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.”

Dorothy Parker, To Whom We Owe So Much

Today’s politically correct anthologies of American literature are filled with rediscovered writing by rediscovered women and ethnic minority writers. Their writing is sometimes as interesting as well-known writing by well-known writers, but it’s nonsense to pretend that, in general, it is as culturally important. You can tell me that Gwendolyn B. Bennett, Rolla Lynn Riggs, and Elizabeth Madox Roberts, who all have work in the p.c. Heath Anthology of American Literature, are as central to understanding the 1920s as Dorothy Parker, but I won’t believe you.

I use the old-fashioned Norton Anthology of American Literature because, unlike the Heath, it includes Parker. Norton gives her only two and one-third pages and her overdone story “The Waltz,” but at least they say the right things about Parker and the 1920s:

This was the decade of “flaming youth,” the beginning of the “youth culture” that still characterizes American society. All over America, the activities of trend-setting and privileged young people were considered newsworthy. Dorothy Parker, a talented writer of wit and charm [question: are there untalented writers of wit and charm?], was among those whose sayings and doings were recorded in the gossip columns of New York newspapers and repeated around the country.

The anthology mentions that wisecracking suddenly came out of the closet and into newsprint and that “nobody was more skilled at it than Parker,” but it doesn’t print any of her wisecracks, nor her one immortal poem: “Men seldom make passes / At girls who wear glasses.” Here are some of Parker’s wisecracks:

He’s a writer for the ages -- four to eight.

One more drink and I’d have been under the host.

[Of the young actress Katharine Hepburn]
She ran the whole gamut of her emotions from A to B, and put some distance between herself and a more experience colleague lest she catch acting from her.

If all the girls at the Yale Prom were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.

[Her contribution to the Algonquin Roundtable’s “Most Unlikely Headline” contest]
“POPE ELOPES”

If you’ve got to be raped, you might as well lie back and enjoy it.

[Scene: two women meet before a door. The women: Dorothy Parker and Clare Boothe Luce, the glamorous, witty writer-politician wife of Henry Luce, founder of Time Inc.]
Luce (with a smile, gesturing for Parker to precede her): Age before Beauty.
Parker (stepping forward): Pearls before swine.

[On hearing that Miss Luce was kind to her inferiors]
And where does she find them?

Parker was a drunk and a perfectionist, which meant that her writing, unlike her fast mouth, pressed against deadlines. Harold Ross, the founding editor of The New Yorker (1925---), sometimes sent a copyboy round to her apartment to get what she’d written, superbly finished or not. One mid-day the copyboy pounded on Parker’s door for a long time before her hoarse voice came from within: “Tell Ross I’m too fucking busy. And vice-versa.”

Though not a twenties feminist in her personal life, Parker the public figure opened doors for women to be as funny and as raunchy as men. But at least once, we now know, one of her immortal wisecracks was topped by something even better, though then unprintable. The wits at the Algonquin Roundtable were told one lunchtime that President Calvin Coolidge had just died. "How can they tell?" Parker blurted out.

"He had an erection," said humorist Robert Benchley, Parker's sometime lover. Benchley’s comment passed down through his family and was only published in 1987.

Deborah Colker and Women's Dance

The principal subject of art has always been woman, but only in modern dance have women been an art’s principal creators. Consider: Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, Martha Graham, Mary Wigman, Doris Humphrey, Hanya Holm, Pina Bauch, Meredith Monk, Twyla Tharp.

Which—to use all the fingers of both hands—brings us to Deborah Colker and her superb company, which last performed here in 2004 in several memorable dances. One of them appeared to be a funeral rite in which everybody, women and men, walked slowly in a solemn line, holding candles and—presumably to show how naked we all are before death—naked to the waist. The other, better-known dance was “Rota” (created in 1997), in which, as the curtain came down, the dancers, in fetal position and clinging hard, were whizzing around and around on an accelerating Ferris wheel.

Colker and company were performing in São Paolo a few weekends ago, and we went to see what she’s up to. Germany commissioned her to do a dance about football (American soccer) for the 2006 World Cup, and she took part of that dance, titled it “Dynamo,” and paired it with an earlier work about rock-climbing, “Velox” (1995), to make an evening of sports dances.

Based on the dances I’ve seen, what strikes me as most remarkable about Colker’s work is something you see in most of the work of the women choreographers I’ve named: unisexuality. George Balanchine, the greatest 20th century choreographer, liked to say all ballet is about women. None of the women choreographers, with the prominent exception of Martha Graham, would say this of modern dance.

To emphasize the alikeness of women and men, Colker does the following:

1) She has them do the same things. As in ballet, men lift and carry women, but, unlike ballet, the women aren’t held up to be admired; they are held like bags of groceries, carefully but casually. Further, the women hold and carry the men. Men do clumsy, “ugly” things—squashing their faces against the ground while sticking their rumps in the air; women do the same things, alongside the men and often before the men do them.

2) Both sexes dress in the same or similar clothing, often tights. If the clothing isn’t black, men are as likely as women to be in bright colors.

3) The men and women are all young (none over 30, except for Colker) and of roughly equal height—5’ 6” to 5’ 10”, I’m guessing: tall for a woman, short for a man. The women are dark-haired, lean, and muscular; none has a big bosom. The men are more varied—some blond, some thin, some bulky with muscles.

4) Both men and women are thoroughly, indeed brilliantly, rehearsed. In most ballet companies—though no longer perhaps in the world’s best—the women are precise in mirroring one another’s movements (think of the Rockettes), while the men in the chorus are sloppier but forgiven because of their height and their having on average a decade less dance training. Colker insists the boys be as good as the girls.

5) There’s no “romance” between the sexes—no romance, period. Whereas classical ballet is romance-driven, lovers pining for each other, ecstatically meeting in pas de deux in a world that thwarts them and finally dooms one or both, in Colker’s dances men and women are pals, happy to kick a ball around or float up a wall (in harnesses, in “Dynamo”), but just as happy alone.

6) Because there’s no romance—or, to be blunt, no lust—impelling the dance, there’s no reason for men and women to chase one another in hope of sexual release. Instead, what we see are games and friendly play—running, kicking, floating, and climbing, in which, to repeat, the sex of the participant doesn’t matter. Dance as kinesiology, as dance history Suzanne Buckley says dismissively.

7) Because there’s no romance, no lust, et cetera, there’s no plot in Colker’s dances—and the tone isn’t tragic or nostalgic, as in most ballet, but quietly blissful. There are climaxes of a kind (remember the Ferris wheel) but they are purely technical: we never thought the wheel could go so fast or, in “Velox,” that so many people would climb on the rock wall at once or that anybody could do what the marvelous last woman, spider-like, does—climb under and beside and over other climbers, and hang on to the central climber and raise one arm and leg toward the audience to bring the curtain down.

Rather than picturing a world like our own, where desire and loss and nostalgia shape human psychology, which in turn shapes the gestures humans make—as happens in ballet and in dances made by men—Colker shows us a kind of heaven where everything is done for joy or curiosity or simply exercise, and there’s no risk of failure.

It’s for this reason that I wish her dancers smiled. One or two do, but slightly, as though overcoming instruction to wear the dancer’s characteristic deadpan expression (“Don’t look at my face. It’s what I do with my body that matters!”). We in the audience are smiling but we want the dancers to confirm that we should be, that they are really having as much fun as they should be, doing what they do.

In my discussion I’ve left out of account the one dancer who doesn’t fit into what I’ve said. He’s older than everyone else, taller, and bald with a fringe of gray. He’s also an amazing acrobat, able for example to lift himself from prone on the floor into a handstand. In “Velox,” he is the central climber off whose back the spider woman hangs.

But though different from the other men, he’s no more a sexual presence than they—no more than is jolly Mr. Clean of whom he looks to be the unsmiling younger brother. As he moves through the company, single-mindedly doing something different from the others, he is like a gym coach among students in a free-play period or an umpire for a game that hasn’t started. We in the audience aren’t troubled by his anomalous existence. For those of us older than the dancers—which is to say, 90 percent of the audience—he is our representative, the symbol that, however old, we belong (however oddly) in the paradise of the body Colker creates.