GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE

JUNE 23, 1995

Evenings Out

Exploring a cent lesbian and gay

by Daniel Vaillancourt

in 1989's In Search of Gay America, author Neil Miller probed lesbian and gay life from coast to coast, giving readers glimpses of Selma, Alabama; Boston, Massachusetts; Memphis, Tennessee; San Antonic, Texas; Minneapolis, Minnesota; and other cities and small towns off the gay beaten path. In 1992, he went international with Out in the World, covering the comings and goings of lesbians and gay men in countries such as Argentina, Australia, Denmark, Egypt, Germany, Japan, South Africa, and Thailand. Tired of living out of a suitcase, Miller now turns time traveler to offer his latest, Out of the Past: Gay and Lesbian History from 1869 to the Present (Vintage Books).

Miller recently discussed extracting the essentials from 125 years of suppressed history.

Daniel Vaillancourt: How did you become involved in this project?

Neil Miller: I was aware that there'd been a lot of research on gay and lesbian history that had been done in the past 15 years. Nobody had ever tried to put it together in one volume, and there seemed to be a need for it. I'd written the other two books, which took me around the country and around the world. So I figured, where do I go now? Delve into the past.

Why did you begin where you did?

I started in 1869 because it was the first time the word "homosexuality" ever appeared in print. I could have begun with the Greeks, I suppose. (Laughs) I chose not to. My idea was to start at the end of the nineteenth century, which was really the period in which a sense of gay identity really started to emerge—the sexologists were kind of labeling homosexuality and heterosexuality, psychology was emerging... There was obviously plenty of same-sex [activity before then], but this notion of gay identity is really a late nineteenth century phenomena. So, I started there. I started with Oscar Wilde meeting Walt Whitman. Is that the beginning of my first chapter? I'm not sure. (Laughs)

How is Out of the Past different from, let's say, Eric Marcus' Making History or other histories?

It's different in the sense that it covers a much wider range. Making History is really just about the homophile movement. I think the scope of Out of the Past sets it off from most other books. It really tries to describe this kind of process in which our modern gay and lesbian identity and community kind of emerged—the process that created that community. It's a long process, and sometimes a subtle one. The book deals with everything from familiar things like the Oscar Wilde trials and the trial of Radclyffe Hall and that sort of thing, going right up to the gays in the military battle of the Clinton administration. It also has profiles of people, ranging from Eleanor Roosevelt to Martina Navratilova, which I think makes it lively and readable. I've Author Neil Miller got good chapters on the McCarthy period and the Holocaust. I also deal with some cultures that we don't read too much about, like Russia. The book has what I hope are the best stories-in one volume, and in a pretty readable format.

As comprehensive as it is, the book remains very user-friendly. Well, that was kind of the idea—that you could kind of dip in and dip out, and if there was something you were particularly interested in, you could read it. The portraits of people are often rather short, and there are excerpts. It kind of gives you an overall picture of things. There are notes, but they are at the end of the book. And there's a very good annotated bibliography that encourages you to read other stuff. How long did it take you to write Out of the Past, start to finish? About two years.

Describe the process.

I mostly tried to read as much as I could on different subjects. I really just spent a lot of time in libraries. I'm a journalist; I'm not a historian. I didn't do any primary research. I didn't go rummaging through attics and stuff like that. The idea was to take advantage of all the good scholarship, and make it accessible. This book is not going to tell you everything you wanted to know about Oscar Wilde or Radclyffe Hall or Gertrude Stein, but it's going to give you enough of a picture that you can go off on your own if you want to read more. You'll learn something and say, "Gee, I never realized that Gertrude and Alice called each other by all these funny names." What accounts for the book's Western focus? That was something I regretted, but which was kind of inevitable. As I argued in Out in the World, in so many non-Western societies,

there just hasn't been the development of this sense of gay and lesbian identity. This sense of gays and lesbians as a kind of separate category of people out of which you get a community and a political movement is really a Western phenomenon. Only in the last ten years have we started to see it in places like Japan, for example, and in other cultures. So, the book does tend to have a Western focus.

But the concept of "gay community" is spreading throughout the world.

Absolutely. It seems to be spreading to non-Western cultures at a rapid rate... It's interesting. Just last night, when I was giving a talk in Dallas, I met this guy whom I had met in Hong Kong. In Out in the World I describe Hong Kong as a pretty repressed society. He said that it's completely changed in the last few years. There are so many more gay bars and gathering places. I'm sure a lot of the family pressures remain, but I think things are really changing outside the West, even in the few years since I wrote the book.

What was the most inspiring thing about working on this book?

Inspiring... When I wrote In Search of Gay America, the most inspiring thing was interviewing gays and lesbians in small towns. They'd really had to struggle with their sexuality where things didn't come quite so easy. I think it's kind of inspiring, again, to read historically about people who really stuck their neck out as gay

people in times that were very uncongenial. Somebody like Magnus Hirschfeld in Germany, or Radclyffe Hall. Or even reading about Audre Lorde writing about being a black lesbian in the '50s. It's people who really just underwent a lot of adversity, and triumphed over it with a very positive sense of themselves as gay people. I think that's a lot of the inspiration, at least for me.

You quote New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen, who in an April 6, 1994, column wrote: "It is so certain and inevitable, that the next century will be a time in which it is not simply safe, but commonplace, to be openly gay?" Do you share Quindlen's optimism?

I wish I were as hopeful as her. I mean, I think the strength that the religious right has been showing, and the kind of rightward drift of American politics, is very disheartening. I've tended to be optimistic, and I think there is this sense of almost an inevitability of gay

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