Box Turtle Bulletin

Born On This Day, 1919: Merle Miller

(d. 1986) The Iowa native was marked from the beginning: bookish, played the violin and piano, work thick glasses. The other kids called him sissy from the moment he started school. “I heard that word at least five days a week for the next 13 years until I skipped town and went away to college.” He studied at the University of Iowa and the London School of Economics. During World War II, he was a war correspondent and editor for Yank, The Army Weekly. After the war, he was an editor at Time and Harper’s magazine, and he wrote several best-selling novels, including his classic That Winter (1948), which portrayed the difficulties of veterans’ post-war readjustment. His non-fiction books included We Dropped the A-Bomb (1946), which was based on interviews with a crewman for one of the three B-29s that bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In 1952, he exposed the workings of the Hollywood blacklist in a book commissioned by the ACLU and published by Doubleday, The Judges and the Judged. “A large segment of one of this country’s largest industries remains panicked, partly by the hysteria of the times, partly by what is, relatively, one of the country’s smallest corporations, American Business Consultants, and a handful of supporters. All of the 151 lists are stained with the same careless red paint.” Miller knew very well the damage that inclusion in the McCarthy-inspired blacklist: he himself ended up on it, which kept him from developing a nascent career as a script writer.

One of his most famous books began as a series of interviews that he recorded with former President Harry Truman in 1962. His original plan was to produce a television documentary series bot all three networks turned it down. He suspected that his having been blacklisted in the 1950s may have been a contributing factor. Miller filed the tapes and notes away, not sure of what to do with them. When Truman died in 1972, the TV networks invited Miller to appear on camera and share some of his Truman stories, which he had been telling to entertain his friends and colleagues for the past decade. That’s when he decided the time was right to write that book. It would be no ordinary biography, but a book of conversations between Miller and Truman titled Plain Speaking. When it came out in 1974 (after at least eight publishers turned it down), it rose to number one on the New York Times best-selling list, and it remained on the list for over a year.

Miller remained closeted throughout most of his career, but the heady days of the post-Stonewall era changed that. In October 1970, Harper’s magazine, Miller’s former employer, published a homophobic screed by Joseph Epstein calling  gay people “an affront to our rationality …  condemned to a state of permanent niggerdom among men.” (Oct 27)  While meeting with two New York Times editors for lunch, Norman complained bitterly about the article. The other editors didn’t see anything wrong with it, and couldn’t understand why Miller was so upset. “Look, goddamn it, I’m homosexual … and I’m sick and tired of reading and hearing such goddamn demeaning, degrading bullshit about me and my friends.” The editors were taken aback, but a few days later, they approached Miller about writing a piece for The New York Times Magazine (which then enjoyed complete editorial independence from the Times newspaper).

His essay, “What It Means To Be A Homosexual,”was a bombshell in the mainstream press (Jan 17).The Times’s mailroom was inundated with more than 2,000 letters in the first six weeks, a record. Almost all of them from gay people and their parents expressing their gratitude for Miller’s honesty. It also opened the eyes of a number of straight readers, who were able to see gay people as just people. One reader, who was careful to avoid using epithets for racial, ethnic and religious minorities, admitted, “Yet for every time I’ve said homosexual, I’ve said ‘fag’ a thousand times. You’ve made me wonder how I could have believed that I had modeled my life on the dignity of man while being so cruel, so thoughtless to so many.” Later that year, his essay was published again in book form as On Being Different: What It Means to Be a Homosexual. Penguin Classics re-issued it again in 2012 with a foreword by Dan Savage and afterword by Charles Kaiser.