On Being Different Read online

  I said, no doubt with an inner sigh, “It is, but it’s a relationship.”

  It has been my observation, and I have done considerable looking into the matter, that relationships are very much the same, no matter what the sex of the people involved. It’s never easy. I’ve tried it three times on what I hoped would be a permanent basis. Once, the marriage; the second affinity lasted ten years, each more tortured than the one before. The third has lasted six years now, and once we got acquainted, which took a little more than two and a half years, it has been beautiful. Except for a slight suspicion, now and again, that he is a better writer than I am.35

  Nothing I have written has ever come easily. I read and believe Ben Jonson when he says that Shakespeare never blotted a line,36 and I believe that Mozart composed the overture to Don Giovanni while the first-night audience was walking into the theater. But I realized when I was practicing the piano ten and twelve hours a day in Marshalltown that I would never be another Wolfgang Amadeus, and at about sixteen or so, I decided it was either that or nothing. Nothing.

  As a writer, I learned early on to make do with the necessity of blotting lines.

  But writing the piece for the Times was the most difficult writing of any kind ever. First of all, I tried doing it any way but the right way, any way but honestly. The first version was in the third person and was a once-over-lightly sociological history of what had happened since the Stonewall Rebellion in June, 1969, through the gay-in in June, 1970.

  As part of the research I attended several meetings of the Gay Activists Alliance and the Gay Liberation Front. I was fascinated by both, envied both. They are wonderful kids, honest, unafraid, loving, knowing some things, important things that I’m still not sure about. They may have hang-ups, but guilt is not among them. Neither is cowardice. Huey Newton is perfectly right: homosexuals may be the most revolutionary.

  I couldn’t help thinking, with the required pinch of rue and regret, how different my life would have been if I had been born homosexual in 1950 instead of…But that’s a tiresome game, and I’m too old to play it.

  Besides, writing about the kids in G.A.A. and G.L.F. wasn’t what I had been asked to do or wanted to do. No matter what else, I had to tell what it had been like with me, and that I was not prepared to do, could not bring myself to do. Not easily, anyway.

  Afterward, lots of people wrote to say how courageous I had been in doing the piece. Well, maybe, but, as you can see, my heroism came after every conceivable attempt to be something less than that, anything less than that.37

  In late October, when I was still trying to begin the piece, the Gay Activists Alliance had its all-day sit-in at Harper’s; I was unable to join in. I did, however, write a note saying to the editors, saying for the first time, that these were my friends, my brothers and sisters. I was homosexual, I said, and while I was not among them, I was with them.38

  A few days after that the story about E. M. Forster and his posthumous homosexual novel appeared in the Times, and the next day I began the piece, liberated somehow, the block unblocked.

  I had admired Forster since the day I first happened on Howards End.39 Admired him both as a writer and as a man:

  I believe in aristocracy…. Not an aristocracy of power, based upon rank and influence, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate, and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and through all the ages, and there is a secret understanding between them when they meet. They represent the true human tradition, the one queer victory of our race over cruelty and chaos.

  (I had, with Forster’s permission, used A Secret Understanding as the title of a novel, along with that quotation from his essay “What I Believe.”)

  I wrote the article in six days, against the advice of every friend I had or have, homosexual and straight. I lost a couple even before it was published, both homosexuals of my generation, “…of course I won’t be able to see you again if you write something like that…and of all places to advertise, the Times.”40

  More usual were people who said, who always say, “Well, if you do it, I hope you’re prepared for the consequences.” Nobody added, as my mother invariably did after issuing that particular ultimatum, “And, afterward, don’t come home, your tail between your legs, crying to me…”41

  A friend who read the article just before I sent it to the Times said, “I think it’s wonderful, but couldn’t you take out that part about the black boys at the M. & St. L. railroad station?”42

  The Times had no objection at all, not to anything; all of the cuts were for reasons of space.43

  Among the more than two thousand letters I’ve received since the piece have been a great many saying that having written it, I must surely feel relieved, feel freer somehow; it was all out in the open at last.

  But that’s like asking whether I regret having written it. I’m not sure whether I feel more free. I may simply feel more naked than before, somehow more exposed, more vulnerable. And again it will be some time before I know for sure, if I ever know for sure.

  A fellow writer said on national television, “I don’t think a writer should reveal that much of himself.”

  I have always thought that one of the obligations of a writer is to expose as much of himself as possible, to be as open and honest as he can manage—among other reasons so that his readers can see in what he writes a reflection of themselves, weaknesses and strengths, courage and cowardice, good and evil. Isn’t that one of the reasons writing is perhaps the most painful of the arts?

  Maybe he’s right, though. Maybe I exposed too much of myself. I was told that a woman in Brewster whom I had thought of as a friend had said, rather snappishly, “I think he should have kept a thing like that to himself.”

  I have lived near the village of Brewster for twenty years now, and it is small; I have a nodding acquaintance with almost everybody. Going there for the first time after the piece appeared was as difficult as—oh, or so my memory insists, making the first island landing in the Pacific in the spring of 1945.

  I knew that while by no means everybody in town would have read the article, everybody would either have heard about it or seen or heard about the Cavett Show. Indeed, the day after the show a neighbor to whom I have not been introduced wrote: “I’ve seen you flitting down the streets of Brewster, and if you continue to write such degenerate…and say such filthy…”

  I would not consider myself a flitter; still, the eye of the beholder…44 A friend had telephoned to say, “There’s been a lot of talk around town, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the next time you go to the A&P, you are stoned.”

  Who but a friend would tell you a thing like that?

  All right. I know it’s ridiculous, but it’s true. For three weeks I did not go to Brewster; when I shopped, I went to Danbury, where I am not known.

  But one morning my sense of the ridiculous—I like to think it was that—took over, and I allowed myself to be driven (I am one of the non-driving minority) to the village. I went boldly into the stationery store and, feeling like a man attending his own execution, picked up a magazine.

  The proprietor of the store came over, smiled, and said, “I want to shake your hand. That was a very important piece you wrote, and I’m glad you did it. We need to get these things out in the open and discuss them.”

  So much for the small and shameful fears. Later that day I talked on the telephone to one of the early astronauts, a pleasant enough man but one I had always considered the squarest of the square. Toward the end of our conversation he said, “I read your piece in the Times…. It was very good, very important, very necessary.”45

  I keep forgetting, and I mustn’t, the basic decency of most people. To repeat, given a chance, most people are basically decent. The young. Oh, yes, the young; I have always thought that. I have never been one of those who are threatened by the young. The girl who was editor of The Daily lowan this year wrote:

  …Articles such as yours make it easier for all p
ersons who deviate from the so-called norm (read white, straight, middle-class, Protestant male).

  …I want to assure you that The Daily Iowan has (naturally) changed quite a lot since you worked for the paper…. We have ascribed to the principle that all people deserve to have a sense of dignity, a sense of worth; that people deserve to be judged as human beings above all else…. We understand that all oppression is interrelated: that the treatment accorded blacks, women, gay people, all derives from the same source, that until we are all free, none will be free…. I think you would have felt more comfortable working for this year’s staff, but we still have a long way to go. We are, however, trying to go the distance.

  The young. And sometimes the aging as well. A woman I went to high school with:

  …Twenty-three and a half years living in the same house, married to the same man and raising five children have made my life one of great happiness rather than unexciting monotony, as it might seem…. Everyone is misjudged and misunderstood on occasion, but the shame of our society that we should tolerate discrimination against homosexuals is deplorable, and I cringe to realize I’ve been even a small part of it!…Though I’ve read much on the subject, from various sources, nothing else has so effectively influenced me. I feel confident that others are gaining a healthier attitude toward this long-existing problem and, hopefully, the present generation will prove wiser than its often closed-minded and narrow-thinking elders.

  I am much more optimistic than when I wrote the piece, much; the laws, as I said, will be changed, sooner than I thought. Efforts are under way in every state, and they will, I think, succeed.46

  I spoke of liberal guilt about homosexuality and said that there was none. As if I thought that guilt was a requisite for doing what is right. And that, of course, is nonsense. I think social attitudes will change, are changing, quickly, too.

  Possible parental attitudes as well. True, the principal of an elementary school near New York City wrote that parents would rather hear that their children are mentally retarded or disturbed than hear any mention of homosexuality. On the other hand, a suburban housewife wrote:

  A few days after I read Merle Miller’s article…my husband and I began discussing homosexuality in terms of our two young sons, aged two and a half and seven months. My husband asked how I would react if one of our sons showed a preference for his own sex.

  …I think I would try to get him to talk about his feelings and then urge him to try psychiatric counseling. (I am supposing that this is occurring when he is in his teens). What started as an experiment could have become a habit rather than a matter of preference.

  But thinking of my son as an adult homosexual fills me with neither disgust nor maternal glee that no other woman will take my place, but concern for his fulfillment and happiness. Human beings need to give and receive love. Does it really matter whom we choose to love so long as we are loving?

  There was considerable objection among young gays to my statement that, given a choice, I would rather have been straight. The assumption seems to have been that I consider straightness more virtuous, somehow superior. That was not what I meant. I meant that in this place and this time, indeed in most others since the Hellenic Age in Greece, being straight is easier. But as the son of a novelist wrote:

  …the point has to be made—and I think your article remains ambiguous on this—that it’s not being gay…it’s having been gay at the time we were, and, especially, it’s having been gay in secret, having had a sex life either throttled or separate from our everyday work life, having lived in a world of momentary, anonymous contacts, etc….

  None of this is necessary. And all around me now in gay liberation I see people only five to ten years younger than myself (I am twenty-nine), some of them indeed people with several years of heterosexual life behind them, coming out with no guilt at all so far as I can see. For you, “Gay is good. Gay is proud. Well, yes, I suppose.” For them it is, period. As a result, your article—totally honest for you—was not totally true for us. This isn’t a put-down; it’s to say that from where we stand, some things are clear in our lives that can’t be part of your experience. For us this was not “what it means to be a homosexual,” but what it no longer need mean.

  Dozens of letters explained why if they came out of the closet homosexual doctors and therapists would lose 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…

  Each homosexual must, of course, come out at his own time and in his own way, but 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.

  A boy in Pittsburgh got my telephone number from a mutual acquaintance, and he called to announce that unless he was persuaded to the contrary, he was going to commit suicide. He had been the victim of shameful treatment from the Pittsburgh police department, in particular from a member of the vice squad, whose 219th vice arrest the boy was. And he had got kicked out of the nursing school he was attending, without a hearing.

  I advised against the suicide, pointing out that he would miss the gay revolution, and revolutions are always exciting, especially if they are bloodless.

  But when I suggested that he go to the Pittsburgh branch of the American Civil Liberties Union and to the local homophile organization for help, he said, “I couldn’t do that. If I did, my mother might hear about it, and if she did, it would kill her.”

  I told him that in general mothers turn out to be sturdier than you think and that they had been hearing such information about their sons for several thousand years now, and I knew of no recorded instance of one dying from the shock.

  I think that the boy was convinced that suicide would be a mistake, but I don’t think I convinced him that his mother was strong enough to bear the shock. I wanted to tell him that his mother no doubt already knew. The things we spend our lives knowing and pretending not to know…I didn’t, though; I wished him luck, knowing he’d need it.

  Not long before last fall’s election, a member of the Gay Activists Alliance told one of Arthur Goldberg’s aides that he was grateful for Goldberg’s stand on homosexual issues, but added, “Why didn’t he do it before?”

  “He wasn’t asked before,” said the aide.

  No minority in this country or anywhere else has gained its rights by remaining silent, and no revolution has ever been made by the wary. Or the self-pitying.

  I wrote that “…the closets are far from emptied; there are more in hiding than out of hiding,” and the mail abundantly demonstrates that.47 It took me a long time to do it, but now that I have, I realize how stifling the air has been all these years. I may not be freer, but I’m a lot more comfortable, a lot less cramped.

  And there are smaller pleasures involved. I for one will never again have to listen to and pretend to laugh at the latest “fag gag”; I will never again have to describe the airline stewardess who had the hots for me “…and so when we got to Chicago, we went to the hotel, and…” I will never again have to shake my head when some insensitive, malicious boob says, “Of course, I’ve never known any fags, have you? I mean, except this one fag hairdresser who is always…”

  Never ever again.

  I now go along with James Blake, the author of a marvelous book about, among other things, prison life; he is Genet with a sense of humor.48 He wrote:

  I’ve been homosexual (stupid term) for a long time, and I was never much bothered by what people thought, though I always kept a wary eye on the fuzz…. It was never a problem with me—I figured the kind of people who take exception to my sex life are people I don’t want to know anyway. So no sweat.

  Why was I always bothered?

  Afterword

  If you were born after 1970, I think it is nearly impossible to imagine how it felt to open up The New York Times Magazine on a Sunday
morning in January 1971 to discover a deeply personal and beautifully written piece in defense of homosexuality.

  Nothing like this had ever been printed in a newspaper like the Times before.

  I was a junior at Columbia University in the City of New York when Merle Miller’s piece appeared, and I had undoubtedly purchased the Sunday Times at a newsstand on Saturday night. But I’m sure I didn’t share my fascination with his article with any of my classmates on Sunday morning.

  I had been aware of my attraction to other boys throughout my teens, and even earlier, but I always assumed that I was going through “a stage”—because that is what you were taught to believe back then, to spare yourself the possibility that you might be afflicted by something that would condemn you to “permanent niggerdom among men,” as Joseph Epstein so delicately put it in Harper’s, shortly before Miller wrote his rejoinder to Epstein’s piece.

  Six months before Miller’s article appeared, raging teenage hormones had finally merged with opportunity to produce my first adult homosexual experience. It happened in Avignon, when I was driving Lionel and Diana Trilling around the South of France. (As proper New York City intellectuals, neither of them had ever had a driver’s license.) One night after the great critic and his wife had retired after dinner, I drove to the Avignon town square, where hundreds of young people were swirling around dozens of musicians, actors, and every sort of impromptu performance.

  I knew exactly why I was there, and quite quickly, I spied a young Frenchman who seemed eager to cure my curiosity. But since I had never done anything like this before, it took forty-five minutes of hide-and-seek with the young man until we finally said “bonsoir.” Then I immediately agreed to drive both of us back to his apartment. On the way, I learned that he owned a record store with his lover, who was away on vacation in Morocco.

  My first grown-up gay experience was a tremendous stroke of luck: He was young and cute and passionate and affectionate, and when we sat down next to each other on the couch in his apartment, the first thing he did was to rest his head on my lap. I stayed with him for at least two hours; and long after I had worn him out, I still wasn’t ready to leave.