Theatre review: What It Means

American screenwriter, journalist and novelist Merle Miller became a major figure in the gay rights movement largely - if this adaptation of his most famous essay and subsequent memoir is to be believed - by accident. A decorated World War II veteran who'd been blacklisted by McCarthyites and returned his medals in protest at the Vietnam War, he'd been a fervent but understated kind of radical. When James Corley’s What It Means first joins him, he’s holed up in his rural New York State house on the day of one of the first post-Stonewall gay rights marches in Manhattan: It’s close enough for him to join easily, but he doesn’t think that’s his kind of activism. But in 1970 Harper’s Magazine, of which he’d been editor before getting, he implies, pushed out, publishes a lengthy article about sexuality by a straight writer.

Joseph Epstein’s “Homo/hetero: the struggle for sexual identity” purported to be an even-handed and sympathetic study, but gay people recognised the homophobia. In particular, and using a technique all too familiar in 2023 from transphobic rhetoric, Epstein feigns concern for how bad homosexuals have it, by wishing there were none on earth.

Shocked by how even the straight friends he considered liberal heap praise on the article, Miller starts pointing out that this statement is genocidal including, more forcefully than intended, to a couple of New York Times editors at lunch. Having inadvertently outed himself to a packed restaurant, he goes further and accepts the editors’ offer of writing a piece for them countering Epstein’s. The resulting “What It Means to Be a Homosexual,” and its later expansion into the book On Being Different, are what Corley has turned into what is – for the most part – a monologue.

Richard Cant as Miller helps Harry Mackrill’s production zip through its 90 minutes despite the sad undercurrent to the life story that sees him being homophobically bullied from the age of 4; much of the rest of his life is spent hiding, trying to fit in and joining in with the macho culture around him, but any time he returns to his small town, even as a war hero and successful screenwriter, he can’t escape the memory of the effeminate little boy. Fitting in is only possible insofar as he’s allowed to – “A fag is just a homosexual who’s left the room” becomes a refrain.

We know where he gets his catty side from any time he talks to his mother, a classic of the “I’m supportive but for god’s sake don’t tell anyone we know” genre, and that does come out in his own witty comments (“Alexander the Great loved colonizing and sodomizing, what could be more masculine?”) Despite the often downbeat subject matter (hindsight also brings an added dark edge to the descriptions of homosexuality being seen as a disease sweeping New York,) Cant really brings a lot of warmth to this understated polemic. But 15 minutes from the end Miller is forced to turn things up a gear as the monologue gets a shift: A Boy From Pittsburgh (Cayvan Coates) arrives to demand Miller offer some hope, and acknowledge his own part in the negative narrative (having written a number of novels, Miller is proud to have finished his first one with a gay protagonist; but he still has him kill himself in the end.)

The Boy represents the letters he received from queer people across America after the article was published, variously thanking him, contradicting him and demanding he do more. It brings full circle a very satisfying narrative arc as, having started by excusing himself from activism and sniffing at the various public figures beginning to come out, he ends up a very publicly out figure and mentor to the groups protesting Harper’s for publishing the Epstein article in the first place. With little asides to his unseen partner David in another room (who always seems to be cooking and cleaning after Merle, but never quite to his satisfaction,) What It Means balances the depressing realities of queer lives historically, and by association today, with the quieter happy moments when people are allowed to just get on with their lives: A heartwarming evening with a sour pinch.

What It Means by James Corley, based on On Being Different by Merle Miller, is booking until the 28th of October at Wilton’s Music Hall.

Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Danny Kaan