Sex and the Single Author

Author Gore Vidal

“In Rome, as in Bangkok, sexual opportunism was simply an ordinary way of life for innumerable people, as Gore (Vidal) constantly observed in regard to himself and others. On occasion it ran parallel with interests of the heart. More often it expressed physical desire and turns of individual personality. For Vidal the subject was interesting, the practice ordinary and hardly worth, on the personal level, describing or commenting on.”

Commenting on the “homoerotic” in Shakespeare’s sonnets, Vidal wrote, “Who thought up that word has saved the pride of thousands of hetero school teachers who cannot imagine a great writer not liking Miriam, the two children and a split-level ranch house.”

Whatever the merit of his views, Vidal lived at the crossroads of sex and literature. After all, he wrote “The City and the Pillar” and “Myra Breckenridge” and slept with both Anaïs Nin and Jack Kerouac.

—   Source: “Gore Vidal: A Biography” by Fred Kaplan