Merle Miller Corn Chowder

Here is another hearty home made soup to honor LGBT Hero Merle Miller. Shortly after the Stonewall event, fifty years ago, this famed writer set down just what it meant to be a “homosexual”. It was and is a masterpiece of LGBT culture. Read about him in short article after the recipe.

This soup is made of things right out of your pantry. You should not have much to pick up at the store for this. A thick, rich homemade chowder can be the perfect meal for a lunch or game night while we still can not count on the weather holding. 

 

Ingredients:

3 cups	Chicken broth low salt
2 cans	Corn Kernels, drained
1	Yellow Onion, finely diced
2 cloves	Garlic, minced
1 can	Diced Potatoes
1lbs	Fully cooked pork sausages
½ cups	Half-and-half non fat
¼ cup	Fresh Parsley, chopped
½ tsp	Dried Thyme
2 Tbsp	Butter
1 Tbsp	Olive Oil
	Salt and pepper to taste

Directions:
Do your cutting: Chop the onion and mince the garlic.


Warm the olive oil and butter in a dutch oven over medium heat. Toss in the onions, and cook for 5 minutes to start. 
 

Add the sausages, cook them until brown on both sides, another 5-6 minutes.
 
 

Remove the meat. (While the chowder is cooking cut the sausages into bite sized pieces.)

Pour in the chicken broth and scrape the bottom to release any browned bits. Add the drained can of potatoes and bring to a boil. Reduce to simmer for 30 minutes until the potatoes start to break down.
Then toss in the drained corn kernels for another 15 minutes. 
 

Carefully, using an immersion blender, smooth out the chowder. Season with salt and pepper, and add in the parsley. 

 

Once it is the consistency you want, add the cut up sausages and the can of creamed corn. 

 

Let simmer for 20 minutes to blend flavors.

If you like, serve with a spoonful of sour cream in each bowl.

For our music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZObv6QgRXc

What a wonderful meal to serve my Master Indy

socialslave

To satisfy and restore.

To nourish, support and maintain.

To gratify, spoil, comfort and please,

to nurture, assist, and sustain

…..I cook!

Please buy slave's cookbook:

The Little Black Book of Indiscreet Recipes by Dan White http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00F315Y4I/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_vAT4sb0934RTMvia @amazon

 

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Merle Miller was born in Iowa at the end of World War I. Before World War II, he was a Washington correspondent for the late Philadelphia Record. During the war, Miller served both in the Pacific and in Europe as a war correspondent and editor for Yank, The Army Weekly.

During the course of a writing career that spanned several decades, Miller wrote numerous novels, including the best-selling classic post war novel, That Winter (1948). He also wrote several non-fiction books, many television plays, and was the author of the screenplays, "The Rains of Ranchiphur" (1955), and "Kings Go Forth", (1958). His postwar career as a television script writer and novelist was interrupted by the advent of Senator Joseph McCarthy and Miller's inclusion on the "Blacklist." He did not re-enter TV until the early 60s.

The trigger:

Joseph Epstein, in an essay in the September, 1970 issue of Harper’s, spouted the typical anti-homosexual drivel that was common at that time. He closed with: “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.”

Merle Miller, who had been an editor at Harper’s, felt “outraged and saddened” to read Epstein’s language. 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. 

 

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, praised the unusual power of Epstein’s piece. Miller wouldn’t have it: “Epstein is saying genocide for queers!” In the essay, Epstein, had written that “Nobody says, or at least I have never heard anyone say, ‘Some of my best friends are homosexuals.’”

“Many of my best friends are Jewish fags, black fags…. Miller continued.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 and spoke with his superiors at the Times, They OK'ed and Miller was asked to 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.”

“What It Means to Be a Homosexual”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.

Miller couldn’t have known what would happen after the publication of his essay.

Miller’s essay got over two thousand letters—more than the paper had ever received for a single article. Later that year the piece was published as a book, with an afterword by Miller. Forty-one years later, Penguin Classics has re-released it as “On Being Different,” with a new foreword by Dan Savage and a new afterword by Charles Kaiser, the journalist and author of “The Gay Metropolis.”

Miller stated:

“I'll tell you this, though. It's not true, that saying about sticks and stones; it's words that break your bones.”

“I have never infected anybody, and it's too late for the head people to do anything about me now. Gay is good. Gay is proud. Well, yes, I suppose. If I had been given a choice (but who is?), I would prefer to have been straight. But then, would I rather not have been me? Oh, I think not, not this morning anyway.”

“A young homosexual friend recently said, "It's no secret that you, that one, has such-and-such color hair, is yea high, weighs thus and so, and so on, but when you keep one part of yourself secret, that becomes the most important part of you."
And that is true, I think; it may be the most important truth of all.”

Miller was fed up, and, in Dan Savage’s words, “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. ”

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.”

That afterword closed with a sigh of relief: “I realize how stifling the air has been all these years. I may not be freer, but I’m a lot more comfortable, a lot less cramped.” 

 

It was, of course, a landmark piece, and its author became an activist after it ran. Unfortunately, when Miller died in 1986, his New York Times obituary said that he had no survivors, although for years he had been with his partner, the writer David W. Elliott.