Talk:Gore Vidal

"openly gay novel "The City and the Pillar" "

The pedant in me says "novels aren't gay, people are gay" -- does this need to be rephrased?

1. 1. Actually, Vidal doesn't even believe people are gay. He is of the "'homosexual' describes behaviors not people" school. I'll attempt a minor rephrase. - Hieronymous

• I'm not sure that Vidal is gay, so much as asexual. He was attracted to another boy during his youth, but nothing came of it. In any case, whether a novel is "gay" doesn't imply anything about the author: plenty of gay writers WRITE straight (Clive Barker) and Mr. Vidal isn't exactly gay.

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funny he'd run for Congress in '82 having said in '80 he didn't vote anymore. (United States, p954) (i'm looking for the first time he said the Reps and Dems are two right wings of the same party, I presume that's after '80 =)

[R23] There is no inconsistency. When available candidates differ superficially and represent identical interests, there is no choice. Voting implies consent. Suppose everybody withheld their consent, ie, nobody turned up to vote. That would send the "Property" a party profound message: provide real choices. Candidates at the federal level benefit the underclasses only by accident, not by design.

[R23] A reference to the two right wings of the Property party appears in the 1972 essay "Homage to Daniel Shays" found in Vidal's "Collected Essays 1952-1972."

Domhoff accepts the Ferdinand Lundberg formulation that there is only one political party in the United States and that is the Property Party, whose Republican wing tends to be rigid in maintaining the status quo and not given to any accommodation of the poor and the black. Although the Democratic wing shares most of the basic principles (that is to say, money) of the Republicans, its members are often shrewd enough to know that what is too rigid will shatter under stress.

[R23] Ferdinand Lundberg, The Rich and the Super-Rich. 1969

Somehow it should be said that he's a kind of homegrown Chomsky. He says much the same things in much the same way. He may even have said some of them before Chomsky...

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re his name. from New York Review of Books 1973 Oct 18, as "West Point" in United States

[Dad] had no memory for the past, his own or that of the family. He was so vague, in fact, that he was not certain if his middle initial "L" stood for Louis, as he put on my birth certificate, or for Luther. It was Luther. At fourteen I settled the confusion by taking my grandfather's name Gore.

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I do wonder if the "do as I advise" quote is used quite as intended. I happened to stumble on a possible original, which is clearly in toungue-in-cheek mode: "...I am at heart a propagandist, a tremendous hater, a tiresome nag, complacently positive that there is not one human problem that could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise." (New Word Writing #10 1956, as "Writing Plays for Television" United States) I thought the thing didn't sound quite like the Vidal I was reading... now I see why. (Not that he's lacking in ego or things to say; but his self-promotion is a lot less smack-in-the-face than this suggests.

I go more his own comment on Tennessee Williams: "self-pity and self-serving kept in exquisite balance by the finest comic style since S. L. Clemens." (US p1134)

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If I ask why source citations included as HTML comments (so as not to clutter the visible text so badly) were also deleted, would I get an answer?

Apparently not.

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re the half-n-half of Ben-Hur: I'm not trying to gussy up "Vidal and Fry wrote Ben-Hur." As Vidal recounts it, his half is the first and Fry's is the second.

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I think that the long excerpt from the Times about his house in Italy exceeds "fair use" limits and should either be cropped, rewritten, or deleted. Hayford Peirce 20:20, 29 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Vidal's Full Name

Vidal's full name is Eugene Luther Gore Vidal. There's no "Jr." His father's name was "Eugene Luther Vidal." (See, e.g., "Palimpsest")

Jimmy Trimble picture

I seriously doubt if this picture is uncopyrighted or has been released. It is a picture that appears in Vidal's autobiography "Palimpsest". Hayford Peirce 23:59, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)

• My mistake -- I've just checked my copy of "Palimpsest" and neither picture therein is the same as the one in this article. But I'd still like to know where it comes from.... Hayford Peirce 00:17, 1 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  • Nope, I was right the first time. I've gone through "Palimpsest" another time, and this time I found the photo that was in the article on page 22. The "Photo Credits" on page 457 of the book says clearly that it is from the "collection of Gore Vidal". As such, Mr. Vidal himself, I'm pretty sure, would have to give Wikipedia specific permission to use it. The editor who inserted this picture gives us no such information, nor any information at all, for that matter. I am, therefore, removing the picture. Too bad -- I gotta say that Jimmy Trimbal is a very cute fellow; I knew a boy at Exeter (which Vidal also attended) who was the spitting image of him. Hopefully my own lightfoot lad is still alive.... Hayford Peirce 00:33, 1 Jan 2005 (UTC)
    • :o( Yes, very cute. I don't recall where the image came from. But I got it off the web somewhere. I remember it was easy to find and there were several copies since I initially found it through google images. I certainly didn't scan it in or anything (it would be of far higher quality if I did!), though someone apparently did. Considering he died in '45 that image has to be at least 60 years old. When does this enter public domain?! When Vidal dies? Is this image also in the book [1] (http://espn.go.com/media/pg2/2002/0314/photo/i_jtrimble2_i.jpg)? What CAN be used? Ugh, it's beyond purposterous that images of people who've been dead for over half a century can't be freely used. --Deglr6328 09:49, 1 Jan 2005 (UTC)
      • It's preposterous but, apparently, true. The "fair use" thingee is very difficult to understand but I would think that as long as Vidal is alive he controls all rights to that picture. When he dies it would be his estate, I suppose, assuming that he wills his photo collection to someone in particular. Unless, of course, Vidal himself did *not* take that picture himself and had it given to him by, say, Trimble's sister. In which case it would probably belong the sister or Jimmy's estate or god knows who.... I myself own numerous paintings and sketches by my uncle Waldo Peirce, a semi-celebrated painter, but apparently I can't even take a photo of one of them and post it to the article about him -- his estate still owns the rights to reproductions of his paintings even though those paintings are hanging on my walls. I could, I suppose, try to get the written permission from his three surviving children.... But it's easier just to forget about the whole thing, just as it probably is with the Trimble picture. 17:11, 1 Jan 2005 (UTC)

was he really part of NAMBLA?

was he really part of NAMBLA?

Does anyone claim he was? Please sign your name using ~~~~ and, if possible, a registered account. Appreciated Schissel : bowl listen 03:12, Feb 25, 2005 (UTC)

another wikipedia page said he was a supporter and I think I've read he's a member.

sign CD