The year was 1971; the date was January 17th. Stonewall was a memory not yet two years old, activism had taken the form of local gay liberation front actions against practices such as police harassment and discrimination in employment and housing, the idea of “LGBT” had yet to be thought of, and the slogan “out of the closets and into the streets” was popular. Not the best climate in which to pen an essay for the Sunday section of the New York Times on the dimensions of being homosexual—and yet journalist and editor Merle Miller did it.
Frankly subtitling his piece “What It Means to Be A Homosexual,†he laid out for his own and later generations the obstacles of taught prejudice associated with what we now term a gay identity in a stinging and wide-ranging rebuttal of a deeply homophobic piece by Joseph Epstein that had appeared shortly before in Harper’s Weekly.  The courage that it took to spell out the details of a subject that was not considered fit for print also created a mirror of the social landscape whose limitations gay people were beginning to successfully challenge, a process that continues in our own day.
The essay was republished in book form later in 1971 under the title On Being Different and reviewed in the November 24, 1971 issue of The Advocate. The review looked at two other works, Arthur Bell’s Dancing The Gay Lib Blues and John Murphy’s Homosexual Liberation, and noted that much of the criticism of the original Times piece came from homosexuals who were more worried about projecting an image straight people could live with than seeing a man come to terms with his sexual orientation without accepting the stereotypes of the day.
Despite the contemporary impact of Miller’s essay on both gay and straight America, his book has not been reprinted until this year. The 2012 reissue by Penguin Classics provides the original 20-page text, augmented by a thoughtful foreword written by Dan Savage and a challenging afterword by journalist Charles Kaiser, author of The Gay Metropolis (1997).
Appendixes help place Miller in context with the texts of a letter Miller wrote to his wife a few weeks before the essay appeared, an obituary composed by an old friend, and notes on Miller’s essay by Dr. Frank Kameny. When I was looking for books on what I was in the course of my path to coming out in the 1970s, On Being Different was the only book our local library in western Pennsylvania had under “homosexuality,†and I devoured it.
Forty years later, the thoughts and philosophies it promotes make it a vital piece of LGBT history that has been restored to the attention of a new generation.
Reviewer: Robert Ridinger
Northern Illinois University
