The Difference

By * A.T. Baker

HOMOSEXUAL: OPPRESSION AND LIBERATION by DENNIS ALTMAN 242 pages. Outerbridge & Dienstfrey.

$6.95.

ON BEING DIFFERENT by MERLE MILLER 65 pages. Random House. $4.50.

In a now celebrated essay in the New York Times Magazine, printed in January 1971, Novelist Merle Miller gravely and eloquently admitted he was a homosexual. It was an act of courage and some grace, made at a time when most avowedly homosexual voices were those of shrill types with long hair and little reputation to lose. In the months since, a whole tumble of homosexuals have "come out of the closet" and rushed into print. Perhaps best among these accounts is a book by Australian Dennis Altman. Between them Miller and Altman measure just how far the "gay" liberation has come. Miller's book is a confession and a plea for understanding. Altman's book is a boast and a demand for social revolution.

In his brief volume--which also includes the original article--Miller explains how he came to write it. At 51, he was an established author, and had even been (briefly) a married man. He was lunching with two friends from the New York Times, and in passing, one of them praised a recent magazine piece by a man who wished "homosexuality off the face of the earth." Miller was seized by a sudden burst of exasperation: "And then for the first time, in broad daylight, in a French restaurant on West 46th Street, I found myself saying: 'Look, goddam it, I'm homosexual, and most of my best friends are Jewish homosexuals, and some of my best friends are black homosexuals, and I am sick and tired of reading and hearing such goddam demeaning, degrading bullshit about me and my friends.' There it was, out at last, and if it seems like nothing very much, I can only say that it took a long time to say it, to be able to say it, and none of the journey was easy." A week later after what is described as one of the longest editorial sessions of the New York Times Magazine, an editor called Miller and asked if he would write the piece.

In his essay, Miller was disarmingly explicit about the petty social humiliations and painful hypocrisies of the closeted homosexual, starting from his childhood in Marshalltown, Iowa, where his mother, who wanted a girl, kept him in pink as a baby, sent him to school in his steel-rimmed glasses carrying a music roll, thus exposing him to kids who took one look and called him "sissy." His first sexual encounter (at the age of twelve) was with a boy who dropped off a freight train one night. Miller recalled how in later life his best friend telephoned to say that his eldest son was coming to visit, and added (jokingly?), "Now, please try not to make a pass at him."

After Miller's article appeared, several of his friends said they could no longer see him. But thousands of people wrote in approvingly. Surgeons, lawyers and therapists confirmed, sadly, that if they were open about their homosexuality they would lose their clients. A homosexual in Germany wrote: "Just seeing something like that in print has meant more to me than you can rightly imagine." Said another: "Nothing I have ever read has helped as much to restore my own self-respect."

Altman, by contrast, feels free to polemicize in the more receptive atmosphere that Miller helped create. He is only 27, but his academic credentials are sound--a former Fulbright scholar from the University of Tasmania with a Cornell M.A. and lecturing experience at N.Y.U., he holds a lectureship at the University of Sydney. Altman's argument is that homosexuality is natural and good. It is society that is all wrong, by forcing the homosexual into the role of an oppressed minority. This makes the homosexual a revolutionary, along with oppressed and militant groups like blacks and women. Altman expounds the validity of homosexual love with references both historical and philosophical. Says he: "Anthropological evidence suggests that homosexuality is neither alien nor perverse." He quotes Professor G. Rattray Taylor as stating that the Greeks "distributed their sexuality and were as interested in bosom and buttocks as in genitals." He resorts to Freud: "Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of sexual functions produced by a certain arrest of sexual development." All this, so the argument goes, proves that mankind is "inherently bisexual."

Altman tours the present gay world with the knowledgeability of a participant. He has, it seems, been into every gay bar, along every gay beach, tried every gay bathhouse--and reports on them. In fact, he defends them as the only show in town for the practicing homosexual. He has even been into "leather," gives an understanding report of the motives (and sufferings) of drag queens, transvestites and transsexuals. He records that his own first homosexual encounter was in a bathhouse where, "clad only in white towels, men prowl the hallways, groping each other in furtive search for instant sex . . . Disgusting? Yes, perhaps. Yet lasting friendships are quite commonly begun in bathhouses."

Three Complaints. Altman charges that homosexuals suffer from three things: persecution, discrimination and, paradoxically, tolerance. By persecution, he means police harassment in homosexual bars and meeting places. He points out that in 1970 Connecticut's Commissioner of Motor Vehicles denied a license to a man because "his homosexuality makes him an improper person to hold an operator's license." As another example of discrimination, he cites the prejudice against hiring homosexuals. "Try telling your boss you cannot move to a new job because of your lover"--the only term homosexuals have for the heterosexual equivalent of wife. By tolerance, Altman means the behavior of people who defend his civil rights--and might ask him to dinner--but wouldn't ask his lover, or invite him to "bring a friend," as they do with a heterosexual.

What Altman demands is nothing less than full agreement that homosexual love is "just as valid" as heterosexual. Altman has a rosy view of what the world will be like if and when this view becomes generally accepted. He sees a society in which men are allowed to love men without embarrassment, and families no longer demand that little boys should be aggressive and dominant, or that little girls be submissive and secondary. Then, he thinks, every body can love one another in a general wash of good will and sexuality. This, he suggests, could lead to a softening of the profit motive and encourage the end of aggressive wars. "Ultimately," he quotes Herbert Marcuse, "liberation implies a new biological person, one no longer capable of tolerating the aggressiveness, brutality and ugliness of the established way of life."

However radiant such a goal may sound, the means suggested seem utter nonsense. Altman does a great disservice to the basic cause of improving the homosexual's condition by overstating the link between acceptance of homosexual behavior and a vastly im proved society. To read him is to be reminded of Russell Baker's remark that "Misery no longer loves company.

Nowadays it insists upon it."

The treatment of homosexuals as cripples and monsters is unjust. Any sensible steps that can be taken to protect them, legally and socially, are desirable. But the chest-thumping insistence that homosexual love is just like (and exactly as desirable as) heterosexual love is self-defeating. It is also biologically inaccurate and socially unsound.

Man is the prisoner of his biology.

Human young take from 15 to 20 years to mature, and the sexual urge of the parents, not just in brief periods of heat as is the case with most mammals, but steadily, year after year, is a strong biological device to keep parents together, protecting the young. Homosexual love is regarded as deviant because no children can be born of it, and for that reason there is a protective reaction to it by the "normal."

Beyond this, the promise that just a little more freedom, sexual and otherwise, will finally make the long repressed world glow like an amusement-park lantern is now growing a little thin.

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