Gore Vidal lived too long
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/gore-vidal-lived-too-long/article4461047/
Beneath it all – the cruelty, the bitter humour, the prose as gleaming as polished silver – Gore Vidal was naive.
There was, for him, a Platonic America: a small, pure, free republic of the caring, corrupted at the very moment of its creation – rather Christian, for a man who despised the religion – and now so depraved that it deserved the fate of Sodom.
I learned my American history from him. He introduced me to Lincoln, the one human being Mr. Vidal seemed so in awe of that he could only report him, not explain him. It took me years to overcome his grudge against Theodore Roosevelt.
Getting over Gore Vidal was an important life lesson for many of us. It took a while to realize that seeing America through his eyes required the capacity to hate. He was capable of hate; few others are.
Instead, the world briefly notes his passing, discounting the anger, remembering that he was from such a different world and such a distant past. His death reminds us of how sad a life can be that extends too far beyond its time. He lived too long.
Beneath it all – the cruelty, the bitter humour, the prose as gleaming as polished silver – Gore Vidal was naive.
There was, for him, a Platonic America: a small, pure, free republic of the caring, corrupted at the very moment of its creation – rather Christian, for a man who despised the religion – and now so depraved that it deserved the fate of Sodom.
I learned my American history from him. He introduced me to Lincoln, the one human being Mr. Vidal seemed so in awe of that he could only report him, not explain him. It took me years to overcome his grudge against Theodore Roosevelt. Getting over Gore Vidal was an important life lesson for many of us. It took a while to realize that seeing America through his eyes required the capacity to hate. He was capable of hate; few others are.
Instead, the world briefly notes his passing, discounting the anger, remembering that he was from such a different world and such a distant past. His death reminds us of how sad a life can be that extends too far beyond its time. He lived too long.And there was, behind it all, like a reflection on the wall of a cave, a half-glimpsed portrait of an America that could have been: an America that stayed small, that stayed true to the words that Jefferson failed to stay true to in his Declaration, that treated all men as equal, though none were quite so equal as Mr. Vidal and his friends. For him, American history was a betrayal of American possibility.
But even at the height of his powers, few really believed. He ran for Congress and lost, for a Democratic Senate nomination and lost. Worse, far worse, he started to fail to shock. You had sex with a thousand people by the age of 25? Is that all? You took illicit drugs? Who hasn't? You believe the United States is in terminal decline, bankrupt and headed for a military coup? Join the crowd.
All the worthy opponents – William F. Buckley, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote – not only died on him, they became irrelevant along with him. No one listened to the old elites any more, not even the saucy ones. And that flickering, Platonic America he dreamed of? Even he never believed it could have existed outside the imaginations of the Framers.
Do not go back and reread Lincoln, as I did earlier this year. It's so much wordier than you remember, and so irritatingly knowing. And it's worse than that. Mr. Vidal can't love his characters. A great writer must love his characters, even if he hates everyone else in the world. But his characters are just vehicles to allow Gore Vidal to be Gore Vidal.
He was once deeply in love with Jimmie Trimble. They had met at school. Trimble was killed at Iwo Jima. That love was the foundation of The City and the Pillar. Mr. Vidal once said he only realized years later that Trimble had been "the completion of myself," his one great love.
Or a love that would remain perfect because it had never really been tested, because it was more idea than experience. Rather like the America that Mr. Vidal could glimpse, that he invited us to imagine. Not that his death isn't a loss, even if it came after he had long since been outside his time. (He had declared Mr. Capote's death to be "a wise career move.") The world is a grubbier place now than it was when Mr. Vidal was a great man. Politics and prose today are as casually savage as he ever was, but with none of his elan. Gore Vidal has been replaced by Jon Stewart.
The class he came from has been replaced by a new set with new money and new, and much cruder, ideas.
Worst of all, the tributes over the past few days have been mostly affectionate. He would have hated that. Worship him or punch him (as Norman Mailer once did. He responded: "Words fail Norman, again"), but don't treat him like a loveable but increasingly cranky old uncle finally going to his reward.
He lived too long.
Globe Magazine
http://www.globe-magazine.com
BOBBY KENNEDY AND OTHER GAY KENNEDYS
http://pierrejoubert.blogspot.com/2014/01/bobby-kennedy-and-other-gay-kennedys.html
Bobby Kennedy had an affair with ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev.
This is according to The Pink Triangle, a new book by Hollywood biographer Darwin Porter.
The book reports conversations with Gore Vidal, Truman Capote and others.
Capote believed Bobby Kennedy was homosexual.
The 'pink triangle' prisoners: The Nazis' persecution of homosexual men
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUpKrOyULPc
I Survived The Holocaust Twin Experiments
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdgPAetNY5U
Pink Triangle: The Feuds and Private Lives of Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Famous Members of Their Entourages
https://www.amazon.com/Pink-Triangle-Tennessee-Williams-Entourages/dp/1936003376
One hot summer night in 1945, three young American writers, each an enfant terrible, came together in a stuffy Manhattan apartment for the first time. Each member of this pink triangle was on the dawn of world fame—Tennessee Williams for A Streetcar Named Desire; Gore Vidal for his notorious homosexual novel, The City and the Pillar; and Truman Capote for Other Voices, Other Rooms, a book that had been marketed with a photograph depicting Capote as a underaged sex object that caused as much controversy as the prose inside.
Each of the three remained competitively and defiantly provocative throughout the course of his writing career. Initially hailed by critics as “the darlings of the gods,” each of them would, in time, be attacked for his contributions to film, the theater, and publishing. Some of their works would be widely reviewed as “obscene rantings from perverted sociopaths.”
From that summer night emerged betrayals that eventually evolved into lawsuits, stolen lovers, public insults, and the most famous and flamboyant rivalries in America’s literary history. The private opinions of these authors about their celebrity acquaintances usually left scar tissue.
Vidal became the most iconoclastic writer since Voltaire, needling and satirizing the sacred cows of his era and explosively describing subjects which included America’s gay founding fathers, the lesbian affairs of Eleanor Roosevelt, his own seduction of the Beat Generation’s spiritual leader and guru, Jack Kerouac. The book contains an overview of Vidal’s hot, then glacial, relationship with the fabled diarist Anaïs Nin, and the drawn-out slugfests which followed.
Capote became the mascot of the ultra-fashionable jet set, surrounded and showcased by his glamorous “swans.” Eventually, Capote feuded not only with Vidal, but with “The Queen of the Best-Sellers,” Jacqueline Susann, publicly referring to her as “a truck driver in drag.” Capote’s own struggles for bestsellerdom are depicted during the research of his all-time hit, In Cold Blood, wherein he falls hopelessly in love with one of its killers. The book contains details about his hosting of “The Party of the Century,” and his self-destructive descent into isolation, alcohol, and drugs.
Tennessee Williams, attacked for his “incurable sense of decadence,” became as notorious as his plays. His tumultuous private life is explored as never before in a portrait that’s as poignant and flamboyant as any character he created, including that of Blanche DuBois. Did Tennessee really perform fellatio on JFK at his Palm Beach compound? Did Warren Beatty really have sex with him as a means of procuring his role as the gigolo in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone? What really happened when a then-unknown actor, Marlon Brando, arrived on Tennessee’s doorstep in Provincetown during World War II?