Who Is Gore Vidal?
by David Bianco
Born into a wealthy family in 1925, Eugene Luther Gore Vidal has
politics in
his blood. Vidal's maternal grandfather was Thomas P. Gore, a powerful
U.S.
senator from Oklahoma. Al Gore is a distant cousin. John F. Kennedy was
his
stepbrother-in-law.
But it's as a novelist and critic that Vidal actually made his mark.
After
graduating high school in 1943, Vidal enlisted in the army. He never saw
battle and, out of boredom, began writing his first novel. Based on
firsthand
experiences aboard an army freighter, Williwaw (1946) was
published along
with a host of other postwar war novels and received high marks.
Eschewing college, Vidal moved to New York to write. His second novel
disappointed him, though it received good reviews, and he decided to
take a
bigger risk with his next one.
Although The City and the Pillar (1948) is now considered a
classic of gay
literature, its frank discussion of
an affair between two young men and its daring suggestion that
homosexual
relationships were natural made reviewers' tongues wag. Vidal dedicated
the novel to "J.T." and loosely
based one of the characters on his first male lover, Jimmie Trimble.
Despite
the controversial subject matter, the novel rushed onto the bestseller
lists.
Some prominent critics refused to review Vidal's next five novels,
possibly
out of homophobia. The lack of attention marginalized his writing. To
make
ends meet, he went into television, movies, theater, and politics.
In 1954 Vidal decided to put fiction writing aside until he could make
enough money to write whatever he pleased. For the next 10 years he
earned a sizable income working on teleplays and screenplays, including
the
scripts for Suddenly, Last Summer and Ben-Hur.
During the early 1960s, Vidal also dabbled in politics, running
unsuccessfully for a U.S. House seat. During the Kennedy administration
he
served on the President's Advisory Committee on the Arts.
Ultimately, however, Vidal returned to fiction. Julian (1964),
based on the life of the
fourth-century Roman emperor, established his literary style of
intercutting
humorous asides, gossip, and trivia into painstakingly researched
historical
novels. He went on to write a cycle of American history novels, in which
he
explored the seamy side of U.S. politics and gave fictional form to
famous
historical figures.
His greatest achievement as a novelist, however, may have been his most
controversial book. Vidal's experimental satire, Myra
Breckinridge (1968),
was the first American novel about a transsexual. The protagonist,
Myron, is
a gay man who has sex-reassignment surgery and is reborn as Myra.
Two years later, the novel became a movie, starring Rex Reed and Raquel
Welch
as Myron-Myra. A resounding flop, and panned by critics as "repugnant,"
it's a camp classic today.
Beginning in the 1960s Vidal also distinguished himself as a literary
and
social critic. Lauded as "America's finest essayist," he has penned
scores
of droll, often biting commentaries. "The chief play in a Vidal essay,"
noted
one critic, "is to point out that the emperor has no clothes and then go
a
step further and remove the poor man's skin."
Although Vidal has lived with companion Howard Austen for 50 years, and
although he has had numerous homosexual liaisons (with, among others,
Jack
Kerouac), he asserts: "There is no such thing as a homosexual person.
There are only homosexual acts." Nonetheless, some of Vidal's
most passionate
essays have dissected homophobia and sexual discrimination and were
recently
collected in Gore Vidal: Sexually Speaking.
David Bianco is the author of Gay Essentials (Alyson
Publications), a
collection of his history columns, and Modern Jewish History for Everyone. He can be reached at DaveBianco@aol.com.
For further reading:
Vidal, Gore. Palimpsest: A Memoir.
Random House, 1995.
Kaplan, Fred. Gore Vidal: A Biography.
Doubleday, 1999.
Read PlanetOut's interview with Gore
Vidal.
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