AS LGBT people, we all have our origin stories—that moment when we knew we were attracted to people of our own sex. For me, the realization began, as most things did, with a book: The City and the Pillar, by Gore Vidal. While queer people of a certain age may remember Vidal as droll or revolutionary, to me, at age sixteen, he was merely a fusty old writer of retold historical tales, tomes so thick that these would be the books you placed at the ends of a shelf to hold up the other books. Burr or Myra Breckinridge had found their way onto my parent’s shelves, next to the Reader’s Digest or Encyclopedia Britannica, some of the only hardcovers they kept in the house.
But the way I encountered Vidal in a life-altering way wasn’t through his books but through an appearance on The Phil Donahue Show. Vidal turned up near the tail end of an era when appearing on talk shows was still a writer’s prerogative. Writers were called public intellectuals, and America apparently cared about their opinions. Vidal was a frequent participant in these mid-afternoon and late-night pageants. Speaking in a faux European accent, he evoked the rarified accent of Locust Valley or Hyannis Port, where he summered with the Kennedys.
When he appeared on the show, I had already stumbled into my first relationship, someone I’d met by chance when my family moved from the relative tropicality of Fort Lauderdale to Eustis, Florida, a small town about an hour northwest of Orlando, and several centuries behind it. Even in the throes of our stormy and sincere first love, I didn’t yet perceive that there was any such thing as being gay. It was 1986, and there was no evidence of anyone in my small town being in a same-sex relationship. Despite our love, I believed with all my heart that the two of us would grow up and marry men, never to look back on what had occurred between us. For at least one of us, that’s exactly what happened.
But for me, The Phil Donahue Show happened. The image that lingers in my mind of Phil is of his heavy flop of graying sheepdog hair, hanging like fallen ash over his Poindexter glasses. He’s wearing a chambray shirt, evidence of his alliance with “the people.” His sleeves are rolled up casually, as though he’s been working on a farm. He holds the bulky microphone of the day, a thick wand with a head like an enoki mushroom. He gesticulates to the audience, asking if gays and lesbians should have equal rights. The question is rhetorical insofar as everyone knows that Phil is a Chicago liberal who believes in LGBT equality. From the safety of my grandmother’s bedroom, where she keeps a small, black-and-white TV, I tune into his show every day as a way to breathe in some of that enlightened, big-city air.
Vidal is there to talk about something “homosexual”—my heart pounds—namely his 1948 book The City and the Pillar. The next day I drive my beat-up car to the library to order this book through interlibrary loan. It must be sent from one of the city branches where they dare to own a copy until the Baptists find out. My hand shakes as I fill out the card, and I’m bright red when I hand it to the clerk. Will she know from these words on the page—the author, the title—that the book is about being gay? Will they let me, a sixteen-year-old girl stuck in the Bible Belt, have a copy?
The librarian doesn’t blanch. Soon I’m holding the book, a square little volume with a dusty cover. I hide it in my backpack so that no one sees. The story, as it turns out, is hard to accept. At the outset, two high school friends go on a camping trip and, while wrestling alone in the woods, get unexpected erections and end up kissing. The one boy, like my high school girlfriend, disappears back into the world, capable of blending in through a kind of willful forgetting. The other, reminiscent of me, is haunted by their encounter. He joins the Navy and eventually heads to Greenwich Village. Vidal’s description of what happens there is what planted the seed in my young mind of what I had to do in my life: Go to Greenwich Village. Find the gays.
The unfortunate ending to Vidal’s story (which he later revised) involves the main character finding his old friend and meeting him for a casual lunch. The man who has haunted him for so many years is now everything that he’s not: stable, married, successful, and happy. The protagonist, in the throes of emotion and self-hatred, lures his old crush to his hotel room and—spoiler alert!—rapes him, taking what he wanted so many years ago. But in doing so he’s forced to confront the depth of his failure as a human being.
Granted, that doesn’t sound too inspiring. Written in 1948, it can be read as a kind of cautionary tale for anyone who tries to live as a gay person. Other early novels like The Well of Loneliness (1928) and plays such as The Children’s Hour (1934) similarly exposed the sad heart of “inverted” love, destined always to ache. These books served in some ways as moral stop signs meant to warn gays and lesbians away from pursuing a doomed life, most likely reflecting the writer’s own troubled experience. Yet for those of us struggling to discover our identity in the days before gay marriage or the Internet, these books at least elucidated a direction. They verified something for us that we hadn’t known before: that we existed.
In a new edition of The City and the Pillar that I bought a few years ago, a much older Gore Vidal reflects upon the early reception of his book and its impact. Upon its publication, he tells us, his grandfather was filled with sorrow. The publisher, E. P. Dutton, distanced itself from the book. But a few luminaries, such as Vidal’s literary hero, Thomas Mann, found it “an important human document.” The 73-year-old—and probably gay—Mann wrote that, perhaps for the first time, he had been moved by a love scene involving two men. Coming as it did in the late 1940s, The City and the Pillar helped to launch a conversation about a forbidden topic. The book helped to plant in me the seed of understanding who I was, however differently my life would turn out from those of its characters.
Laura Jones, a freelance writer, is completing her MFA at Northwestern University.
