Merle Miller's Coming Out

The writer Merle Miller was born, in 1919, in Marshalltown, Iowa, and grew up knowing something was wrong with him. From third grade on, the boys called him sissy and worse. He had three friends, all “aliens” like him: a Jewish boy, a girl in a wheelchair, and a woman with a clubfoot who sold tickets at the movies.

He was a great reader, and “read about sensitive boys, odd boys, boys who were lonely and misunderstood, boys who really didn’t care all that much for baseball, boys who were teased by their classmates,” but no boy who was “tortured by the strange fantasies that tore at me every time, for instance, my mother insisted I go to the ‘Y’ to learn to swim. They swam nude at the ‘Y,’ and I never went. Lead me not into temptation.” Then,

I was fourteen when I happened on book called Winesburg, Ohio. I don’t know how. Maybe it was recommended by the librarian, a kind and knowing woman with the happy name of Alice Story. Anyway, there at last, in a story called “Hands,” were the words I had been looking for. I was not the only sissy in the world:

Adolph Myers was meant to be a teacher . . . In their feeling for the boys under their charge such men are not unlike the finer sort of women in their love of men.

Sherwood Anderson’s story ended unhappily. Of course. How else could it end?

And then the tragedy. A half-witted boy of the school becomes enamored of the young master. In his bed at night he imagined unthinkable things and in the morning went forth to tell his dreams as facts.

I must have read “Hands” more than any story before or since. I can still quote it from beginning to end:

They had intended to hang the schoolmaster, but something in his figure, so small, white, and pitiful, touched their hearts and they let him escape. As he ran into the darkness, they repented of their weakness and ran after him, swearing and throwing sticks and great balls of soft mud at the figure that screamed and ran faster into the darkness.

Winesburg was published in 1919, and one of the terrifying things is that the people in any town in the United States, quite likely any city, too, would react very much the same way today, wouldn’t they?

I’ve just quoted from Miller’s landmark article, “What It Means to be a Homosexual.” The article was commissioned by and appeared in The New York Times Magazine in January 1971, a year and a half after the Stonewall Rebellion of June 28, 1969, during which the patrons of a gay bar in New York City’s West Village fought back against police trying to arrest them. Miller was the first mainstream American writer-journalist to declare his homosexuality. (His article, with an afterword, appears in his book On Being Different: What It Means to be a Homosexual [1971].)

In 1977 he was in Austin, Texas, working on a magazine article, and my boss, Elspeth Rostow, introduced me to him. Miller was a grinning, square-faced, bespeckled man, rather like Harry Truman, the subject of his biggest bestseller, Plain Speaking (1974). We made affable small talk. Then, perhaps challenged by the presence of someone who had shown so much courage, I mentioned his Times article and said I’d been touched at his naming the woman who led him to Anderson’s story.

“I knew she was dead,” he said. “They couldn’t hurt her.”