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.
