Ever since I saw the incredible Bloody Town Hall a few years ago, I’ve had an obsession with televised discourse from this era. I have no idea why, but I crave bad footage of white men with perfect manners and terrible hair insulting each other in clipped tones—legs crossed, pants hiked to the mid-calf region, socks pulled up egregiously high, dress shoes winking in the light. I want to watch Dick Cavett tell Norman Mailer to fold a sheet of paper “five ways and stick it where the moon don’t shine.” I want to see Jack Paar tell viewers of Oscar Levant, “for every pearl that comes out of his mouth, a pill goes in.” I want to see Jim Brown effortlessly ream idiotic racists.
But most of all, I want to see Gore Vidal. I want to see Gore Vidal doing anything.
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Eons ago, when I got my writing first job, I was reading Sexually Speaking, a collection of Vidal essays that get as close as the man ever got to proclaiming himself a professional f*ggot. He didn’t need to proclaim himself as anything: if we knew anything about Vidal, it was that he was queer and not closeted, but also not exactly out. Vidal famously hated the label “gay,” for what were, at least at the time, politically sound reasons. He sought to erase “homosexual” as a noun and return it to, in his eyes, its proper classification: adjective. He didn’t see queer people as having anything in common with each other, so why should it be a political identity? 1
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The reasons for Vidal’s stance seem obvious now. He was a brilliant, ambitious man operating in several industries where being openly gay precluded success. Politics, namely, but also books and letters. His second novel The City and the Pillar, one of the first American literary novels to treat gayness as natural and not inherently tragic, was considered so disgusting that the New York Times declined to review his next five books on principle, a blackballing that forced Vidal to reconsider his options as a writer. He suffered for his queerness, and fought for it while disavowing that he had anything in common with the rest of the fags—apart from f*cking, and possibly loving, men. And this was probably for reasons closer to someone like Roy Cohn’s 2 than we’d like to admit: Vidal was someone who liked to be near power, and there probably weren’t a lot of other gays around in those spaces back then, apart from the odd Christopher Isherwood (friend) or Tennessee Williams (friend) or maybe Truman Capote (enemy.)
The man who claimed that each time a friend found success a little part of him died couldn’t have felt himself in anything but bitter social competition with what other queers he did meet, and while he seems to have had a queer community (his life partner Howard Austen, among others) it didn’t serve his case to explain that to the public. That wasn’t what he was trying to do. Mainly he just wanted to talk about his own fixations: America, and how it started from a sh*tty place and ended up in a stupid one. During a career of asking the right questions and making tragically prophetic statements about the state of the nation, he managed to also carve a path for true sexual enlightenment, without throwing anyone—trans people, women, people of color—under the bus. A rare thing indeed, for one who famously never turned down the chance to sound off on TV.
His lively activism was and is different: though gayness is rarely the focus 3, his fiction and essays often end up being about the right to be gay—whether a “respectable” queer or a total sexual freak—and have human rights. This was in part the aim of Gay Liberation and is part of the fight for trans rights today, but not all of it. The rest, for us, does rely in remaining a community, in saying yes, I am queer, and yes, I do have something in common with other queer people, even if it’s just oppression. I personally know this to be true because of a long time, it pissed me off. As a younger, freshly-out person still clinging to fantasies of cis power, I preferred to think of myself as an accidentally trans person—a trans person who was somehow better than other trans people, because more “normal.” “Normal” meaning “conventionally successful,” the thing I was aiming to be above all else. Like Vidal, I was disinclined to lump myself together with an oppressed group whose lives seemed invisible at best, or “there but for the grace of God” cautionary tales at worst. I think when we’re young queers it’s more comforting to believe that all the other queer people are suffering because they’re failing, rather than recognizing the weight of the oppression that keeps us from occupying positions that are prestigious and close to power. At least, this is where I was at. I figured that all the other trans people were just whining: I had no cause to whine or feel oppressed, because I was going to be the First Literary Trans Person through sheer force of will, and through this achievement I would make my transness somehow okay.
A few nervous breakdowns disabused me of this obnoxious notion, and not a moment too soon. But I didn’t stop identifying with Gore Vidal. In fact, my identification grew stronger. Because a gay person running away from something inescapable always has something in common with a gay person doing the exact same thing. We tip our hats to each other. We see each other, we just don’t have time to talk.
I think Vidal’s own ambivalence about being queer has a lot to do with the psychology of the closet at that time. While we know there were obvious, all-but-open gay people all over the country during Vidal’s youth in the 50s, we also know that it was a dangerous thing to be and involved a wild amount of risk. Those who could realistically find and marry a beard often did, especially since in most areas of business and politics your success often depended on being married with a family 4, part of the performance of American normalcy that was expected in the 50s. Vidal was never interested in performing normalcy, but his politics were, in a certain sense, respectability politics. He felt he had nothing in common with the out gay people of later generations and had nothing to say about the “AID-sy 80s” perhaps because his relationship to the identity was so limited. And so it had to remain, he knew, if he wanted people to actually pay attention to his ideas.
Because I have sympathy for my earlier self—the self that gorged itself on Vidal’s ideas about queer politics from a young age—I also have sympathy for Vidal in this area. I get what it’s like to want to distance yourself from your own community because you think their oppression is contagious, rather than plainly systemic. I get what it’s like to want power because you can’t get no goddamn respect. I get what it’s like to want to leave this stupid country for a gorgeous Italian villa. I get what it’s like to hate yourself and assume it has nothing to do with social politics, and everything to do with your own failure to be “normal” in the eyes of society.
Vidal’s pop culture presence is almost without equal in American history for these reasons, and perhaps on best display in his debates with his intellectual and spiritual opposite, the grotesque William F. Buckley, Jr. Vidal appeared with Buckley in a series of televised debates in the late 1960s, which are the subject of Best of Enemies, a 2015 documentary that might as well be about everything that’s happening right now.
The result of those 1968 debates is that we can now see the two sides of the American coin—such as they are—duke it out live in the days before Trump. Buckley Jr. holds the line on what conservatives have always preached: screw the poor, go empire, go nationalism, go Christians. Vidal, meanwhile, makes the liberal case: give the people a life that is liveable, pull out of Vietnam, give people the sexual freedom that’s actually—when you think about it—the least this pathetic country owes them.
Through it all Vidal remains poised, almost giddy at the chance to politely insult his rival over and over again. It was a great visual rivalry: in a time when you didn’t have Crosby vs. Hope or Fred Allen vs. Jack Benny or even Walter Winchell vs. Hitler anymore, Vidal vs. Buckley made for great TV, if you can believe that an argument between two middle-aged men with patrician accents ever made for great TV. Even today it screams with life and excitement, because the things they’re debating are exactly the things we’re debating today. As in: Marginalized people—part of America, or trash we should exterminate?
Vidal was the face of a certain kind of progressive politics of this time. He used his privilege not to fight for gay liberation as it was being fought on the streets, but to present a politically acceptable version of that fight to Mr. and Mrs. America tuning in at 7. We needed someone like Vidal, whose upper-class accents and Suetonius quotations were at the same level of Buckley Jr.’s. Vidal’s ability to match him point for point, quote for quote was exactly what normal people (stupid, non-intellectual) needed to convince them that gay people were actually maybe fine and not the problem. Vidal put his face and his body on the line, most famously in the debate where Buckley threatens to punch his lights out over the infamous “crypto-Nazi” remark.
“Listen you queer,” Buckley Jr. sneers in the unmistakable, universal accent of anti-gay disgust. With the camera on Vidal, we see his response: a delighted smile. It’s an incredible moment of television just for how much you can see of these famously reserved men. If anyone doubted that the personal was political and vice versa, this moment solidified that great 60s truism. We can see it nakedly, the difference between these men, one of whom is cool, calm, and totally correct, the other of whom is eaten up by his hatred for people he considers to be less than himself. Buckley’s eyes go hard and small—his jaw nearly dislocates. By contrast, Vidal seems to open up to the camera. His eyes go soft and almost seductive. It’s like he can’t believe his good luck, that he’s here making this stupid, ugly man squirm simply by pointing out what Buckley’s politics are actually in alignment with: not good old down-home American values, but covert fascism.
That smile was the perfect response, managing to reveal Vidal in the rare unguarded moment while also acting as an extension of his on-camera persona, the man both pissed off and tickled to death that we have to live in such a “shabby” country with such stupid, anti-progressive people. It was a smile that broke through the noise of respectability television, though some later viewed it as disingenuous. What kind of queer would smile at being called a slur?
“I am a happy warrior,” he tells a caller on a talk radio show years later of the proto-viral moment. “I am in battle, and I’m enjoying it.” Happy yes, but rageful, too.
“He goes on automatic anger,” Larry Kramer wrote of Vidal in a 1992 interview 5 . “His conversation is sprinkled with the buzzwords of a lifetime; they no longer seem to convince even him. I identify with him completely. Who has listened to him? What has his wrath made right? The world is farther away than ever from his dream.”
Kramer is right in pointing out that Vidal—to some a radical provocateur, to others a closet case in denial—had a dream. It was the same dream that a lot of us have right now, the dream of an America that doesn’t constantly throw its most vulnerable and disenfranchised under the bus. A dream of a country that acknowledges it was built on greed, slavery, and countless other human rights abuses. A hope that someday we’ll give up on the pointless empire-building and try to solve the basic problems of living life in this country.
Maybe Vidal’s well-read brand of polite outrage wasn’t enough to change anything—it never is. But he also wasn’t allowed to get as angry as he probably was, not on television, not in the 1960s. In the Buckley debates, he remains poised, unflustered in a way it’s hard to be when your humanity is being debated. As Buckley sweats, his tics exaggerated, his composure slipping, Vidal only becomes surer of himself. The rapper JT might well have been speaking of Vidal when she wrote, “unfazed, unbothered, unf*ckwitable, b*tch why bother?” The one true American philosopher we ever got had no reason to doubt his clear vision of the country, and his dream of creating a better one. But anyone who dreams of a better America is bound to end up with a broken heart, a thing which must be shielded at all costs from those who might see it and pity it. Vidal used his unmatched ability to intellectually entertain to deflect from the fact that he was often alone in a world of straight people who were more politically successful than him and more deeply listened to and understood than him—many of whom might have always been secretly thinking of him in “listen you queer” terms.
But he was joyful in his rage, too, and he let us see that. What he knew was what every activist knows who’s in it for the long run. You have to be a happy warrior. You have to take at least some relish in the fight. Otherwise, they’ve already won. Not once in his many television appearances does he let us forget for a second that this is the beautiful, unflustered face of a man who f*cks men without shame. 6
That’s the other thing about Vidal—in an era that seemed to go out of its way to put the ugliest possible men on camera, what a relief Vidal’s beauty must have been to viewers. Television was his medium, it captured his gorgeousness in all its varied forms across the decades. The Greek God looks of his youth softened, in the 1970s and 80s, into a beauty more puckish, slightly horsey in middle age, but still formidable. He became a person you’d recognize not just for being beautiful, but for being right: someone who shows up on TV to debunk the American bullshit, always a welcome presence not least because of his beauty. Who wouldn’t welcome, amidst a pile-up of jowly faces, slipping toupees7 and stodgy bullshit opinions, the entrance of a bonafide Dorian Gray onto the scene? Imagine being a gay man in this repressed, dogshit culture and suddenly turning on the TV to see the full lips, the impish eyebrows, the sense of something—a heart? 8 —deeply locked away but still somehow accessible in the mocking glances he tenders his enemies. You don’t have to be beautiful to make a point, but it helps, and Vidal—himself a connoisseur of beautiful men—knew it. In his more sensational TV appearances—his Dick Cavett spat with Norman Mailer, the Buckley Jr. debates—he is in on joke, however grim it may be, howevermuch it is meant to be at his expense. He never lets anyone else win. How could he? He’s always right.
Not just about social justice—about everything. The whole time he was warning us about what’s happening right now. He told us that this was a country made for the wealthy, by the wealthy—and who would know better than him, who grew up with a senator grandfather who let his grandson read the congressional record at age 7? He told us not to look for intelligence in politics, deeming it a place for “energetic mediocrities.” Constantly he warns us about America trying to expand its empire—a disastrous impulse we’re still suffering for—rather than taking care of the people here in this country, living in poverty and enforced ignorance. He told us that there’s no reason, in a country with as big a military budget as we have, for anyone to go hungry. He told us there was no reason why we shouldn’t all have equal rights. And he was right. He was just so ridiculously right, and he was saying it the whole time, loudly, as many times as he could. And still we’re here. Because nobody listened.
“The idea that there is any far left to this country is madness,” Vidal said in a 1977 interview with Trump mentor Roy Cohn. Then as now, he could not be more right. Even the classic fight between him and Buckley Jr., the “listen you queer” one, is about something that doesn’t exist in our timeline: Republican shame at being called a Nazi. Can you imagine such a thing of today’s Republicans, the youngest of which greet each other on the street with Roman salutes 9?
He understood what every good politician should understand—that if we knew our history, we wouldn’t keep stupidly trying to harken back to some idea of a great or even good past. “This country was successful because of cheap energy and free labor. We’re never going to have that again,” he tells Mike Wallace in a 60 Minutes interview from the late 70s. He was one of the few white historians who acknowledged that America was built on, and achieved a false status of “greatness,” because of slavery. He spoke the truth at every opportunity, and repeated himself to the point of exhaustion, and still we didn’t listen, we didn’t hear. Why? Because he was gay? Because he was right?
There’s something about Vidal that reminds me of the famous scene in Broadcast News, when Holly Hunter begs her boss to make the right decision, not just the diplomatic one. “It must be nice being the smartest person in the room,” he smarms at her. “No,” she says. “It’s awful.” It is awful. Who knew this better than Vidal, who prophesied that we’d eventually elect a president who less than a third of the country voted for?
I feel such empathy for Vidal. For decades he was the smartest man in the room, the person most awake to this country’s systemic failures. The best man for the job of leading this place into a future that cared about people, not profit. But he didn’t get the political career he wanted, because telling the truth in a smart way doesn’t make you friends and it doesn’t make people like you and you doesn’t do much of anything most of the time except annoy people. He was brave enough to keep on annoying people with the problematic reality of this country, of human nature, of history. I wouldn’t exist—and I don’t think gay rights of any kind would exist—without him. It’s not an exaggeration to say that re-reading Vidal’s essays has been keeping me sane this year, even when it should drive me crazy with the reminder of how preventable it all was. But we know this: Cassandra’s curse was to see the future and be disbelieved.
Kramer again: “He is one of my heroes, and like me, he’s obviously very tired…He has fought and created and never stopped trying for as long as we have known him….He may be exhausted and despondent and cynical…but he is still trying. Oh, that I can go on, still trying.”
This, in 1991. How much more tired would we become, and how much more tired do we still have to get, and how much more righteously angry, before anything in this stupid, shameful country changes? ♦
This piece first appeared on Substack.
FOOTNOTES:
1 On the contrary: he feared that creating such identifiable minority groups would make us easier for the police state to round up and kill. And girl, he wasn’t wrong…
2 CLOUT!
3 That is, he rarely made it the focus. Interviewers were always thrilled to bring up queerness and to his credit, he always answered their often prying questions with dignity and openness.
4 Vidal’s suspicion was that this was because family men “made good slaves,” since you’re less likely to stir things up at work when you have a wife and kids to support at home.
5 “The Sadness of Gore Vidal” for QW Magazine, collected in Sexually Speaking.
6 His shame was never in the act of gay sex, but in the social misunderstanding of gay sex as “deviant.”
7 He could also be hilariously cruel about the ugliness of others. In a 1976 Playboy essay titled “Sex is Politics,” he recalls a rare moment of discomposure on a TV panel: “I was staring at the lacing to his piece (half the men who appear on television professionally are bald: why?). Nervously, he touched his forehead, and continued.”
8 Though he would deny he had one: “I’m exactly as I appear. There is no warm lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water.” Yet Nina Straight, Vidal’s half-sister, recalls another side. In In Bed with Gore Vidal, Tim Teeman writes: “the “only time” [Nina] saw her half-brother upset was when, “sometime in the ‘50s or ‘60s,” they were staying “at a friend’s place in some woods” and Vidal lost a tiny picture of [Howard] Austen he carried in his wallet, “of Howard as a little boy with bangs and Mary Jane shoes. He lost it and we had to look all over for it. He was really upset and saying, ‘He’s the only good person I’ve ever known’ — ‘good’ meaning simple, guileless — and he loved the image of that little boy, the basic, innocent dedication and purity.”
9 Nazi salutes—don’t let anyone tell you different.
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