If your Facebook news feed looks anything like mine, you already know from jubilant friends that it’s the twenty-fifth annual National Coming Out Day. It can be difficult to remember that, just forty years ago, homosexuality was still listed as a psychiatric disorder by the American Psychiatric Association. Open homophobia was the dominant mode, not only in bar-counter conversation, but in the pages of exalted liberal magazines.

“I must have been nine or ten years old,” began Joseph Epstein, in an essay in the September, 1970 issue of Harper’s, “when my father, who had read me stories out of a children’s Bible, out of Robin Hood, out of the Brothers Grimm, who carefully instructed me never to say the word ‘nigger,’ one night sat me down in our living room to explain that there were ‘perverts’ in the world.” What Joseph Epstein’s father meant by “perverts” were men who were sexually attracted to other men. Epstein’s “Homo/hetero: The Struggle for Sexual Identity” elaborates on the condition of those men cursed (“in the medieval sense of having been struck by an unexplained injury, an extreme piece of evil luck”) with such perversion.

Epstein went on to describe, with almost clinical dryness—although maybe it’s just contempt—“the increasingly large sector of American life inhabited by cultural swingers and intellectual fellow travelers, in which a man is esteemed according to the degree of his alienation from his country.” The gays, he said, have achieved the highest possible “degree of alienation”; in this world “where badges are judged wounds, wounds badges, homosexuals have a deservedly high place,” earning a widespread “kind of jealousy of this elite state.”

Continuing on this theme of the gays’ special fortune—don’t go thinking that Epstein wanted homosexuality to be illegal; those laws were “barbarous, not to say illogical”—Epstein presents the “sexual simplicity” of the homosexual lifestyle, as described by “the hairdresser of a lady friend of mine.” (Elliot, the hairdresser, told Epstein that he did not like a lot of talk leading up to sex: in a homosexual bar, he said, you could walk up to a man and say, “You want to fuck? Let’s go to my place.” Simple.)

He closes the article with what he just might have seen as an expression of altruism (“One can tolerate homosexuality, a small enough price to be asked to pay for someone else’s pain”). “If I had the power to do so,” he writes, “I would wish homosexuality off the face of the earth… nothing [my four sons] could ever do would make me sadder than if any of them were to become homosexual. For then I should know them condemned to a permanent niggerdom among men, their lives, whatever adjustment they might make to their condition, to be lived out as part of the pain of the earth.”

That Epstein—born to Jewish parents in 1937, into a world at war against Hitler—could wish for the eradication of a whole group of people seems startling to many of us now. But it wasn’t then. Merle Miller, who had been an editor at Harper’s and who was a well-respected and best-selling author (and veteran of the Second World War), felt “outraged and saddened” to read Epstein’s language in “one of the best, maybe the best, magazine in the country.” He called Bob Kotlowitz, the magazine’s executive editor, to say as much. Kotlowitz, a friend of Miller’s, responded that he, like “a great many intelligent people … more or less” agreed with Epstein. As Miller later wrote, “the moment passed.”

Not for long. A few days later, Miller had lunch with two editors at the New York Times Magazine, Gerry Walker and Victor Navasky, and Epstein came up again. Navasky, who went on to edit the Nation, praised the unusual power of Epstein’s piece. Miller wouldn’t have it: “Epstein is saying genocide for queers!” In the essay, Epstein, who for decades would edit The American Scholar, had written that “Nobody says, or at least I have never heard anyone say, ‘Some of my best friends are homosexuals.’”

Navasky recounted his old friend’s response to this, at a panel discussion uptown last night, with a kind of glee that shows just how much has changed. “Many of my friends are gay!” Miller had exclaimed back then at lunch. Actually, Navasky paused to correct himself, Miller had said “fags”: “Many of my best friends are Jewish fags, black fags…. In fact, most of my friends are gay! In fact, I’m gay! In fact, that’s the first time I’ve ever said that in public! And there are only three of us here.”

Navasky returned to his office marveling that this public intellectual just came out of the closet over lunch. He spoke with his superiors at the Times, and, with quasi-approval from the famously homophobic higher-ups (in effect: that’ll be very different for us, but tell him he can try it and at least we’ll pay a kill fee), asked Miller if he would express his reaction in a magazine piece. What Miller turned in, Navasky said, was “so beautiful, so spectacularly different, so compelling, that it had to run.”

Miller couldn’t have known what would happen after the publication of his essay. Before the article ran, he wrote a letter to his former wife, saying as much. The Times just called, he wrote, and told him that the piece would be called “What It Means to Be a Homosexual.” “Now you really can’t get more direct than that, can you? At least it’s not cute…” he wrote. In the dozens of years he had known his former wife, including those when he had been married to her, they had never once discussed homosexuality. Miller enclosed the uncorrected galleys for her to see. “So that you will know….”

The article was published on January 17, 1971. It was extraordinary. Miller had not intended to write anything personal—“I have no taste for self-revelation,” he later wrote—but it seems to have spilled out from his pen, his typewriter, a reasoned and reasonably furious demand for respect. “I am sick and tired,” he wrote, “of reading and hearing such goddamn demeaning, degrading bullshit about me and my friends.” It was a great deal more than that, but in a way, Miller’s anger was it: a simple, loyal appeal on behalf of himself and his bullied friends.

The columnist and activist Dan Savage, who spoke on the panel with Navasky, said it was that line that got to him most when he read the essay for the first time last year. “Sometimes there’s a ‘Kumbaya’ feel” to coming out, he said. “Not here.” Miller was fed up, and, in Savage’s words, “in that single sentence captured the anger that has motivated L.G.B.T. activists from the Mattachine Society to the Stonewall riots to ACT UP to the It Gets Better Project. What are L.G.B.T.-rights activists but people who grew sick and tired of reading and hearing such goddamn demeaning, degrading bullshit about themselves and their friends and decided to speak up and fight back. ”

Miller’s essay got over two thousand letters—more than the paper had ever received for a single article. (Navasky has never read them, but his guess was that they were “ninety per cent hooray.”) Later that year the piece was published as a book, with an afterword by Miller. Forty-one years later, Penguin Classics has rereleased it as “On Being Different,” with a new foreword by Savage and a new afterword by Charles Kaiser, the journalist and author of “The Gay Metropolis.” Kaiser’s moving and eloquent essay, which the New York Review of Books has published as “When The New York Times Came Out of the Closet,” makes clear what a different world it was, when Epstein’s view could be printed in Harper’s. As Miller wrote in his May, 1971 afterword, doctors and therapists who came out would lose their patients; “lawyers wrote that they would lose their practices; writers would lose their readers; a producer would not be able to raise the money for his next musical.”