few days after the talk with Kotlowitz, I had lunch with two friends who are on the staff of The New York Times Magazine. I asked one of them, Victor Navasky, who is also a writer, what he thought of the Epstein piece. He said he thought it was brilliant. He said, “At a time when everybody else is saying we have to understand and accept homosexuals, Epstein is saying…”

  I said, “Epstein is saying genocide for queers.” And then for the first time, in broad daylight, before what I guess you would call a mixed audience, in a French restaurant on West 46th Street, I found myself saying, “Look, goddamn it, I’m homosexual, and most of my best friends are Jewish homosexuals, and some of my best friends are black homosexuals, and I am sick and tired of reading and hearing such goddamn demeaning, degrading bullshit about me and my friends.”29

  There it was, out at last, and if it seems like nothing very much, I can only say that it took a long time to say it, to be able to say it, and none of the journey was easy.

  If you were to ask—a great many people have—whether I regret saying it and regret what followed, I would have honestly to answer that I don’t know. I may never know. Today it is raining, one of those warm, refreshing rains that I spend dispiriting winter days trying to remember. Today I don’t regret it.

  …Though, like you, Mr. Miller, I have found an adjustment to homosexuality (with a relationship that is now in its sixth year and growing stronger and more tender daily), it is curious to speculate how much more might have been accomplished had the time spent on needless guilt and evasiveness been put to the service of self-fulfillment. The waste is one which is felt not only by myself and my lover, but by nearly every other homosexual—male or female—I have ever known.

  A few days after the lunch I was at the Times to use the library, and Victor asked if I’d be willing to write a piece on some of the things I’d said at lunch. I said yes and immediately regretted it, which is the story of my life.

  In any case, Victor called later in the week to say that after one of the longest editorial meetings in the history of the Times Magazine, its editors wanted me to write a piece on what he called, “…changing attitudes toward homosexuality, your own included…Make it as personal as you like…”

  I was not, however, to proselytize; William F. Buckley had said that he had no objection to Gore Vidal’s bisexuality; however, if Gore tried to proselytize, there was a moral issue involved…30

  I said that if there was one thing in the world that I was not about to line up recruits for, it was homosexuality. Homosexuality and the army.

  Also, Victor said, the subject was by its very nature hazardous, but if the piece was unacceptable the Times would still pay its usual consolation prize of $250.31

  I was aware of some of the hazards so far as the Times was concerned. Until ten, maybe five, years before—nobody knew for sure how many—the word “homosexual” had never even been mentioned in the Times. Homosexual news, if any, was not considered fit to print. In a family newspaper.

  That attitude still exists, in surprising places. I appeared on the Dick Cavett Show to discuss the subject, but when I was suggested for the David Frost Show, I am reliably informed that I was said to be “unacceptable.”32 Why? The producer said, “Because we are a family program.”

  I did not know at the time I was working on the article th
at one of the reasons Stanley Kauffmann is no longer dramatic critic of the Times had to do with a column he had written about homosexual playwrights. According to Turner Catledge’s book My Life and the Times, the mother of Arthur Ochs “Punch” Sulzberger was “deeply disturbed” by the column.33

  I must say, on rereading it, that the column seems remarkably mild, even for 1966:

  The homosexual dramatist ought to have the same freedom that the heterosexual has. While we deny him that freedom, we have no cause for complaint when he uses disguises in order to write. Further, to deny him that freedom is to encourage a somewhat precious esthetics that, out of understandable vindictiveness, is hostile to the main stream of our culture…. It seems to me that only by such freedom can our theater be freed of “homosexual influence”—a misnomer for the stratagems that homosexuals in all branches of the theater are now often forced to use in order to work…. Homosexual dramatists need the same liberty that heterosexuals now have. If this is too much for us to contemplate, then at least let us drop all the cant about “homosexual” influence and distortions because we are only complaining of the results of our own attitudes.

  What a pity that the first really popular play about homosexuals was such self-pitying kitsch as The Boys in the Band, although maybe the kitsch accounts for its popularity. Maybe some people want to think that’s the way homosexuals are, and, of course, some are, none that I have known, though, not for long anyway.

  And some homosexuals are like the four wild heterosexuals in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?34 It is best to avoid them. Do you wonder that sometimes for weeks on end I never leave the house?

  A few years ago I made some complaint about my current relationship to an old friend, and he said, “But I thought that was a good relationship.”