Neil Miller

Award-winning author

In his award-winning book In Search of Gay America, journalist Neil Miller examined the changing lives of gays and lesbians across the United States, particularly in small towns and rural areas. He explored what it is like to be gay in places like Bunceton, Missouri and Bismarck, North Dakota and the difficulties in forging a gay identity where there appears to be little tolerance or support. These same challenges that face many gays and lesbians in the U.S. prompted Miller to go even further. In his book, Out in the World: Gay and Lesbian Life from Buenos Aires to Bangkok, Miller takes an even more exotic journey, traveling to twelve countries to provide the first large-scale look at gay and lesbian life around the globe. Miller's most recent book, Sex-Crime Panic: A Journey to the Paranoid Heart of the 1950's shows the dark and strange chapter in history in which the McCarthy era destroyed the lives of gay men in the American heartland.

As he did in In Search of Gay America, Miller looks at the topics of sexuality, relationships, politics, social patterns, community building, and the impact of AIDS. But as Out in the World demonstrates, gay and lesbian life abroad is quite different from that in our country. Miller had to look at the economic, religious, and social factors unique to each country, as well as the impact the gay-liberation and feminist movements might have had on countries outside of the United States. In the process, Miller began to ask more fundamental questions: What are the preconditions that make it possible for individuals to live in an openly gay or lesbian life? What does "gay" or "lesbian" or even "homosexual" mean? Is a gay or lesbian identity merely a Western culture notion?

Miller's work, Out of the Past, deals with gay and lesbian history from 1869 to the present. His work, investigates "the more than one hundred years since the concept of homosexual identity - or of the gay and lesbian community - was first articulated." Out of the Past introduces the reader to an amazing range of the pivotal people, places and events in gay and lesbian history including the cowboys and Indians of the American West, the decadence of 1920s Paris, Jazz Age Harlem, Nazi persecution, the bathhouses and nightlife of the 1970s, the Stonewall riots, the March on Washington, the Gay Games, and the age of AIDS. Miller identifies seminal figures including Harvey Milk, James Baldwin, Virginia Woolf, Martina Navratilova, Michel Foucalt, and Oscar Wilde - and excerpts the writings of Baudelaire, Joe Orton, Colette, Yukio Mishima, and Randy Shilts, among others. It covers gay and lesbian life in Soviet Russia, Castro's Cuba, and modern Japan, and chronicles recent developments in gay politics from the Reagan administration's response to AIDS to Clinton's position on gays in the military to ACT UP and the modern gay and lesbian movement. In 2005, an updated, 10th anniversary edition of my history book, Out of the Past, was released.