T
HERE’SAREASONwhyHenry James burned
hispapers in thegardenofLambHouse:whena
famous writer dies, he’s vulnerable. People
swoop in and write up his life, often in a way
that Joyce Carol Oates would later call “patho-
biography.”
In Bed with Gore Vidal
has apparently upset some people
who knew its subject, yet it’s peoplewho knewVidal who are
the source for everything inTimTeeman’s book, whichmeans
it amounts toanoral biography—like theoneGeorgePlimpton
put together in 1997 on Truman Capote (
Truman Capote: In
Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances and Detrac-
tors Recall His Turbulent Career
). But this one has a theme:
Teeman argues thatVidal’s sex life is key to understanding his
career, if only because
TheCity and the Pillar
, his 1948 novel
about the gay underworld, effectively outed him.Yet Vidal al-
ways refused to call himself “gay.” For this lapseTeeman puts
him, in a sense, on trial. Why didVidal insist that there’s no
such thing as homosexuals, but only homo-
sexual acts, when clearly he had a longtime
companion and copious sex with hustlers?
Whydidhenot takepart in the fight against
AIDS?
Beforewehave finished the first chapter
of Teeman’s book, we are replete with reasons. In an era that
viewed homosexuality as a disease,Vidal’s political ambitions
made such an admission impossible. (As he famously said: “I
might have had a life in politics if it wasn’t for the faggot
thing.”) Vidal felt that he had to defend himself against a ho-
mophobicworld, not tomention the legacyof beingbrought up
by a mean alcoholic mother who made himwary of any ex-
pressionof love,which iswhyhe insistedonpayingpeople for
sex, because that kept himsafe fromemotional involvement.
That, at least, is the gist of a book thatVidalmaywell have
called,werehe alive to reviewit, “Bioporn”—the termheused
in an essay on a biography of SomersetMaugham. (Vidal pre-
dicteddecades ago that eventuallypeoplewouldno longer read
a writer’s novels, only books about writers, like
In Bed with
GoreVidal
.)ButTeeman’s argumentwithVidal seems sincere:
it bothers a gay man of his generation that Vidal would not
admit he was gay—or lead the fight against AIDS, as Larry
Kramer urged him to, or do any of the things that the most
prominent gay writer of his generationmight have done. But
Vidal refused to be so categorized, arguing, like Foucault, that
categorizationallows society tocontrol andpersecute.The idea
ofbeingcalledagaywriter appealed tohimeven less (why limit
your audience?).But here’s theparadox:Vidal livedaverypub-
ESSAY
‘Always aGodfather, Never aGod’
A
NDREW
H
OLLERAN
AndrewHolleran’s latest book is
Chronicles of a Plague, Revisited:
AIDSand ItsAftermath.
lic lifeas a“same-sexer” (his term)whonever passedupanop-
portunity tomock homophobia. Themanwho said repeatedly
that the secret tohis long relationshipwith amanhemet at the
EverardBaths,HowardAusten,was that theyhadneverhadsex
(aclaimTeeman’s sources cast doubt upon) never lost achance
to heap contempt on the disdain in which homosexuals were
held.Andhenever let socialmoresget in thewayofhisownsex
life. Vidal, a real moralist when it came to politics, could not
bearmoralizingabout sex.Amemberof the rulingclass, hesays
more thanonce in thisbook, isnot boundby theconventionsof
the lower orders.
Teeman is too egalitarian or too young or too gay to put up
with thiswithout protest; andeverynowand thenhis impatience
pokes through. (“Well,” he writes after Vidal’s prediction that
healthcare reformwould never happen under Obama, “Vidal
seems to have been wrong about that.”) In the meantime, we
get a feast ofdish.However, oral biographiescomewithaprob-
lem: onemustmake upone’s ownmind about the reliabilityof
thepersonspeaking.Oneof thespeakers, for
instance, is Vidal’s lifelong friend Scotty
Bowers, the Hollywood go-betweenwhose
sometimes credulity-straining revelations in
his own sex memoir,
Full Service
(2012),
Vidal vouched for, andwho remaineda lov-
ing friend to the very end. In the other camp isVidal’s half sis-
ter, Nina Straight, who took so dyspeptic a viewof Vidal that
shecouldn’t evenbear thevoiceofHowardAusten, anamateur
singerwhose recordingsVidalwould listen toonCDswith tears
in his eyes afterAusten died: “Theminute he started singing,”
Straight says, you looked around “to see who had thrown the
cat out of thewindow.”
Catty iswhat thesewitnesses are, andoftenvery funny.Not
onlywasVidal an incrediblewit (thereare toomanywonderful
lines topickone), but sowere several of his friends.But every-
one sawa different side of him. Indeed, asTeemanweaves the
quotes together, each speaker seems to contradict the previous
one. If one source sayshewas amanwho“alwayswanted tobe
in control,” “as narcissistic a personality as you can imagine,”
“incrediblyvain,” thenext one sayshowkindandgenerous and
compassionate hewas.WhichVidal one got dependedonvari-
ous things, Iguess; sittingdownwithhimat the tablemust have
been a real crap shoot.
Plimpton’sbookonCapotearrangeshisquotesby topic, but
Teeman’s chapters—on Vidal’s childhood, the women in his
life, his claimthat hewas bisexual, his adolescent love Jimmy
Trimble, his partner HowardAusten, their years in Rome and
Hollywood—also contain a running commentary by Teeman
that begins with a gothic prologue inwhich our intrepid jour-
nalist enters the Hollywood Hills house where Vidal has just
died, and endswith a grimportrait ofVidal’s final years.
Vidal felt thathehadto
defendhimself against
ahomophobicworld.
10
TheGay&LesbianReview
/
WORLDWIDE
