“He was tanned and youthful-looking… Thom Gunn, “Getting Things Right,” in Shelf Life (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 173.
“Perhaps I’ll never write another novel… Ibid., 456.
“I believe he really thinks about ‘posterity’… Isherwood, Diaries: Volume One, 521.
“Two days ago, for example, I was quite blue… Ibid., 533.
Abbey “was very funny… Ibid., 588.
“There was one wonderful thing about Truman… John Gregory Dunne, quoted in George Plimpton, Truman Capote (New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 1997), 432.
Donald Windham… had hoped to use the title himself… Windham, Lost Friendships, 57.
“As boys they were lovers… Vidal, The Second American Revolution and Other Essays, 144.
“but for God’s sake don’t tell Ralph.” Charlton Heston, In the Arena (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 187.
“Gore is running for Congress… Isherwood, Diaries: Volume One, 859.
CHAPTER 6. THE GREAT HOMOSEXUAL THEATER SCARE
“Get that ass!” Gore Vidal, “Tennessee Williams: Someone to Laugh at the Squares With,” At Home, 50.
“Poison… Windham, Lost Friendships, 212.
Merlo’s Italian nickname for Williams’s grandfather… Donald Spoto, Kindness of Strangers (Boston: Little, Brown, 1985), 245.
“It is time to speak openly and candidly about the increasing incidence and influence of homosexuality… Howard Taubman, “Not What It Seems,” New York Times, November 5, 1961, Art X1. (This article was brought to my attention by Michael Paller in Gentlemen Callers. His chapter on the homosexual theater scare is excellent.)
“I took to it, as they say, as a duck to water.” Gussow, 49.
the Sisters Grimm… Ned Rorem, quoted in Mel Gussow, Edward Albee: A Singular Journey (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), 80.
“Why do homosexuals always write rotten love poetry…?” Ibid., 85.
“That’s the best fucking one-act play… Quoted in Gussow, 120.
Richard Howard could hear echoes… Ibid., 158.
“Martha: Hey, put some more ice in my drink… Edward Albee, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (New York: New American Library, 2006), 15.
“Like Strindberg, Mr. Albee treats his women remorselessly… Howard Taubman, New York Times, October 15, 1962. http://theater.nytimes.com/mem/theater/treview.html?res=FC77E7DF1730E062BC4D52DFB6678389679EDE&scp=2&sq=Howard%20Taubman/Edward%20Albee&st=cse.
“a homosexual daydream… Philip Roth, “The Play That Dare Not Speak Its Name,” New York Review of Books, February 25, 1965. ://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1965/feb/25/the-play-that-dare-not-speak-its-name/. (But en-lightenment can come at a slant. Critic Michael Bronski reports that in his early teens in the 1960s in New Jersey, his parents were afraid he might become gay. His father spoke to a psychiatrist who suggested that he bond with his son. He should find some activity they both enjoyed. They both liked theater, so the father regularly took Michael into New York to see new plays. As Bronski points out, he still became gay, but he and his father saw some good shows and they now have a pretty good relationship. Among the plays they saw was Tiny Alice, which puzzled both of them.)
Wilfrid Sheed… in Commentary… Quoted in Michael Sherry, Gay Artists in Modern American Culture: An Imaginary Conspiracy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 130. (Sherry concentrates on American music, but his book is a gold mine of material and ideas about theater, too.)
Martin Gottfried in Women’s Wear Daily… Quoted in Paller, Gentlemen Callers, 179.
“The principal charge against homosexual dramatists is well known… Stanley Kauffmann, “Homosexual Drama and Its Disguises,” New York Times, January 23, 1966, Arts and Leisure, 93.
“[T]he great artists so often cited as evidence of the homosexual’s creativity… “The Homosexual in America,” Time, January 21, 1966, 40. (Michael Sherry’s book brought this essay to my attention.)
“The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility… Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” A Susan Sontag Reader (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1982), 118.
“brilliant” became “admirable.” Gussow, 179.
“There’s not that much difference between straight and gay couples in their fights.” Ibid., 159.
“I know I did not write the play about two male couples… Ibid.
“If I am writing a female character, goddamnit, I’m going to write a female character… Quoted in Paller, Gentlemen Callers, 190.
“Yes, those first two acts of Virginia Woolf are marvelous bitch dialogue… William Goldman, The Season (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969), 411. (This book is recommended for anyone who wants to see just how ugly and unrelenting fag-baiting could get in the 1960s.)
“With Frank ill, Tennessee just couldn’t cope for himself… Spoto, Kindness of Strangers, 257.
“Frankie was the only one who really understood him… Ibid., 258.
“I’ve grown used to you… Williams, Memoirs (Garden City: Doubleday, 1975), 194.
“They say he just gasped… Tennessee Williams, Five O’Clock Angel: Letters of Tennessee Williams to Maria St. Just (New York: Knopf, 1990), 185.
CHAPTER 7. THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE
“Never pass up the opportunity to have sex… This is frequently attributed to Gore Vidal, but not even he can remember exactly when he said it. Vidal, Point to Point Navigation (New York: Doubleday, 2006), 251.
“Capote did not look small on the show… Norman Mailer, Pieces and Pontifications (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982), 41.
“The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains… Truman Capote, In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences (New York: Modern Library, 1992), 3.
Capote and Infamous… The first movie is a grim slog that treats the author as an autistic robot whose exploitation of Smith and Hickock is a worse crime than the murder of the Clutters. Philip Seymour Hoffman works hard to overcome the fact that he is miscast as Capote, and for this he won an Academy Award. The second movie, Infamous, is livelier, funnier, smarter, and more emotionally complex; its Capote, Toby Jones, is so effortless that he doesn’t seem to be acting at all. The movie is a neglected masterpiece.
“Steps, noose, mask… Capote, In Cold Blood, 340–341.
“Are we so bankrupt, so avid for novelty… Stanley Kauffmann, New Republic, January 22, 1966; quoted in Gerald Clarke, Capote.
“For the first time an influential writer in the front rank… Kenneth Tynan, “The Coldest of Blood,” The Observer, March 13, 1966, reprinted in Tynan Left and Right (New York: Atheneum, 1968), 445.
“For although the word ‘friends’ should be put into quotation marks… Windham, Lost Friendships, 74. Windham also writes intelligently about the liberties Capote took with facts, which he knew about since his boyfriend, Sandy Campbell, spent time with Capote in Kansas as a fact-checker for the New Yorker. “His triumph is the accuracy of his imaginative invention, the instinctive truths he found in himself, which enabled him to create convincingly and movingly within the confines of the known facts the inner workings of his major characters, especially of the killer Perry Smith” (78).
“A hotel’s enormous neon name… James Baldwin, Early Novels and Stories (New York: Library of America, 1998), 368.
“they do not matter…” Randall Jarrell, Poetry and the Age (New York: Knopf, 1953), 112.
“incessant homosexuality” Quoted in Magdalena Zaborowska, James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 49. A weird, fascinating book that asks all the right questions but rarely gives direct answers.
“I read late last night… Another Country… Donald Vining, A Gay Diary, vol. 3, 1954–1967 (New York: Pepys Press, 1981), 308.
“If we do not now dare everything… Baldwin, “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” in Collected Essays (Library of America), 347.
“Bobby Kennedy’s assurance… Ibid., 340.
“Ask any Ne
gro…. Ibid., 345.
a conversation that can be seen on YouTube (www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xy3ounRw9Q&playnext=1&list=PLE7353AF1FDA22441).
“the only hope this country has… Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), 895.
“love of his people in his writing… Quoted in James Campbell, Talking at the Gates (New York: Viking, 1991), 205.
“If there is ever a Black Muslim nation… Philip Roth, “Channel X: Two Plays on Race Conflict,” New York Review of Books, May 28, 1964. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1964/may/28/channel-x-two-plays-on-the-race-conflict/.
“One cannot let one’s name be associated with shits… Richard Davenport-Hines, Auden (New York: Pantheon, 1996), 319.
“By the time you are thirty… “James Baldwin Debates William F. Buckley,” YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v+nbkObXxSUus. (Baldwin later reworked his remarks for a strong article in the New York Times Magazine, “The American Dream and the American Negro,” reprinted in Collected Essays, 714.)
did not want to live like a Henry James character. Leeming, James Baldwin, 258. Leeming can only paraphrase this important letter… see “Notes on a Native Son” by James Campbell, The Guardian, February 12, 2005. (Campbell originally quoted from Baldwin’s correspondence but had to go back and paraphrase. Sol Stein was able to include letters in his book, but nobody else was able to do likewise. Hilton Als has argued that Baldwin’s letters are his unpublished masterpiece.)
CHAPTER 8. LOVE AND SEX AND A SINGLE MAN
“as brutal as Pal Joey” Quoted in Parker, Isherwood: A Life, 664.
“At last!” quoted in Parker, 667.
“There were businessmen with flesh-roll necks… Christopher Isherwood, Down There on a Visit (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1962), 340.
“I see my twenty-three-year-old face… Ibid., 29.
“You know, you really are a tourist, to your bones… Ibid., 349.
“World Is Just One Big Sodom to Him…” Reviews from Miami News, Detroit Free Press, and Oxford Times, quoted in Parker, 695.
“It’s saying a great deal about Isherwood’s ability as a novelist… Herbert Mitgang, New York Times, March 23, 1962, 31. Gerald Sykes in the New York Times Book Review, in one of the rare good reviews, saw Down There as a gay novel: “Even readers who feel they have had more than enough in recent years of the modern Sodom and Gomorrah will be surprised, I believe, to find how freshly and movingly these men are presented.” “Compulsively Detached,” March 18, 1962, Times Book Review, 288. (It’s hard to guess what this overdose of Sodom and Gomorrah refers to: Another Country was not published until June and Virginia Woolf didn’t open until the end of the year.)
Welcome to Berlin, to star Julie Andrews… Keith Garebian, The Making of Cabaret (Oakville, Ontario: Mosaic Press, 1999), 3.
“Right now he is nerve-strung almost to screaming point… Quoted in Parker, 702. (One of several odd things about the Parker bio is how in most of the book he takes the side of almost anyone except Isherwood, but in the last third he takes Isherwood’s side against Bachardy.)
“When I suffer, I suffer like a dumb animal… Quoted in Parker, 709.
“And in no time at all the blindingly simple truth was revealed… Christopher Isherwood, diary, September 19, 1962; quoted in Parker, 706.
“And I’ll tell you something else… Isherwood, A Single Man (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1964), 72.
“As long as one precious drop of hate remained… Ibid., 102.
“George smiles to himself, with entire self-satisfaction… Ibid., 180.
“Then one by one the lights go out… Ibid., 186.
“Let us even go so far as to say… Ibid., 28.
“While I can believe this novel, I don’t find it particularly interesting… Roger Angell, quoted in Parker, 715.
“a small masterpiece… as well as reviews in the Los Angeles Times, Catholic Standard, The Daily Worker the Catholic Herald, and the Nashville Tennessean, quoted in Parker, 727.
“Poor Corydon is now in California… Elizabeth Hardwick, “Sex and the Single Man,” New York Review of Books, August 20, 1964. Other Hardwick quotes: “His is a fairly modest anal disposition, respectable enough, with a finicky, faggoty interest in the look of things—far from the corruption and splendor of his type in French fiction.” One cannot win in the eyes of straight intellectuals. You’re either a flaming criminal in a Jean Genet novel or you’re nobody. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1964/aug/20/sex-and-the-single-man/.
“The most honest book ever written about a homosexual… Quoted by David Garnes, “A Single Man, Then and Now” in The Isherwood Century, ed. by James J. Berg and Chris Freeman (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), 199.
“As long as I quite unashamedly get drunk… Isherwood, My Guru and His Disciple (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1980), 271.
“When Don isn’t here… Isherwood, diary, November 2, 1964; quoted in Parker, 721.
CHAPTER 9. THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING
“I decided to examine the homosexual underworld… Gore Vidal, The City and the Pillar, rev. ed. (New York: Dutton, 1965), 245. (Michel Foucault said something similar fifteen years later in History of Sexuality, but he read it back into history, proposing that an innocence existed before doctors named “the illness” at the end of the nineteenth century.)
“had too much ego to be a writer of fiction… Jason Epstein, quoted in Fred Kaplan, Gore Vidal, 771.
“Then Enid was right. You do love Clay. And you are mad.” Gore Vidal, Washington, D.C. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967), 374.
“My entire life is now devoted to appearing on television… Quoted in Kaplan, Gore Vidal, 593.
“things tending toward the final erosion of our cultural values…” CBS Reports: The Homosexuals, CBS, March 7, 1967; available at http://www.akawilliam.com/watch-cbs-reports-the-homosexuals-from-1967.
“I am Myra Breckinridge… Gore Vidal, Myra Breckinridge (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968), 1.
“The novel being dead… Vidal, Myra Breckinridge, 4.
“I AM HONORED AND DELIGHTED… Christopher Isherwood to Gore Vidal, August 12, 1967, quoted in Kaplan, Gore Vidal, 584.
“A funny novel, but it requires an iron stomach… Eliot Fremont-Smith, “Like Fay Wray If the Light Is Right,” New York Times, February 3, 1968. http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/01/home/vidal-myra.html?scp=1&sq=myra%20breckinridge&st=cse.
“the pokerfaced jacket art… James McBridge, “What Did Myra Want?” New York Times Book Review, February 18, 1968. http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/06/22/reviews/hollywood-myra.html?scp=4&sq=myra%20breckinridge&st=cse.
Ginsberg calmed a group of protesters… Mailer, Miami, 167. One year later, on the witness stand at the trial of the Chicago Seven, Ginsberg would OM in an attempt to make peace between defense attorney William Kunstler and angry judge Julius Hoffman.
“And some people were pro-Nazi…” ABC News, August 28, 1968. The famous exchange can be watched on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uajX661byMw&NR=1). People have accused Vidal of making the crypto-Nazi charge out of nowhere, but the pro-Nazi line was introduced by Buckley. Presumably he was referring to George Lincoln Rockwell, whom he discussed later, but he didn’t explain himself yet. (Incidentally, Buckley was in the army during World War II and attended Officer Candidates School, but never went overseas.)
That should have been the end of it… Buckley supporters pretend that Buckley did not instigate the articles. The details here are drawn almost entirely from Kaplan, Gore Vidal, pp. 603–612, who backs up his account of the order of events with many sources, most importantly an unpublished manuscript by Harold Hayes, editor of Esquire.
“almost obsession with homosexuality… William F. Buckley, “On Experiencing Gore Vidal,” Esquire, August 1969, 110.
“faggotry is countenanced… Ibid., 128.
“Can there be any justification in calling a man a pro crypto Nazi…?” Gore Vidal, “A Distasteful Encounter with Willia
m F. Buckley, Jr.,” Esquire, September 1969, 140.
“They were younger than they thought they were… James Baldwin, Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (New York: Dial Press, 1968), 454.
“the most grueling, agonizing, total hatred of the blacks… Cleaver, “Notes on a Native Son,” in Soul on Ice (New York: McGraw Hill, 1968), 124.
“It seems that many Negro homosexuals… Ibid., 127.
“I, for one, do not think that homosexuality… Ibid., 136.
He closes by quoting Murray Kempton out of context… Ibid. Cleaver’s full quote from Kempton reads, “When I was a boy Stepin Fetchit was the only Negro actor who worked regularly in the movies…. The fashion changes, but I sometimes think that Malcolm X and, to a degree even James Baldwin, are our Stepin Fetchits.” Kempton appears to say that black militants, including Baldwin, are the only blacks one hears about anymore, but that’s not how Cleaver uses the quote.
“the silent ally, indirectly but effectively… Cleaver, “The Allegory of the Black Eunuchs,” Soul on Ice, 162. There’s a smart defense of Baldwin by Michele Wallace in Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, where she argues that Cleaver was put off not only by Baldwin’s inclusion of gay men in his fiction but also by his inclusion of tough, sympathetic black women.
“All that toy soldier has done is call me gay… W. J. Weatherby, James Baldwin: Artist on Fire (New York: D. I. Fine, 1989), 292.
“I thought I could see why he felt impelled… James Baldwin, No Name in the Street, in Collected Essays, 459.
“Since Martin’s death in Memphis… Ibid., 357.
“I think both sides, Hanoi and Washington, are terribly, tragically… Eric Norden, “Playboy Interview: Truman Capote,” Playboy, March 1968; reprinted in Truman Capote: Conversations, ed. M. Thomas Inge (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1987), 146.
“a roman à clef, drawn from life… Ibid., 161.
“a bloody mary before lunch… Windham, Lost Friendships, 87.
“looking suspiciously like a fat and aged version of tough Truman Capote on ugly pills… Mailer, Miami, 223.
Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America Page 38