SUMMARY: Gore Vidal was in many ways the dean of American letters. More to the point, at least for many of us who happen to be queer, Gore (and yes, I remember him by his given name) was our first introduction to the idea that it was possible to construct a viable, culturally subversive, culturally critical, gay literature. He helped many of us learn to think critically about what it means to be cultural dissidents in a society that is only now coming to appreciate the beauty of Otherness.
By: Paul S. Marchand
Gore Vidal died yesterday.
I shall miss him terribly.
Gore (and I don’t apologize for using his given name; something about him seemed to call it forth) was one of those cultural dissidents who demanded a great deal of his readers. At the same time, he was one of those pioneers of queer literature whose writing forced us to ask serious, critical questions about the place of Others in society.
My first encounter with Gore’s writing was — as I expect it was with many queerfolk of my generation— his novel The City and the Pillar. While its story line takes place in a pre-Stonewall America in which the open expression of sexual Otherness was interdicted by state and church alike, it reminded young queerfolk that we were not alone. Reading The City and the Pillar as a teenager awakened me to the reality that there were others like me, and that we were not only queer, but also that we had been here for a long, long, time.
Reading his other works also awakened my mind to the importance of asking sharp, probing questions about the cultural assumptions that underlie so much of our society. For if Socrates was right that the unexamined life is not worth living, Gore Vidal insisted that we examine not only our own lives, but also the societies in which our lives are lived.
Of all Gore’s works, the one I most enjoyed was Creation, perhaps the least over-the-top of his novels, but perhaps the most intellectually provocative. Set in the 6th and 5th Centuries BC, the conceit of the novel is the exploration of various ideas of creation itself, expressed in the travels of the novel’s protagonist, Cyrus Spitama, a putative grandson of Zoroaster. Not only was Creation a tour de force of historical storytelling, but it also invited the reader to undertake a critical reappraisal of the accepted narrative of the Persian Wars as recounted by Herodotus.
Indeed, I might never have taken up a serious reading of Herodotus had I not been nudged there by Gore Vidal’s iconoclastic, revisionist, take on the conflict between Greece and Persia that in so many ways has shaped our own Greek-Roman civilization. A score of years after I last reread Creation, I remain grateful to Gore for inspiring me to visit the sources for myself, to learn on my own a history that finds so many parallels in our own time.
Gore Vidal inspired me to think; he inspired me to inquire; he left me unembarrassed to be an out, loud, proud gay man.
As I once similarly appreciated the late Sir John Gielgud, I appreciate the late Gore Vidal.
I shall miss him.
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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City. The views expressed herein are entirely his own.
