Isherwood dedicated A Single Man to Gore Vidal. Vidal was honored and later dedicated his most notorious novel to Isherwood. But in the meantime he paid his friend the higher compliment of competing with him. Shortly after A Single Man appeared, Vidal went back to his old novel, The City and the Pillar, and revised and reissued it, as if to establish his position as the first chronicler of American gay life. The new City and the Pillar was published in 1965, a year after A Single Man. It included an afterword where Vidal explained why he wrote the novel and offered his strongest statement to date about sexuality:
I decided to examine the homosexual underworld (which I knew rather less well than I pretended), and in the process show the “naturalness” of homosexual relations, as well as making the point that there was no such thing as a homosexual. Despite the current usage, the word is an adjective describing a sexual action, not a noun describing a recognizable type. All human beings are bisexual.
Declaring the categories null and void was an ingenious move. It suggested a whole new approach to sexual tolerance, and it put Vidal himself above the name-calling of the mid-Sixties. He couldn’t be called a homosexual: there was no such animal. Yet the position left him standing outside when the ground shifted in the next decade.
Gore Vidal remained a man of many hats and enormous energy. He wrote plays and screenplays; he appeared on television; he ran for Congress. He was also making a name for himself as a major essayist. His early pieces were occasional prose on topics that happened to interest him, exercises in excess intellect. But he wrote more regularly and his essays became more accomplished. The form played to his strengths: his wit, his curiosity, his knowledge, and his ego. His editor, Jason Epstein, later said that Vidal “had too much ego to be a writer of fiction because he couldn’t subordinate himself to other people…. It was always him wearing different costumes.” The essays are Vidal playing Vidal, and he did it beautifully. He had a fluent first-person voice and a wide range of interests: literature, history, culture, and politics. He became a regular contributor to the Nation and Esquire and, after 1964, the New York Review of Books.
But what Vidal most wanted to do was write fiction. He had two works in progress on his desk: his novel about ancient Rome and a novel about Washington, D.C. But fiction requires time, and Vidal needed to make money. He bought himself some time when he adapted his political play, The Best Man, for the screen in 1963. Tired of Edgewater and New York, he and Howard Austen moved to Rome for six months. There Vidal finished Julian, his best novel to date.
The last pagan emperor, known to Christians as Julian the Apostate, is the subject of four fascinating chapters in Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Expanding on the first-person examples of I, Claudius by Robert Graves and Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar, Vidal told the tale through multiple narrators, a device that enabled him to use pieces of the voice developed in his essays. He was better at telling than showing anyway, and first-person narrative is all telling—storytelling. The book came out in 1964 to excellent reviews and was a surprise best seller.
He returned to Edgewater, wrote more essays, more political journalism, and worked on other screenplays before he returned to Rome to finish his Washington novel. The succinctly named Washington, D.C. is a family saga about political life from the New Deal to the McCarthy era. Published in early 1967, it was a step backward, a surprisingly clunky novel written mostly in expository dialogue. (“Then Enid was right. You do love Clay. And you are mad.”) There’s a promising subplot in the homoerotic bond between a newspaper publisher and his son-in-law, a young politician, but Vidal was limited by the conventions of third-person fiction and his tendency to express strong emotion in the language of trashy melodrama. The book received mixed reviews, but it too was a best seller, doing even better than Julian. Many people thought it was a roman à clef about the Kennedys.
He wrote far better about politics as an essayist. He also spoke about it well. During this time he not only covered the 1964 political conventions for Esquire, he was a regular guest on the Jack Paar and David Susskind shows. “My entire life is now devoted to appearing on television: a pleasant alternative to real life,” he wrote to friends. He found a new vocation as an articulate political insider, even though his only real political experience had been to run for office and lose. But Vidal was rare in literary circles in being fascinated with the dirt of party politics. He claimed to have picked up his cynical wisdom from his mother’s family, in particular his grandfather, Senator T. P. Gore, but I suspect he learned more from his father, Eugene, who’d been badly burned by the government in his work with the airline industry. Vidal picked up much more political experience later when he lived intimately with Aaron Burr and Abraham Lincoln while writing fiction about them.
The question of homosexuality almost never came up on TV. However, in March 1967, a news special was broadcast, CBS Reports: The Homosexuals. Hosted by Mike Wallace, it featured talking heads in silhouette discussing their unhappiness, and several pontificating psychiatrists, including fiercely antigay Charles Socarides. Gore Vidal appeared not as a homosexual but as a cultural expert to debate with Albert Goldman. Goldman, who later wrote a positive biography of Lenny Bruce and negative biographies of Elvis Presley and John Lennon, argued that homosexuality was one of the “things tending toward the final erosion of our cultural values.” Vidal replied, “I think the so-called breaking of the moral fiber of this country is one of the healthiest things that’s begun to happen.”
Vidal and Austen returned to Rome in May 1967 to live in a rooftop apartment near the Piazza Navona with a large sunlit terrace. Both men loved the city for many reasons, including the availability of young men for sex. Austen could be quite friendly with his Italian visitors, while Vidal’s relationships remained strictly professional. Rome was an excellent place to write, and he concentrated on his work.
Kenneth Tynan had asked for an erotic sketch for a show he was putting together, Oh! Calcutta! One morning on the terrace, while exploring a possible orgy scene, Vidal hit upon a line: “I am Myra Breckinridge whom no man will ever possess.” His imagination took off in a new direction and he followed it, forgetting Tynan and starting a novel. He wrote the first draft of Myra Breckinridge in a monthlong burst of creativity.
A wildly inventive comic fantasy about a movie scholar who changes his sex and goes to Hollywood, Myra Breckinridge is half parody, half lyric celebration. It suggests an American Orlando, but where Virginia Woolf’s cross-gendered fantasy is soaked in British literature, Vidal’s is soaked in American cinema. There are witty descriptions of old movies, prose poems about studio backlots, and comic homages to eccentric gay film critic Parker Tyler (who was still alive at the time). The book takes the form of Myra’s first-person journal, which enables Vidal to mix narrative, social analysis, movie lore, and blatant erotica. There is not only an orgy but two extended scenes where Myra literally plays doctor with straight blond stud Rusty Godowsky, and sodomizes him with a dildo. The literate voice of the essays is pushed into the absurd, but it’s serious as well as playful. “The novel being dead, there is no point to writing made-up stories. Look at the French who will not and the Americans who cannot. Look at me who ought not, if only because I exist entirely outside the usual human experience.” The book is more about voice than story, and it doesn’t entirely live up to the promise of its voice. But the same has been said about Orlando.
This was the book Vidal dedicated to Christopher Isherwood. “I AM HONORED AND DELIGHTED TO HAVE ANY BOOK OF YOURS DEDICATED TO ME,” Isherwood telegraphed in reply.
Myra Breckinridge was published in February 1968 with no advance copies being sent to reviewers. Little, Brown wanted to keep Myra’s transsexual identity a secret (it’s difficult to imagine a time when people didn’t already know) and present the book as a classy underground novel in the tradition of Lolita and Candy. The cover featured a photo of the cowgirl statue Vidal had seen from his room at Chateau Marmont when he first arrived in Hollywood. The initial printing was 55,000 copies, and the book was an instant best seller. Reviewers slowly caught up with it. “A funny novel, but it requires an iron stomach,” said Eliot Fremont-Smith in the daily New York Times. The Times Book Review was terribly coy in describing the book’s probable audience: “the pokerfaced jacket art manages to be both sexy and epicene; even the dedication will be a tip-off to the In-group.” It’s safe to assume gay readers made up a large proportion of the first buyers, but the book soon crossed over and remained on best-seller lists for thirty weeks. The other literary best seller that year was John Updike’s hotly heterosexual novel, Couples. Writers needed to offer something new and outrageous to hold their own with what was happening in the outside world in 1968.
It was a year of politics and violence. The country was torn apart by Vietnam and race. Lyndon Johnson declared on March 31 that he would not seek the nomination for president, leaving the upcoming election wide open. On the night of April 4, Martin Luther King was murdered by a sniper in Memphis. Riots broke out in black neighborhoods across the country. In June Robert Kennedy was murdered in Los Angeles immediately after winning the California primary. Then, at the end of August, the Democrats met in Chicago.
CBS and NBC provided full coverage of both the Republican and Democratic conventions, but ABC decided to give only evening wrap-ups. They hired Gore Vidal to deliver fifteen minutes of commentary each night. Appearing with Vidal to offer the conservative point of view was William F. Buckley.
The editor and founder of the National Review had fully established himself as the spokesman of American conservativism. Author of God and Man at Yale and other books, he also had a syndicated newspaper column, “On the Right,” and a TV show, Firing Line. Erudite, witty, and unearthly, he was famous for his elaborate sentences, breathy delivery, manic eyebrows, and reptilian tongue. He is now remembered as a representative of an age when conservatives could be civilized and reasonable. But Buckley was ahead of his time in many ways.
His exchanges with Vidal during the Republican convention in Miami were testy but without serious mishap. TV journalist Howard K. Smith served as moderator. Buckley supported the war in Vietnam, Vidal opposed it, but neither man liked the Republican nominee, Richard Nixon. Buckley was more excited by the governor of California, Ronald Reagan.
But the Democratic convention in Chicago was different. The situation was far more tense. The Democrats were bitterly divided over the war, with pro-war delegates supporting Vice President Hubert Humphrey and peace delegates supporting Senator Eugene McCarthy. The division was echoed outside the convention hall in the streets, where anti-war demonstrators—National Mobilization Against the War (MOBE), Yippies (Youth International Party) and others—faced Mayor Richard Daley’s army of police. Allen Ginsberg came to town, not to read poetry but to chant for peace. The author of “Howl” had become less literary and more spiritual in recent years, going deep into Eastern thought. He still wore a necktie but let his bushy hair and beard grow out. In Chicago he saw his old friend William Burroughs and the French gay writer Jean Genet. Burroughs and Genet were covering the convention for Esquire. Norman Mailer was there, too, covering the convention for Harper’s. Mailer had published an odd novel the year before, Why Are We in Vietnam? about two boys on a hunting trip in Alaska who love each other as friends, but each is afraid to show his love for fear his pal will then sodomize him. Mailer continued to have weird issues about homosexuality, but he remained alert and curious about gay writers.
Vidal and Buckley had their first TV exchange on Sunday, and it went badly. Sometime during the two weeks since Miami, Buckley had read Myra Breckinridge. He hated it. He attacked Vidal for being no better than a pornographer. A pornographer, he said, had no business calling the Republican Party immoral. Vidal was amused, but their conversations remained on edge.
During the day Vidal visited the convention floor as both a journalist and a McCarthy supporter. It was the familiar world of his play, The Best Man. But he also visited the new world of student protesters several miles away in Lincoln Park on the lake. The police cleared the park each night so nobody could sleep there, using billy clubs and tear gas. Mayor Daley hated the protesters and encouraged his cops to do whatever they wanted. Mailer visited the park, too, and in his excellent book Miami and the Siege of Chicago, describes meeting Ginsberg and his friends there on Monday evening: he thought they looked like infantrymen, but Genet reminded him of Mickey Rooney. Late Monday night the police attacked the park again and Ginsberg was badly gassed. For the rest of the week his voice was hoarse from tear gas and chanting.
On Tuesday night, the police came through the park one more time. The students resisted and threw rocks; the police became angrier. The students fled south and regrouped in Grant Park, which was closer to the convention and the hotels where the delegates stayed. It was also closer to the TV news crews. There were no live video feeds on the street, only 16mm movie cameras whose footage needed to be rushed to TV stations and developed before it could be broadcast. The Chicago police were more restrained, for a while.
The climax came on Wednesday, August 28. In the convention hall that afternoon, the anti-war Democrats attempted to get a peace plank into the party platform. They failed. Up in Grant Park, there was a major disturbance when somebody climbed a flagpole to take down the American flag and raise another—some said a Vietcong or Vietnamese Liberation Front flag, others a red scarf. A couple of cops tried to stop it and rocks were thrown. The police then formed a wedge and attacked the crowd, indiscriminately slamming people with nightsticks. Camera crews raced behind the wall of helmeted cops, capturing the mayhem in broad daylight.
In another corner of the park, Ginsberg calmed a group of protesters by teaching them how to chant “om.”
As the hot summer afternoon turned into evening, protesters crowded out of Grant Park and moved toward Michigan Avenue. They hoped to march down Michigan to the convention. But at the intersection of Balbo Avenue, outside the Hilton hotel, they were blocked by the police. Boxed in on three sides, the protesters were unable to move. Everybody waited—for thirty minutes. Then, at 7:57 p.m., as if on command, the police charged into the crowd. Columns of cops tore through the massed bodies, swinging clubs and fists, stampeding people left and right, knocking down individuals and dragging them across the pavement to paddy wagons while still beating them. They went after journalists, too, spraying them with mace or smashing their equipment. But the TV cameras on the canopy of the hotel were out of reach and continued filming. Recognizing what the cameras meant, protesters began to chant, “The whole world is watching, the whole world is watching.”
Within an hour, the film was processed and broadcast raw with minimal commentary, seventeen minutes of police violence. People across the country saw cops brutally beating up unarmed students. It was as shocking as seeing Alabama cops attack civil rights marchers with dogs and fire hoses. This time the faces were white, but some became black with blood on black-and-white TV sets.
In the ABC studio that night, Howard K. Smith opened the broadcast with clips of the police attack in Grant Park. Buckley defended the police and blamed the demonstrators, saying they were breaking the law. Vidal defended the demonstrators, saying they were practicing their constitutional right to assemble. The exchange became more heated and incoherent. Buckley cited Oliver Wendell Holmes—“whom you must despise.” Vidal cited the Constitution. Buckley interrupted:
Buckley: And some people were pro-Nazi.
Vidal: Shut up a minute.
Buckley: No, I won’t. Some people were pro-Nazi and the answer is that they were well-treated by the people who ostracized them, and I’m for ostracizing people who egg on other people to shoot American Marines and American soldiers. I know you don’t care—
Vidal: As far as I’m concerned, the only pro or crypto Nazi I can think of is yourself. Failing that—
Howard K. Smith: Let’s not call names.
And Buckley delivered the insult heard around the world.
Buckley: Now listen, you queer. Stop calling me a crypto Nazi or I’ll sock you in the goddamn face.
Howard K. Smith: Let’s stop calling names!
Buckley: And you’ll stay plastered. Let Myra Breckinridge go back to his pornography and stop making any allusions of Nazism. I was in the infantry in the last war!
Vidal: You were not in the infantry. As a matter of fact, you didn’t fight in the war.
Buckley: I was in the infantry.
Vidal: You were not. You’re distorting your own military record.
The two men sat side by side, half turned toward each other, Buckley in a gray suit, Vidal in a dark one. Both remained seated the entire time. Buckley had a finger pressed to one ear, presumably to keep his earpiece in place so he could hear how he sounded. Vidal broke into a smile when Buckley called him a queer, an oddly gleeful, boyish smile. Then he understood how angry Buckley was and his smile wavered. Buckley bared his teeth and leaned forward as if to hit Vidal, but his finger remained stuck in his ear.
A sixteen-year-old boy in Virginia watched the exchange with his mouth wide open. I was home from a summer at Boy Scout camp and I was amazed that two grown men could attack each other like angry adolescents. I suspected Buckley meant queer in the nastiest sexual way and wondered if it were true. I was impressed by how cool and unflustered Vidal remained.
“What happened at Sharon—,” Vidal began before Smith cut him off. Smith proposed that the protesters may have provoked the violence by raising a Vietcong flag, as if that justified all the beatings that followed. Vidal insisted that even a Vietcong flag was an act of speech. “We are guaranteed freedom of speech. We’ve just listened to a grotesque example of it.” The session ended with Smith declaring that Buckley and Vidal had given “a little more heat and a little less light than usual,” but it had still been interesting.
Newspapers discussed the exchange the next day, but could only refer to “the disgraceful language”; they couldn’t quote it. Besides, there were more important things to talk about. Nobody had been killed on Michigan Avenue, but many were injured and hundreds were arrested. A shouting match had broken out at the convention when Abe Ribicoff of New York condemned Mayor Daley for “gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago.” Americans were disgusted by the violence, but many blamed the protesters, not the police. This was an age when the country still trusted its police. In the middle of this chaos, Hubert Humphrey was nominated as candidate for president.
Vidal and Buckley appeared again on the last night of the convention and were subdued, professional, and dull. In November they were called back for postmortems on the election. Nixon won, in part because the Democratic convention had been so disorderly; Nixon represented law and order. Yet the third-party segregationist candidate, George Wallace, attracted many white conservatives, and the election was surprisingly close. Buckley insisted a screen separate him and Vidal so he wouldn’t have to look at his antagonist while they spoke.
That should have been the end of it, but Buckley continued to brood about Vidal. After their last TV exchange, he contacted Esquire magazine and said he wanted to write about the televised fight. He told them he needed to be able to call Vidal a homosexual in print. Esquire enjoyed controversy and, after discussing it with their lawyers, they accepted but insisted Vidal be allowed to respond. Buckley agreed. Vidal hesitated—he had never acknowledged he was a homosexual (after all, there was no such thing)—but eventually he agreed, too. Each man wrote his article and drafts were exchanged. Lawyers were consulted and the articles were rewritten. Then, after both sides agreed on what could be printed, three months before either piece ran, Buckley sent a telegram to twenty magazines and newspapers declaring that Vidal had libeled him on TV and now wanted to libel him with an article in Esquire. He didn’t mention his own article. Two days later he sued Vidal for libel. He still expected Esquire to publish his piece but threatened to sue them as well if they published Vidal’s.
One cannot read about Buckley’s actions without feeling one is dealing with a crazy person. But the very idea of homosexuality can turn some people temporarily insane.
Buckley’s piece ran in August 1969. “On Experiencing Gore Vidal” appears with a subhead, “Can there be any justification in calling a man a queer before ten million people on television?” Which is what part of the essay is about—the part that makes sense, anyway. It’s a long, obsessive, tedious piece. It’s difficult to understand why Esquire went ahead and printed it—it’s clearly not what they hoped for. It’s even harder to figure out what Buckley hoped to prove. He begins by quoting an old article in the East Village Other that attacked him for practicing “faggot logic.” He complains that other people can call him names, and protesters can call Lyndon Johnson names, so why can’t he call Vidal a queer? He quotes his TV exchanges with Vidal in great detail. He talks about Vidal’s writing and his “almost obsession with homosexuality,” which is as close as he comes to actually saying that Vidal is a homosexual. The lawyers must have made him remove anything more direct. Buckley seemed to think that if he could identify Vidal as an actual pervert then he would prove that he himself was more moral and would win the argument. He closes with a strange paragraph on how “faggotry is countenanced, but the imputation of it—even to faggots—is not…. But the imputation of it in anger is not justified, which is why I herewith apologize to Gore Vidal.”
Vidal’s piece ran in September: “A Distasteful Encounter with William F. Buckley, Jr.” The subheading was: “Can there be any justification in calling a man a pro crypto Nazi before ten million people on television?” The cover displayed the title, “The Kids vs. the Pigs” and a photo of a college boy going face-to-face with a real pig.
The essay is clear, coherent, and merciless. Vidal’s account of what happened in Chicago, on the streets and in the TV studio, is more cogent than Buckley’s woolly rambling. But more damning is his look at the past of Buckley and his family. Vidal opens and closes with the ugly story of how the Buckley children in 1944 vandalized an Episcopal church in Sharon, Connecticut—Sharon was the cryptic word Vidal delivered after Buckley lost his temper. The Buckleys, who were famously Catholic, hated the local Episcopal minister for selling a home to Jews. Vidal quotes local newspapers and court records about the crime, but never specifies that Buckley himself was not involved, only his three sisters. He repeatedly makes the point that this is the family Buckley came from. It’s a painful story and is perhaps what angered Buckley so much that he sued Vidal for writing an article he had forced him to write in the first place. Far more damaging, however, is Vidal’s encyclopedia of racist remarks made by Buckley over the years. Vidal offered his own apology of sorts, saying he was sorry to suggest that Buckley had associated with Hitler. He meant to call him a fascist.
Buckley took Vidal to court when he couldn’t defeat him on the printed page. His own essay is a big floppy pillow compared to Vidal’s well-aimed baseball bat. One can’t help picturing a furious Elmer Fudd being clobbered by Bugs Bunny. But Buckley could have stopped the whole affair if he’d simply withdrawn his essay and let the matter drop. However, his pride and his moral righteousness were involved, and he could not let go.
When Esquire printed Vidal’s essay, Buckley sued Esquire, too. The case went back and forth between lawyers and judges for three years. There were countersuits and dismissals, depositions and subpoenas. Legal costs mounted. Finally, in August 1972, Esquire settled with Buckley out of court, agreeing to pay his legal fees and declare in their pages that they didn’t agree with Vidal’s accusations if Buckley dropped his suit. Buckley then dropped his suit against Vidal as well. Buckley next issued a press release claiming that he had won. The Times reported the settlement, again without mentioning Buckley’s original piece, making it look as if Vidal had started the whole thing.
A few years later in his novel Burr, Vidal included a thoroughly unpleasant character named William de la Touche Clancey, an Irish Catholic sodomite who puts on airs and is despised by everyone. It is a not-so-private joke, yet no lawsuit was ever threatened, perhaps because it would have been preposterous to suggest that William F. Buckley could be a sodomite—and after all, there was no such thing.
But Gore Vidal was not the only political writer attacked for being gay in 1968. And one did not need to be white, wealthy, and Harvard-educated to sound crazy when denouncing a queer.
James Baldwin was back in the United States after his sojourns in Istanbul. He appeared frequently on television, always as a black spokesman, never as a gay one. He restricted his sexuality to his fiction. He spent time with the political organizers around Martin Luther King. He also spent time with the new black radicals who offered a militant alternative to King’s pacifism, Huey Newton and the Black Panthers. His pleasure in their company is caught in a description of their followers in his next novel:
They were younger than they thought they were, much: they might arrive in their Castro berets, their parkas and hoods and sweaters and thin jeans or corduroys and heavy boots, and with their beautiful black kinky hair spinning around their heads like fire and prophecy… but they were goggle-eyed just the same, and so far from being incapable of trusting, they had perpetually to fight the impulse to trust, overwhelmed, like all kids, by meeting a Great Man.
The “Great Man” in the novel, Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, is Leo Proudhammer, a black actor, but it was also Baldwin, now a major public figure in the civil rights movement.
The Minister of Information for the Panthers was an older man, a thirty-three-year-old ex-con named Eldridge Cleaver. In March 1968, he published a collection of essays, Soul on Ice, which included strong pieces about life in Folsom Prison, where he served time for rape, and a long essay on Baldwin, “Notes on a Native Son.” After declaring first love of his writing, then unease, Cleaver abruptly announces that Baldwin’s work contains “the most grueling, agonizing total hatred of the blacks, particularly of himself, and the most shameful, fanatical, fawning, sycophantic love of the whites… of any black American writer of note of our time.” When he finally gets to specifics, Cleaver attacks Baldwin for having qualms about African nationalism in his essay “Princes and Powers,” and for mocking Norman Mailer’s essay “The White Negro.” Cleaver treats Mailer as the authority on black male experience, shamelessly fawning over the white novelist.
Then he gets on the subject of homosexuality and goes completely bonkers: “It seems that many Negro homosexuals… are outraged and frustrated because in their sickness they are unable to have a baby by the white man.” He claims that this is why they are so eager to bend over for white lovers. He builds to his famous declaration: “I, for one, do not think that homosexuality is the latest advance over heterosexuality on the scale of human evolution. Homosexuality is a sickness, just as are baby-rape and wanting to become the head of General Motors.” This is a kind of joke, of course, but where exactly does it land? He closes by quoting Murray Kempton out of context in order to dismiss Baldwin as the new Stepin Fetchit, the shuffling, slow-talking black comedian of the 1930s and 1940s.
Cleaver’s remarks about black women (“the silent ally, indirectly but effectively, of the white man”) and his political explanation of the rape of white women are even more appalling. The book had its critics, but it’s shocking how many people praised it in 1968. The Times Book Review included it in their ten best books of the year. Sympathy for the oppressed blocked out the sad truth that Christopher Isherwood identified in A Single Man: oppression can make people crazy and hateful.
Needless to say, Baldwin did not like Cleaver’s essay. He told a friend, “All that toy soldier has done is call me gay. I thought we’d gone through all that with the [Black] Muslims and were past it. All he wants is a gunfight at the OK Corral.” But Baldwin wrote some strange things about Cleaver in his next nonfiction book, the journal-like memoir, No Name in the Street:
I thought I could see why he felt impelled to issue what was, in fact, a warning: he was being a zealous watchman on the city wall, and I do not say that with a sneer…. I felt that he used my public reputation against me both naively and unjustly, and I also felt that I was confused in his mind with the unutterable debasement of the male—with all those faggots, punks, and sissies, the sight and sound of whom, in prison, must have made him vomit more than once.
Baldwin goes on to say that both he and Cleaver are “odd and disreputable” and that “the odd and disreputable revolutionary” and “the odd and disreputable artist” have much to learn from each other. Yet there’s a masochistic note in Baldwin’s response that’s unsettling. It’s as if part of him thought he deserved to be abused as a faggot, punk, and sissy. Cleaver wasn’t the only activist slamming Baldwin for being gay. In political circles he was sometimes known as Martin Luther Queen.
Baldwin may have responded directly if other, more public events hadn’t intervened. A few weeks after Soul on Ice was published, the police raided a Black Panther office in Oakland, California. There was a real gunfight and Cleaver was wounded and arrested; another Panther, Bobby Hutton, was killed. That was on April 6. More important, two days before, on April 4, when Baldwin was in Palm Springs working on a screenplay about Malcolm X, a friend telephoned from Memphis to say that Martin Luther King had been shot. Baldwin was devastated. Many friends said he was never the same afterward. He wrote about it himself: “Since Martin’s death in Memphis… something has altered in me, something has gone away. Perhaps even more than the death itself, the manner of his death has forced me into a judgment concerning human life and human beings which I have always been reluctant to make.”
Baldwin grew more bleak and bitter in interviews on TV and in magazines, talking about white reactionaries, black genocide, and the death of hope. He didn’t bother to look at the page proofs of Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone before it was published in June. He was too depressed by politics, but he also must have known that the book was a failure.
A first-person narrator, a black actor, Leo Proudhammer, tells the story of his life while he recovers from a heart attack. He grew up in Harlem, rose to fame, had affairs with women and men, and is now involved with a young black radical. Leo should provide Baldwin with the opportunity for a deeply personal, autobiographical novel, but it is a flat, impersonal book, with only a few good firsthand moments such as that description of young radicals. The strong emotion that carried Another Country, despite its huge cast and uneven prose, is gone. His emotions were all engaged elsewhere—first in politics, then in grief—or numbed by alcohol. The heavy drinking that had helped Baldwin live with his demons of love and anger was catching up with him.
The reviews were bad. Some quoted Cleaver’s charge that there was no politics, economics, or social referents in Baldwin’s fiction and it was only about sex. People began to make the soon-to-be familiar argument that the essay and not the novel was his domain. As I said before, I disagree. Baldwin’s best novels are better than his essays. I suspect people often prefer the essays simply because there’s no sex in them (which with Baldwin usually means gay sex). But while the first-person essay helped Gore Vidal find his strengths as a fiction writer, the form may have hurt Baldwin. The loose, rambling, hit-or-miss qualities of his essays led to a similar rambling quality when he used the first person for his later novels.
By the end of the summer Baldwin had left the United States, going first to Paris, then to Istanbul. He was out of the country at the time of the Chicago riots. A year later in Istanbul, he directed a Turkish production of Fortune and Men’s Eyes for his friend Engin Cezzar. This is the John Herbert play about prison life and rape, the world of “faggots, punks, and sissies” that Baldwin said he could almost understand Eldridge Cleaver for hating.
Cleaver meanwhile jumped bail and fled to Algeria, where he lived for six years. He returned to America in 1975 and was convicted of assault but sentenced only to probation. He soon renounced Marx, became a Mormon, and eventually joined the Republican Party.
Truman Capote was also unraveling at this time, not from politics but from fame. He was high on it, intoxicated. A year after the masked ball at the Plaza, a movie was made from In Cold Blood and the media revisited him and his book. He returned to the TV circuit, speaking as an advocate against the death penalty. Also shown on TV in 1967 was a film of his story “A Christmas Memory,” with Capote narrating. His voice became more famous than ever.
The politics that meant so much to Vidal and Baldwin barely touched Capote. When he talked about Vietnam or black power in his 1968 Playboy interview, his ideas sounded only glib and secondhand. (“I think both sides, Hanoi and Washington, are terribly, tragically wrong. And the mistakes of statesmen are always written in young men’s blood.”) Even his comments about capital punishment—the death penalty would be good if it were used quickly and consistently; life sentences should mean life without parole—had a thoughtless, mechanical quality. He was busy working on his next project—or said he was busy. By 1968 Answered Prayers was already the world’s most famous unwritten novel. He told Playboy that it was “a roman à clef, drawn from life yet suffused with fictional elements and partaking of both my reportorial abilities and imaginative gifts.” He told friends it would be twice as long as Remembrance of Things Past. But when Donald Windham spent a month with him in a rented house in Palm Springs, he found that Capote did not sit down to write until after lunch and he always took a bottle of wine to his workroom, where he could be heard talking on the telephone.
The drinking that had escalated while he finished In Cold Blood now became epic. Windham noticed his routine during their time together: “a bloody mary before lunch, followed by three or four large vodkas, then wine. Before dinner a bottle of white wine (instead of ‘early drinks’), then four or five vodkas at the house, and two or three more at the restaurant.” It’s an insane amount of alcohol to put into a five-foot-three body. Mailer in Miami and the Siege of Chicago described Mayor Daley as “looking suspiciously like a fat and aged version of tough Truman Capote on ugly pills.” Capote was approaching that version himself, despite a facelift.
Windham made another discovery during this trip. Capote’s regular TV appearances were often taped and rerun and he enjoyed watching himself. He lost his last bond to reality. “[He] began to talk to me as though I knew no more about him, and was no more to him, than another guest on one of the talk shows.”
A lover might have provided some kind of anchor, but he and Jack Dunphy were spending more and more time apart. Dunphy was frustrated as a writer and worked harder at his novels and plays, becoming a hermit. Capote often didn’t want to hear anything critical Dunphy had to say on the few occasions when they were together. He began to see other boyfriends on the side, usually married men with no interest in literature.
Capote achieved the wealth and fame he had dreamed of as a boy in Alabama. He expanded in it, like a high-altitude balloon rising toward the sun. He was a fascinating spectacle—for a while. It’s a myth that success is the worst thing that can happen to an artist. Failure is far more destructive. Yet adulation can feed not only the social confidence of artists, it can turn up the volume of self-criticism and doubt. As Capote grew louder and more baroque in public, he became more silent whenever he sat alone at his typewriter.
As the Sixties came to an end, three gay writers were major spokesmen on important national issues: Vidal on party politics, Baldwin on civil rights, Capote on capital punishment. They were all dismissed at one time or another for being gay, even though their sexuality had nothing to do with what they were saying. But they were also taken seriously. The age of literary television would go on for a few more years, into a time when gay writers could talk a little about their own lives and issues. But this early gay presence, often between the lines, was excitedly noticed and seized upon by audiences of gay men and women.
A future novelist named Edmund White saw Capote on TV at this time and remembers him as being an embarrassment, little more than a literary Liberace. Yet other gay people still in college or high school found Capote exciting, even promising. Most of us were impressed by Gore Vidal, despite his cool, supercilious manner. All of us were in awe of James Baldwin, even though we didn’t discover his sexuality until we read his novels. But if these three homosexuals could publish their books and be taken seriously and even appear on television, then homosexuality was not the total taboo that society claimed it to be. Maybe there was hope for us lesser mortals.