gore vidal - bisexual politics

I was twenty-one when I wrote The City and the Pillar. Although I had already published two novels, Williwaw and In a Yellow Mood, my talent was not precocious. I knew how to do a few things well, and I did them all in Williwaw. By the time I came to write The City and the Pillar, I was bored with playing it safe. I wanted to take risks, to try something no American had done before. I decided to examine the homosexual underworld (which I knew rather less well than I pretended), and in the process show the “naturalness” of homosexual relations, as well as making the point that there is of course no such thing as a homosexual. Despite current usage, the word is an adjective describing a sexual action, not a noun describing a recognizable type. All human beings are bisexual. Conditioning, opportunity and habit account finally (and mysteriously) for sexual preference, and homosexualists are quite as difficult to generalize about as heterosexualists. They range from the transvestite who believes himself to be Bette Davis to the perfectly ordinary citizen who regards boys with the same uncomplicated lust with which his brother regards girls.

When legal and social pressures against homosexuality are particularly severe, homosexualists can become neurotic, in much the same way Jews and Negroes do in a hostile environment. Yet a man who enjoys sensual relations with his own sex is not, by definition, neurotic. In any event, categorizing is impossible. Particularly when one considers that most homosexualists marry and become fathers, which makes them, technically, bisexual, a condition whose existence is firmly denied by at least one school of psychiatry on the odd ground that a man must be one thing or the other, which is demonstrably untrue. Admittedly, no two things are equal, and so a man is bound to prefer one specific to another, but that does not mean that under the right stimulus, and at another time, he might not accommodate himself to both. It is interesting to note that the current slang word for someone both sophisticated and enviable is “swinger.” And what is a swinger? One who swings both ways, who is able to take pleasure where he finds it, with either sex.

In 1946, when I wrote The City and the Pillar, it was a part of American folklore that homosexuality was a form of mental disease, confined for the most part to interior decorators and ballet dancers. Knowing this to be untrue, I set out to shatter the stereotype by taking as my protagonist a completely ordinary boy of the middle class and through his eyes observe the various strata of the underworld. This was a considerable act of imagination. I came from a political family. Jim Willard and I shared the same geography, but little else. Also, in the interest of verisimilitude I decided to tell the story in a flat gray prose reminiscent of one of James T. Farrell’s social documents. There was to be nothing fancy in the writing. I wanted the prose plain and hard and, if I may say so, I succeeded.

Contemplating the American scene in the 1940s, Mr. Stephen Spender deplored the machinery of literary success, remarking sternly that “One has only to follow the whizzing comet of … Gore Vidal to see how quickly and effectively this transforming, diluting, disintegrating machinery can work.” He then characterized The City and the Pillar as a work of sexual confession, quite plainly autobiography at its most artless. Transformed, diluted, disintegrated as I was, I found this description flattering. Mr. Spender had paid me a considerable compliment, for though I am the least autobiographical of novelists, apparently I had drawn the character of the athlete Jim Willard so convincingly that to this day aging pederasts are firmly convinced that I was once a male prostitute, with an excellent backhand at tennis. The truth, alas, is quite another matter.

When the book was published in 1948, it was received with shock and disbelief. How could that young war novelist (last observed in the pages of Life magazine posed like Jack London against a ship) turn into this? The New York Times refused to take advertising for the book, and most of the reviews were hostile. The press lectured me firmly on the delights of heterosexual love, while chiding the publishers for distributing such a lurid “memoir.” Nevertheless, the book was a best seller, not only in the United States but in Europe, where it was taken seriously by critics, not all engaged. André Gide presented me with a copy of Corydon, as one prophet to another. E. M. Forster invited me to Cambridge and shyly confessed that he had written a somewhat similar book which he had never published, not wanting to embarrass family and friends. “Quite bold, actually,” he said. In what way, I asked. Apparently there was a scene of two boys in bed. “And what,” I asked, intrigued, “do they do?” Mr. Forster smiled. “They … talk,” he said, with some satisfaction.

Later that year, in a statistical report, Dr. Kinsey revealed what American men are actually up to, and I was somewhat exonerated for my candor. I even received a nice letter from the good doctor, complimenting me on “your work in the field.”

The world has changed a good deal since 1948. Sexual candor is now not only common, but obligatory. Outright pornography is published openly and I doubt if it does much harm. After all, Americans like how-to-do books. But, most significant, young people today are in many ways more relaxed about sexual matters than we were in the 1940s. They have discovered that choice of sexual partner is a matter of taste, not of divine or even “natural” law. Also, I suspect that the psychological basis to most sex is not so much physical satisfaction as it is a will to power. This strikes me as implicit in The City and the Pillar, though I was perfectly unaware of it at the time. When a young man rejects the advances of another young man, his motive, often as not, is a fear of losing autonomy, of being used as a thing by the other, conquered instead of conquering.

In its slow way, our society is beginning to shed many of its superstitions about the sexual act. The idea that there is no such thing as “normality” is at last penetrating the tribal consciousness, although the religiously inclined still regard nonprocreative sex as “unnatural,” while the statistically inclined regard as “normal” only what the majority does.

Confident that most sexual acts are heterosexual, the consensus maintains that heterosexuality, as the preferred form of erotic expression, must be “right.” However, following that line of reasoning to its logical conclusion, one would have to recognize that the most frequently performed sexual act is neither hetero- nor homosexual but onanistic, and surely, even in a total democracy, masturbation would not be declared the perfect norm from which all else is deviation. In any case, sex of any sort is neither right nor wrong. It is.