The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal

by Gore Vidal

  Curiously enough, as I was writing these lines, expressing yet again the unacceptable obvious, I ran across Ralph Blumenthal’s article in The New York Times (August 25), which used “unpublished letters and growing research into the hidden life of Sigmund Freud” to examine “Freud’s reversal of his theory attributing neurosis in adults to sexual seduction in childhood.” Despite the evidence given by his patients, Freud decided that their memories of molestation were “phantasies.” He then appropriated from the high culture (a real act of hubris) Oedipus the King, and made him a complex. Freud was much criticized for this theory at the time—particularly by Sandor Ferenczi. Now, as we learn more about Freud (not to mention about the sexual habits of Victorian Vienna as reported in police records), his theory is again under attack. Drs. Milton Klein and David Tribich have written a paper titled “On Freud’s Blindness.” They have studied his case histories and observed how he ignored evidence, how “he looked to the child and only to the child, in uncovering the causes of psychopathology.” Dr. Karl Menninger wrote Dr. Klein about these findings: “Why oh why couldn’t Freud believe his own ears?” Dr. Menninger then noted, “Seventy-five per cent of the girls we accept at the Villages have been molested in childhood by an adult. And that’s today in Kansas! I don’t think Vienna in 1900 was any less sophisticated.”

  In the same week as Blumenthal’s report on the discrediting of the Oedipus complex, researchers at the Kinsey Institute reported (The Observer, August 30) that after studying 979 homosexualists (“the largest sample of homosexuals—black and white, male and female—ever questioned in an academic study”) and 477 heterosexualists, they came to the conclusion that family life has nothing to do with sexual preference. Apparently, “homosexuality is deep-rooted in childhood, may be biological in origin, and simply shows in more and more important ways as a child grows older. It is not a condition which therapy can reverse.” Also, “homosexual feelings begin as much as three years before any sort of homosexual act, undermining theories that homosexuality is learned through experience.” There goes the teacher-as-seducer-and-perverter myth. Finally, “Psychoanalysts’ theories about smothering mum and absent dad do not stand investigation. Patients may tend to believe that they are true because therapists subtly coach them in the appropriate memories of their family life.”

  Some years ago, gay activists came to Harper’s, where Decter was an editor, to demonstrate against an article by Joseph Epstein, who had announced, “If I had the power to do so, I would wish homosexuality off the face of the earth.” Well, that’s what Hitler had the power to do in Germany, and did—or tried to do. The confrontation at Harper’s now provides Decter with her theme. She tells us that one of the demonstrators asked, “Are you aware of how many suicides you may be responsible for in the homosexual community?” I suspect that she is leaving out the context of this somewhat left-field cri de coeur. After all, homosexualists have more to fear from murder than suicide. I am sure that the actual conversation had to do with the sort of mischievous effect that Epstein’s Hitlerian piece might have had on those fag-baiters who read it.

  But Decter slyly zeroes in on the word “suicide.” She then develops a most unusual thesis. Homosexualists hate themselves to such an extent that they wish to become extinct either through inviting murder or committing suicide. She notes that in a survey of San Francisco’s homosexual men, half of them “claimed to have had sex with at least five hundred people.” This “bespeaks the obliteration of all experience, if not, indeed, of oneself.” Plainly Decter has a Mosaic paradigm forever in mind and any variation on it is abominable. Most men—homo or hetero—given the opportunity to have sex with 500 different people would do so, gladly; but most men are not going to be given the opportunity by a society that wants them safely married so that they will be docile workers and loyal consumers. It does not suit our rulers to have the proles tomcatting around the way that our rulers do. I can assure Decter that the thirty-fifth president went to bed with more than 500 women and that the well-known…but I must not give away the secrets of the old class or the newly-middle-class new class will go into shock.

  Meanwhile, according to Decter, “many homosexuals are nowadays engaged in efforts at self-obliteration…there is the appalling rate of suicide among them.” But the rate is not appreciably higher than that for the rest of the population. In any case, most who do commit—or contemplate—suicide do so because they cannot cope in a world where they are, to say the least, second-class citizens. But Decter is now entering uncharted country. She also has a point to make: “What is undeniable is the increasing longing among the homosexuals to do away with themselves—if not in the actual physical sense then at least spiritually—a longing whose chief emblem, among others, is the leather bars.”

  So Epstein will not be obliged to press that button in order to get rid of the fags. They will do it themselves. Decter ought to be pleased by this, but it is not in her nature to be pleased by anything that the same-sexers do. If they get married and have children and swear fealty to the family gods of the new class, their wives will…drink. If they live openly with one another, they have fled from woman and real life. If they pursue careers in the arts, heteros will have to be on guard against vicious covert assaults on heterosexual values. If they congregate in the fashion business the way that Jews do in psychiatry, they will employ only those heterosexuals who will put out for them.

  Decter is appalled by the fag “takeover” of San Francisco. She tells us about the “ever deepening resentment of the San Francisco straight community at the homosexuals’ defiant displays and power [‘power’!] over this city,” but five paragraphs later she contradicts herself: “Having to a very great extent overcome revulsion of common opinion, are they left with some kind of unappeased hunger that only their own feelings of hatefulness can now satisfy?”

  There it is. They are hateful. They know it. That is why they want to eliminate themselves. “One thing is certain.” Decter finds a lot of certainty around. “To become homosexual is a weighty act.” She still has not got the point that one does not choose to have same-sex impulses; one simply has them, as everyone has, to a greater or lesser degree, other-sex impulses. To deny giving physical expression to those desires may be pleasing to Moses and Saint Paul and Freud, but these three rabbis are aberrant figures whose nomadic values are not those of the thousands of other tribes that live or have lived on the planet. Women’s and gay liberation are simply small efforts to free men and women from this trio.

  Decter writes, “Taking oneself out of the tides of ordinary mortal existence is not something one does from any longing to think oneself ordinary (but only following a different ‘life-style’).” I don’t quite grasp this sentence. Let us move on to the next: “Gay Lib has been an effort to set the weight of that act at naught, to define homosexuality as nothing more than a casual option among options.” Gay lib has done just the opposite. After all, people are what they are sexually not through “adoption” but because that is the way they are structured. Some people do shift about in the course of a life. Also, most of those with same-sex drives do indeed “adopt” the heterosexual lifestyle because they don’t want to go to prison or to the madhouse or become unemployable. Obviously, there is an option but it is a hard one that ought not to be forced on any human being. After all, homosexuality is only important when made so by irrational opponents. In this, as in so much else, the Jewish situation is precisely the same.

  Decter now gives us not a final solution so much as a final conclusion: “In accepting the movement’s terms [hardly anyone has, by the way], heterosexuals have only raised to a nearly intolerable height the costs of the homosexuals’ flight from normality.” The flight, apparently, is deliberate, a matter of perverse choice, a misunderstanding of daddy, a passion for mummy, a fear of responsibility. Decter threads her clichés like Teclas on a string: “Faced with the accelerating round of drugs, S-M, and suicide, can either the movement or its heterosexual sympathizers imagine
they have done anyone a kindness?”

  Although the kindness of strangers is much sought after, gay liberation has not got much support from anyone. Natural allies like the Jews are often virulent in their attacks. Blacks in their ghettos, Chicanos in their barrios, and rednecks in their pulpits also have been influenced by the same tribal taboos. That Jews and blacks and Chicanos and rednecks all contribute to the ranks of the same-sexers only increases the madness. But the world of the Decters is a world of perfect illogic.

  Herewith the burden of “The Boys on the Beach”: since homosexualists choose to be the way they are out of idle hatefulness, it has been a mistake to allow them to come out of the closet to the extent that they have, but now that they are out (which most are not), they will have no choice but to face up to their essential hatefulness and abnormality and so be driven to kill themselves with promiscuity, drugs, S-M, and suicide. Not even the authors of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion ever suggested that the Jews, who were so hateful to them, were also hateful to themselves. So Decter has managed to go one step further than the Protocols’ authors; she is indeed a virtuoso of hate, and thus do pogroms begin.

  Tricks is the story of an author—Renaud Camus himself—who has twenty-five sexual encounters in the course of six months. Each of these encounters involves a pick-up. Extrapolating from Camus’s sexual vigor at the age of 35, I would suspect that he has already passed the 500 mark and so is completely obliterated as a human being. If he is, he still writes very well indeed. He seems to be having a good time, and he shows no sign of wanting to kill himself, but then that may be a front he’s keeping up. I am sure that Decter will be able to tell just how close he is to OD’ing.

  From his photograph, Camus appears to have a lot of hair on his chest. I don’t know about the shoulders, as they are covered, modestly, with a shirt. Perhaps he is Jewish. Roland Barthes wrote an introduction to Tricks. For a time, Barthes was much admired in American academe. But then, a few years ago, Barthes began to write about his same-sexual activities; he is now mentioned a bit less than he was in the days before he came out, as they say.

  Barthes notes that Camus’s book is a “text that belongs to literature.” It is not pornographic. It is also not a Homosexual Novel in that there are no deep, anguished chats about homosexuality. In fact, the subject is never mentioned; it just is. Barthes remarks, “Homosexuality shocks less [well, he is—or was—French], but continues to be interesting; it is still at that stage of excitation where it provokes what might be called feats of discourse [see “The Boys on the Beach,” no mean feat!]. Speaking of homosexuality permits those who aren’t to show how open, liberal, and modern they are; and those who are to bear witness, to assume responsibility, to militate. Everyone gets busy, in different ways, whipping it up.” You can say that again! And Barthes does. But with a nice variation. He makes the point that you are never allowed not to be categorized. But then, “say ‘I am’ and you will be socially saved.” Hence the passion for the either/or.

  Camus does not set out to give a panoramic view of homosexuality. He comments, in his preface, on the variety of homosexual expressions. Although there is no stigma attached to homosexuality in the French intellectual world where, presumably, there is no equivalent of the new class, the feeling among the lower classes is still intense, a memento of the now exhausted (in France) Roman Catholic Church’s old dirty work (“I don’t understand the French Catholics,” said John Paul II). As a result, many “refuse to grant their tastes because they live in such circumstances, in such circles, that their desires are not only for themselves inadmissible but inconceivable, unspeakable.”

  It is hard to describe a book that is itself a description, and that is what Tricks is—a flat, matter-of-fact description of how the narrator meets the tricks, what each says to the other, where they go, how the rooms are furnished, and what the men do. One of the tricks is nuts; a number are very hairy—the narrator has a Decterian passion for the furry; there is a lot of anal and banal sex as well as oral and floral sex. Frottage flows. Most of the encounters take place in France, but there is one in Washington, D.C., with a black man. There is a good deal of comedy, in the Raymond Roussel manner.

  Tricks will give ammunition to those new-class persons and redneck divines who find promiscuity every bit as abominable as same-sex relations. But that is the way men are when they are given freedom to go about their business unmolested. One current Arab ruler boasts of having ten sexual encounters a day, usually with different women. A diplomat who knows him says that he exaggerates, but not much. Of course, he is a Muslim.

  The family, as we know it, is an economic, not a biological, unit. I realize that this is startling news in this culture and at a time when the economies of both East and West require that the nuclear family be, simply, God. But our ancestors did not live as we do. They lived in packs for hundreds of millennia before “history” began, a mere 5,000 years ago. Whatever social arrangements human society may come up with in the future, it will have to be acknowledged that those children who are needed should be rather more thoughtfully brought up than they are today and that those adults who do not care to be fathers or mothers should be let off the hook. This is beginning, slowly, to dawn. Hence, the rising hysteria in the land. Hence, the concerted effort to deny the human ordinariness of same-sexualists. A recent attempt to portray such a person sympathetically on television was abandoned when the Christers rose up in arms.

  Although I would never suggest that Truman Capote’s bright wit and sweet charm as a television performer would not have easily achieved for him his present stardom had he been a heterosexualist, I do know that if he had not existed in his present form, another would have been run up on the old sewing machine because that sort of persona must be, for a whole nation, the stereotype of what a fag is. Should some macho film star like Clint Eastwood, say, decide to confess on television that he is really into same-sex sex, the cathode tube would blow a fuse. That could never be allowed. That is all wrong. That is how the Roman Empire fell.

  There is not much angst in Tricks. No one commits suicide—but there is one sad story. A militant leftist friend of Camus’s was a teacher in the south of France. He taught fourteen-year-old members of that oldest of all the classes, the exploited laborer. One of his pupils saw him in a fag bar and spread the word. The students began to torment what had been a favorite teacher. “These are little proles,” he tells Camus, “and Mediterranean besides—which means they’re obsessed by every possible macho myth, and by homosexuality as well. It’s all they can think about.” One of the boys, an Arab, followed him down the street, screaming “Faggot!” “It was as if he had finally found someone onto whom he could project his resentment, someone he could hold in contempt with complete peace of mind.”

  This might explain the ferocity of the new class on the subject. They know that should the bad times return, the Jews will be singled out yet again. Meanwhile, like so many Max Naumanns (Naumann was a German Jew who embraced Nazism), the new class passionately supports our ruling class—from the Chase Manhattan Bank to the Pentagon to the Op-Ed page of The Wall Street Journal—while holding in fierce contempt faggots, blacks (see Norman Podhoretz’s “My Negro Problem and Ours,” Commentary, February 1963), and the poor (see Midge Decter’s “Looting and Liberal Racism,” Commentary, September 1977). Since these Neo-Naumannites are going to be in the same gas chambers as the blacks and the faggots, I would suggest a cease-fire and a common front against the common enemy, whose kindly voice is that of Ronald Reagan and whose less than kindly mind is elsewhere in the boardrooms of the Republic.

  The Nation

  November 14, 1981

  THEODORE ROOSEVELT: AN AMERICAN SISSY

  In Washington, D.C., there is—or was—a place where Rock Creek crosses the main road and makes a ford which horses and, later, cars could cross if the creek was not in flood. Half a hundred years ago, I lived with my grandparents on a wooded hill not far from the ford. On summer days, my gra
ndmother and I would walk down to the creek, careful to avoid the poison ivy that grew so luxuriously amid the crowded laurel. We would then walk beside the creek, looking out for crayfish and salamanders. When we came to the ford, I would ask her to tell me, yet again, what happened when the old President Roosevelt—not the current President Roosevelt—had come riding out of the woods on a huge horse just as two ladies on slow nags had begun a slow crossing of the ford.

  “Well, suddenly, Mr. Roosevelt screamed at them, ‘Out of my way!’” My grandmother imitated the president’s harsh falsetto. “Stand to one side, women. I am the President.” What happened next? I’d ask, delighted. “Oh, they were both soaked to the skin by his horse’s splashing all over them. But then, the very next year,” she would say with some satisfaction, “nice Mr. Taft was the president.” Plainly, there was a link in her mind between the Event at the Ford and the change in the presidency. Perhaps there was. In those stately pre-personal days you did not call ladies women.

  The attic of the Rock Creek house was filled with thousands of books on undusted shelves while newspapers, clippings, copies of the Congressional Record were strewn about the floor. My grandmother was not a zealous housekeeper. There was never a time when rolled-up Persian rugs did not lie at the edge of the drawing room, like crocodiles dozing. In 1907, the last year but one of Theodore Roosevelt’s administration, my grandfather came to the Senate. I don’t think that they had much to do with each other. I found only one reference to TR—as he was always known—on the attic floor. In 1908, when Senator Gore nominated William Jennings Bryan for president, he made an alliterative aside, “I much prefer the strenuosity of Roosevelt to the sinuosity of Taft.”