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 But Buckley could have stopped the whole affair if he’d simply withdrawn his essay and let the matter drop.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.
10. Riots
Oh, my God, it’s Lily Law!
Everybody three feet apart!
—Emory, The Boys in the Band
In 1967 in New York City, a twenty-six-year-old former dance student, Craig Rodwell, opened a bookstore on Mercer Street on the southern edge of Greenwich Village. It was not just another bookstore, however; it was a gay bookstore, the first of its kind. Rodwell wasn’t much of a reader, but he had great respect for literature. He intended to combine art and politics, using the store as a center for activism while selling books to attract visitors and pay the rent. Needing an identifiably homosexual name, he called it the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop.
Rodwell had been active in the tiny world of gay politics since 1964, after a suicide attempt led to a stay in a mental hospital. He found strength and purpose working with the Mattachine Society. The organization’s deliberately obscure name (an order of jester
s in the Middle Ages) illustrates how oppressive society was in the 1950s and 1960s: a homosexual rights group could not afford to identify itself as homosexual.
Sex between consenting same-gender adults was still a crime in all fifty states except Illinois. Gay and lesbian bars were frequently raided. Men and women were regularly fired from their jobs for being gay—this included federal employees and schoolteachers. Conservatives later complained that homosexual activists publicized what should have remained private, but it was the police and the courts who made homosexuality a public matter.
To cite just one incident: on a Friday night in April 1960, in a gay bar in Miami, Florida, the “E” club, five plainclothes cops entered, ordered customers to put down their drinks, and arrested twenty-two men for “disorderly conduct.” But that wasn’t the end of it. On Sunday, a local tabloid, the Miami News, ran a story of the raid, naming those arrested with their ages, occupations, and addresses. Imagine your neighbors or even your boss reading that you were caught in a bar where, “habitués of the place were reported to embrace each other, wear tight-fitting women’s pants and bleach their hair.” (This is just one raid among thousands. Historians know of it chiefly because ONE published a detailed account.)
Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America Page 16