Not long after the Harper’s article came out, Merle Miller had lunch with two editors at The New York Times Magazine, and Epstein’s piece came up. Miller was by then already an established journalist and author—though not always a progressive one, judging by a 1953 issue of Pageant magazine I dug up in which he denounces “career girls.” When Miller revealed during the lunch that he, himself, is gay, one of the Times editors asked Miller to write a reaction piece.

Miller’s piece would play a crucial role in LGBT history. Called “What It Means to Be a Homosexual,” it was among the first major works of journalism in which the author himself comes out. “I did not encounter the word faggot until I got to Manhattan,” he writes. “I’ll tell you this, though. It’s not true, that saying about sticks and stones; it’s words that break your bones.”

As Emily Greenhouse described in 2012 in The New Yorker,339 Miller at first resisted writing something personally revelatory, but “it seems to have spilled out from his pen, his typewriter, a reasoned and reasonably furious demand for respect.”

The piece attracted more than two thousand letters, many of them, as Miller’s obituary reads,340 “from other homosexuals thanking him for helping to restore their self-respect.” Miller seemed compelled to use his personal story to steer history in a more humane direction. (Fittingly, Miller’s essay was later published as a book called On Being Different.)341

Not only was Miller reluctant to tell his personal story, he also seemed not entirely ready to embrace his difference. “If I had been given a choice (but who is?), I would prefer to have been straight,” he writes.342 At points in the piece, he wonders to himself if homosexuality is, indeed, contagious.

But writing the article also seemed to bring him some relief, or perhaps even some contentment, in his role of uncertain navigator. “It is a very clear day in late December, and the sun is shining on the pine trees outside my studio,” Miller wrote. “The air is extraordinarily clear, and the sky is the color it gets only at this time of year, dark, almost navy blue. On such a day I would not choose to be any one else or any place else.”