Gore vidal gay
Gore Vidal’s Forgotten Rival
BY DOUG IRELAND | If one asks male queers today who wrote the first serious latest American novel that was explicitly queer , nine out of 10 would address Gore Vidal, for his 1948 novel “The City and the Pillar.” But they’d be wrong.
That distinction belongs to John Horne Burns, whose 1947 “The Gallery,” based on his wartime service in North Africa and Italy, garnered almost universal rave reviews, becoming a bestseller that immediately went through 12 printings. The novel nearly won the Pulitzer Prize for its hitherto unknown 31-year-old author, who became a literary celebrity overnight.
Burns’ portrait was featured on the cover of the influential Saturday Review of Literature as “the optimal war novelist of 1947,” and he was the first author to be praised simultaneously by Harper’s magazine and Harper’s Bazaar, the latter running a “romantic photograph of Burns taken on a gritty Modern York street” when it listed him as one of 1947’s “Men of the Moment” — along with David Lean, Robert Ryan, Michael Redgrave, and Stephen Spender.
John Horne Burns, Americ
When I was in my soon twenties and first stage to think about coming out, I just happened to have a conversation with a well-read gay man at a dinner party. Somehow Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar came up. The premise intrigued me, as did the morbid darkness the gentleman described. Thus, this was the first LGBT book I sought out on my quest toward coming out. It was disturbing. But I was intrigued because it is very much a product of the time it was written and the author who wrote it. I ended up seeking out more and more LGBT books in a quest for understanding: of myself, of LGBT history, etc. Mostly, though, the books seemed to mirror the internal struggles I was dealing with–albeit in a much more grandiose, frequently violent fashion. Plus, it’s by Gore Vidal, so I thought I could hide my LGBT curiosity behind a love of literature, or something about that.
So really, for better or worse, this is where it all began for me and LGBT books–culminating a decade later in this LGBT novel recommendations series I’m doing. So this review is compassionate of a full-circle kind of thing for me.
Most significantly, TCatP was the fir
Gore Vidal
Gore Vidal was an American author, screenwriter, and public intellectual known for his biting wit and iconoclastic views. He wrote extensively about sex, sexuality, politics, and religion.
Vidal was a man of many talents. A prolific nonfiction author, novelist, and essayist; a public intellectual, debater, and television personality; a political operative and two-time political candidate; a socialite and cultural icon; and an accomplished screenwriter and actor.
As a fiction composer, Vidal penned 29 novels, including The City and the Pillar (1948), which caused controversy for its groundbreaking depiction of a same-sex male relationship, and Myra Breckinridge (1968), the first novel to comprise gender-affirmation surgery. He also wrote 30 nonfiction books, including Palimpsest: A Memoir (1995), The Last Empire: Essays (2001), and United States: Essays 1952–1992 (1993), for which he won a National Book Award. His short-form writing appeared in dozens of publications including the New York Review of Books , Esquire , The Nation , and the New Statesman . Vidal also published three short story collections. His work earned him the 1986 George Polk Awar
The Politics of Sexual Identity: In Bed With Gore Vidal by Tim Teeman
Author Tim Teeman (Photo: Juan Bastos)
To create categories is the enslavement of the categorized because the aim of every state is total control over the people who live in it. What better way is there than to categorize according to sex, about which people include so many hang-ups?
— Gore Vidal
This week I spoke to Tim Teeman about his book In Bed With Gore Vidal: Hustlers, Hollywood, and the Private Earth of an American Master (Magnus Books, 2013). Gore Vidal was born in 1925, made his name as a novelist in his early twenties, expanded his repertoire to encompass stage and screen, ran for Congress in the Hudson Valley (1960) and California (1982), and made countless friends and enemies in a long life that ended at the age of 86 in 2012. He’s most widely admired as an essayist (start with Selected Essays) and remembered fondly by those with a taste for the showbiz death-match as one of the heavyweights of talk-show controversy.
When Vidal died he left behind him a whole deck of rumours and opposing testimonies. Much of his work is about sex and sexuality, yet his attitudes towards ga
LGBT History Month Heroes – Day 13
To celebrate LGBT History Month, 2013, Polari is publishing a daily series of LGBT Heroes, selected by the magazine’s team of writers and special contributors.
Gore Vidal – Writer & Essayist
by Christopher Bryant
………………………………………………………………………………………….
The first book of Gore Vidal’s that I peruse was Myra Breckinridge. A tutor on my Master’s degree course recommended it after I gave a raucous presentation on sexual identity as drag, and read from Helen Zahavi’s Dirty Weekend with such intensity that another tutor complimented it as “very Nick Cave”. At least, I think he said Cave …
I had not heard of Vidal, and so I went down to Waterstone’s and bought the double-feature Myra Breckinridge & Myron. From the first sentence I was transfixed, a convert, an acolyte, and I stay so to this sunlight. “I am Myra Breckinridge whom no man will ever possess,” the novel begins. Myra’s voice was nothing like I had re
When I was in my soon twenties and first stage to think about coming out, I just happened to have a conversation with a well-read gay man at a dinner party. Somehow Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar came up. The premise intrigued me, as did the morbid darkness the gentleman described. Thus, this was the first LGBT book I sought out on my quest toward coming out. It was disturbing. But I was intrigued because it is very much a product of the time it was written and the author who wrote it. I ended up seeking out more and more LGBT books in a quest for understanding: of myself, of LGBT history, etc. Mostly, though, the books seemed to mirror the internal struggles I was dealing with–albeit in a much more grandiose, frequently violent fashion. Plus, it’s by Gore Vidal, so I thought I could hide my LGBT curiosity behind a love of literature, or something about that.
So really, for better or worse, this is where it all began for me and LGBT books–culminating a decade later in this LGBT novel recommendations series I’m doing. So this review is compassionate of a full-circle kind of thing for me.
Most significantly, TCatP was the fir
Gore Vidal
Gore Vidal was an American author, screenwriter, and public intellectual known for his biting wit and iconoclastic views. He wrote extensively about sex, sexuality, politics, and religion.
Vidal was a man of many talents. A prolific nonfiction author, novelist, and essayist; a public intellectual, debater, and television personality; a political operative and two-time political candidate; a socialite and cultural icon; and an accomplished screenwriter and actor.
As a fiction composer, Vidal penned 29 novels, including The City and the Pillar (1948), which caused controversy for its groundbreaking depiction of a same-sex male relationship, and Myra Breckinridge (1968), the first novel to comprise gender-affirmation surgery. He also wrote 30 nonfiction books, including Palimpsest: A Memoir (1995), The Last Empire: Essays (2001), and United States: Essays 1952–1992 (1993), for which he won a National Book Award. His short-form writing appeared in dozens of publications including the New York Review of Books , Esquire , The Nation , and the New Statesman . Vidal also published three short story collections. His work earned him the 1986 George Polk Awar
The Politics of Sexual Identity: In Bed With Gore Vidal by Tim Teeman
Author Tim Teeman (Photo: Juan Bastos)
To create categories is the enslavement of the categorized because the aim of every state is total control over the people who live in it. What better way is there than to categorize according to sex, about which people include so many hang-ups?
— Gore Vidal
This week I spoke to Tim Teeman about his book In Bed With Gore Vidal: Hustlers, Hollywood, and the Private Earth of an American Master (Magnus Books, 2013). Gore Vidal was born in 1925, made his name as a novelist in his early twenties, expanded his repertoire to encompass stage and screen, ran for Congress in the Hudson Valley (1960) and California (1982), and made countless friends and enemies in a long life that ended at the age of 86 in 2012. He’s most widely admired as an essayist (start with Selected Essays) and remembered fondly by those with a taste for the showbiz death-match as one of the heavyweights of talk-show controversy.
When Vidal died he left behind him a whole deck of rumours and opposing testimonies. Much of his work is about sex and sexuality, yet his attitudes towards ga
LGBT History Month Heroes – Day 13
To celebrate LGBT History Month, 2013, Polari is publishing a daily series of LGBT Heroes, selected by the magazine’s team of writers and special contributors.
Gore Vidal – Writer & Essayist
by Christopher Bryant
………………………………………………………………………………………….
The first book of Gore Vidal’s that I peruse was Myra Breckinridge. A tutor on my Master’s degree course recommended it after I gave a raucous presentation on sexual identity as drag, and read from Helen Zahavi’s Dirty Weekend with such intensity that another tutor complimented it as “very Nick Cave”. At least, I think he said Cave …
I had not heard of Vidal, and so I went down to Waterstone’s and bought the double-feature Myra Breckinridge & Myron. From the first sentence I was transfixed, a convert, an acolyte, and I stay so to this sunlight. “I am Myra Breckinridge whom no man will ever possess,” the novel begins. Myra’s voice was nothing like I had re