Merle Miller and the Piece That Launched a Thousand “It Gets Better” Video

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http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/10/merle-miller-and-the-piece-that-launched-1000-it-gets-better-videos.html



If your Facebook news feed looks anything like mine, you already know from jubilant friends that it’s the twentieth-fifth annual National Coming Out Day. It can be difficult to remember that, just forty years ago, homosexuality was still listed as a psychiatric disorder by the American Psychiatric Association. Open homophobia was the dominant mode, not only in bar-counter conversation, but in the pages of exalted liberal magazines.

“I must have been nine or ten years old,” began Joseph Epstein, in an essay in the September, 1970 issue of Harper’s “when my father, who had read me stories out of a children’s Bible, out of Robin Hood, out of the Brothers Grimm, who carefully instructed me never to say the word ‘nigger,’ one night sat me down in our living room to explain that there were ‘perverts’ in the world.” What Joseph Epstein’s father meant by “perverts” were men who were sexually attracted to other men. Epstein’s “Homo/hetero: The Struggle for Sexual Identity” elaborates on the condition of those men cursed (“in the medieval sense of having been struck by an unexplained injury, an extreme piece of evil luck”) with such perversion.

Epstein went on to describe, with almost clinical dryness—although maybe it’s just contempt—“the increasingly large sector of American life inhabited by cultural swingers and intellectual fellow travelers, in which a man is esteemed according to the degree of his alienation from his country.” The gays, he said, have achieved the highest possible “degree of alienation”; in this world “where badges are judged wounds, wounds badges, homosexuals have a deservedly high place,” earning a widespread “kind of jealousy of this elite state.”

Continuing on this theme of the gays’ special fortune—don’t go thinking that Epstein wanted homosexuality to be illegal; those laws were “barbarous, not to say illogical”—Epstein presents the “sexual simplicity” of the homosexual lifestyle, as described by “the hairdresser of a lady friend of mine.” (Elliot, the hairdresser, told Epstein that he did not like a lot of talk leading up to sex: in a homosexual bar, he said, you could walk up to a man and say, “You want to fuck? Let’s go to my place.” Simple.)


Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/10/merle-miller-and-the-piece-that-launched-1000-it-gets-better-videos.html#ixzz29Ht6c5Ko

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