Book Review : Sociological Travelogue Through Gay America

In Search of Gay America: Women and Men in a Time of Change by Neil Miller (Atlantic Monthly Press: $18.95, 324 pages)

“I wanted to know, 20 years after the Stonewall riots, if gay pride and progress had finally begun to trickle down to the grass roots,” explains Neil Miller, a gay journalist from Boston, in his introduction to “In Search of Gay America.” So Miller spent a couple of years on the road, seeking out some of the more surprising pockets of gay life, and now he gives us a chatty and colorful account of his travels. At its best moments, “In Search of Gay America” is a kind of State of the Union address on gay sexuality, culture and politics across America in the 1980s.

All too often, however, Miller’s book is more like a sociological travelogue, a whirlwind excursion through gay communities in small towns and suburbs, big cities and barrios. Miller gives us glimpses of a gay congressman, a lesbian judge, a lesbian couple of Pacific-Asian descent who--remarkably enough--”decided to marry because they want to have children,” a community of lesbianas Latinas in San Antonio and gay Native Americans in Minneapolis.

He invites us along on an after-hours visit to a black gay bar in Memphis, and then he takes us to Friday night services at a gay and lesbian synagogue in San Francisco. We witness a gay legislator at work in the Minnesota state house, and the ecclesiastical trial of a lesbian minister in Dover, N.H.

Hidden Pockets of Gay Life

As a former “movement” journalist in search of the still-hidden pockets of gay life across America, Miller is passed along a kind of hip underground railroad of college students, counterculture newspaper editors, New Age farmers, feminist organizers, AIDS activists and gay pols. Some of his experiences in the gay underground are faintly comical; when Miller meets one of his “contacts” at a restaurant in a gritty West Virginia coal town, the place turns out to be a Bohemian hangout complete with Tiffany lamps, an abundance of plants, and waiters wearing ponytails--”the kind of establishment,” he observes, “that serves broccoli omelettes.” Along the way, he manages to pick up--and, without fail, to pass along--a lot of dubious lore; Miller volunteers that the night clerk of the West Virginia hotel where he stays “was rumored to have once been Liberace’s lover.”

Still, the sheer accumulation of data on gay life is a significant accomplishment. Not surprisingly, Miller has discovered that gay men and women can be found in the small towns and rural backwaters of America--but their lives are often constricted, frustrating, even oppressive. For example, the only gay hangout in Fargo, N.D., is shunned by middle-class gays, who spend their weekends in search of more gracious (and anonymous) pleasures in Minneapolis-St. Paul. Miller points out that the big city, with its social and cultural diversity, its opportunities for living as one pleases, and its critical mass of gay men and women, explain exactly why a gay community flourishes in New York and San Francisco and barely exists at all in a place like Bunceton, Mo., even though the tiny Missouri town has elected a gay mayor.

“People are so far back in the closet,” says a woman in Selma, Ala., “they are back behind several racks of clothes. Maybe underneath the shoes.”

Miller is more encouraged by the urban and suburban scene, where gay men and women are busily acquiring the badges and emblems of the successful middle-class life. He is particularly impressed by the struggles of gay couples throughout the country who are adopting and raising children--and lesbian couples who are bearing babies through artificial insemination. Miller introduces us to two such women--one has already given birth, and the other wants to have a baby too; so they bought “a year’s supply” of frozen semen from the same donor through a Los Angeles sperm bank “because they wanted to create a genetic bond between the children.”

Fear of AIDS

Miller discovered that AIDS--or at least the fear of it--has not yet reached small-town America. “As I traveled through the heartland,” he writes, “one of the things that struck me was how little AIDS was discussed, how remote it seemed.” By contrast, gay communities in the big cities--especially San Francisco and New York--are suffering from “bereavement overload,” and the sobering fear of AIDS has changed the wide-open sexuality that once characterized gay life in the big city.

At the same time, the public concern over AIDS has given the gay community and especially its activist organizations “greater visibility and credibility.” Writes Miller: “Suddenly, the power structure was paying attention.”

(One result of the AIDS crisis, according to Miller, has been an increase in monogamy: “I had no sexual explosion, no sleazy period, and I guess I never will,” a gay Boston college student tells Miller. “AIDS has given me the excuse to be the way I want to be.” Still, Miller unflinchingly describes one particularly sleazy form of “safe sex”--and he gives a clinical description of “a lesbian safe-sex kit available by mail from a company in Macon, Georgia.”)

Miller offers few great truths, but the author insists that he was encouraged by what he saw during his travels through gay America. “I found no single vision of the gay future,” Miller concludes. “Perhaps, in the end, sexual pluralism is something society will never accept. . . . But I have seen too many changes in a very short time, met too many people who have taken tremendous risks by becoming open about their sexuality and who will never return to the constricted lives of the past. For them, for all of us, there is no going back.”