by Fred Kaplan
Science fiction and the surreal as vehicles for satiric comedy dominate Duluth. Like Myra, it is a witty literary novel. Time and space are subordinated to associative changes of scene, which take their parodic tone from soap opera and from the popular novel’s sentimental romance genre. Drawing on, among other things, his long exposure to popular culture, especially of the television and movie-script variety, Vidal creates a sophisticated fiction out of self-consciousness about narrative alternatives. On such topics Vidal never lacks cleverness, and Duluth raises cleverness to high art of the sort that Italo Calvino, who had become one of Vidal’s admirers, had in mind when he cryptically commented that he considered Vidal “to be a master of that new form which is taking shape in world literature and which we may call the hyper-novel or the novel elevated to the square or to the cube.” Duluth is beautifully bizarre. One of its subjects is, of course, itself. But that “itselfness” has a strong social conscience. It examines late-twentieth-century versions of the issues that Vidal was always interested in: justice, power, human dignity, the distribution of resources, and the human condition, particularly its social and political dimensions. In the dehumanized world of Duluth, all narratives have been reduced to wildly popular soap operas, and the most blatantly dramatic, comedic representations of the reduction take place not only on television and in popular fiction but in class, race, and sex wars in the streets of this new, all-purpose, cosmopolitan city ironically called Duluth, but actually a new city in a vastly rearranged American geography. It is a Duluth with palm trees, as if all American cities were inexorably slouching toward Las Vegas. It is a city of the American future made of elements of its past in which class, race warfare, and widespread public and private corruption are the main legacies. In the end it is colonized by superior beings, insectlike invaders from outer space. For Duluth substitute America, “love it or loathe it” (in the opening words of the novel), and now loved, loathed, left, lost. It is a disappointed lover’s bitterly elegiac, wittily imaginative lament for what once was (at least in expectation) and now is no longer. Like many bitter elegies for past and present depredations, especially one so highly and challengingly literary, its audience was limited. It did not make the bestseller list. The critical reception was mixed to poor. The response from many was uncomprehending bewilderment. They preferred Vidal’s more traditional straight narratives, preferably about American history. Some expressed angry rejection, particularly on political grounds. One reviewer said that the next time Vidal “deplores the mediocrity of American fiction on a talk show, the host should throw this book at him.” A few, such as Richard Poirier, thought it a satiric masterpiece.
In September 1981 Commentary published an article, “The Boys on the Beach,” by Midge Decter, the conservative writer and wife of Commentary’s editor, Norman Podhoretz, that Vidal felt deserved an answer. Podhoretz had made Commentary, whose influential readership outbalanced its modest circulation, a vehicle for neoconservative views. Vidal and Podhoretz had been amiable acquaintances in the New York literary world in the 1960s when Podhoretz, at first an outspoken liberal, had become the editor of Commentary, which for a time he moved to the left, especially on social issues. They had seen one another occasionally at parties. Once they had shared a taxi and chatted pleasantly. Podhoretz urged Vidal to write reviews for Commentary, where in 1970 he published Vidal’s essay, “Literary Gangsters.” With his wife, Podhoretz moved to neoconservatism in the early 1970s, as a strong supporter of the Israeli political right in particular. In Los Angeles in the late seventies, at a party at which they were both guests, he and Vidal had an argument that touched on American foreign policy. Podhoretz, whose habit was to disguise gut feelings as rational presentations relentlessly repeated as if repetition proved his point, had seemed to Vidal inappropriately and loudly argumentative, without any visible sense of humor. Now, in 1981, Barbara Epstein, horrified at Decter’s article, had brought it to Gore’s attention. Decter’s article seemed to Vidal stereotypically homophobic, partly a response to increasing gay activism, partly an attempt to deflate the occasional claim by homosexuals that the gay lifestyle was superior to the heterosexual, and mostly a visceral loathing of alien creatures, too many of whom had turned the beaches at Fire Island, where the Podhoretzes had a summer home, into a parade ground for homosexual queens.
The 1970s indeed had been vintage years for American homophobia. There was a backlash against the sexual and feminist liberation activity of the 1960s. Gay men, from San Francisco to Fire Island, came aggressively, and often with a sense of political cohesion, out of closets and slums. The popular culture, from rural communities to suburban enclaves to urban hard hats, continued to be pervasively homophobic either with low-keyed indifference or violent words and acts. The issue was generally “manliness.” Homosexuals were not men. If Truman Capote had “not existed in his present form,” Vidal wrote, “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.” Some American liberals identified with the gay-rights movement. It was another honorable attempt to advance civil liberties and equal rights for oppressed minorities that had begun with the Civil War. Others did not, particularly those, like Alfred Kazin and Irving Howe, who no matter how liberal their politics otherwise, felt uncomfortable with the mannerisms and, especially, the promiscuity associated with the most publicly visible and self-dramatizing gay groups. The claim that homosexuality was an illness or at least an affliction still had wide currency. In 1970 Joseph Epstein, in Harper’s magazine, had made the case with brutal insensitivity: “If I had the power to do so, I would wish homosexuality off the face of this earth,” he wrote. “I would do so because I think that it brings infinitely more pain than pleasure to those who are forced to live with it…. They are different from the rest of us … in a way . . . that cuts deeper than other kinds of human differences—religious, class, racial—in a way that is, somehow, more fundamental. Cursed without clear cause, afflicted without apparent cure, they are an affront to our rationality.” By the end of the 1970s the conservatism that would gather triumphant force in the Reagan 1980s had begun to coalesce, a values-oriented politics that made strange bedfellows. Its narrow definition of “normalcy” made it inherently homophobic. Many intellectual liberals, some strongly and proudly identified as Jewish—such as the sociologist Irving Kristol and the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb—moved from anti-Communism to neoconservatism, strong supporters of Israel, of a large American defense budget, and of Reagan Republicanism.
In April 1978 Gore, scheduled to make appearances for Kalki in Boston, had been invited by John Mitzel, whom he had not seen since 1973, to speak at a fund-raising event sponsored by the Boston-Boise Committee, a civil-liberties organization dedicated to protecting homosexuals from discrimination. Mitzel, one of Vidal’s most enthusiastic admirers in Boston, was an open, active proponent of civil rights for homosexuals, a writer for Fag Rag and Gay Community News, the author of a brief, idiosyncratic book, Myra and Gore. The Boston law-enforcement establishment, predominantly Irish-Catholic, had recently increased its enforcement of archaic anti-homosexual statutes, motivated by strong bias against what it believed perversity and by self-serving political reasons. Homosexual men were favorite targets for blackmail and exploitation. Newspapers and elected officials found it easy and profitable to whip up homophobic hysteria. A strong “anti-fag” campaign could ensure electoral victory for otherwise undistinguished district attorneys. When, in late 1977, twenty men were indicted, amid inaccurate claims by the police and banner headlines in the press, for having sex with legally underage males, the Boston-Boise Committee was formed to counter misinformantion and bias.
The authorities took up the challenge. In March 1978, in an illegal-entrapment operation, the police arrested 103 men for homosexual acts or for responding to homosexual solicitation from undercover policemen in the Boston Public Library. Paddy-wagons carted off the villains from elegant Copley Sq
uare to immediate arraignment. When Gore arrived in Boston in early April, Mitzel was delighted to introduce him to his ideological colleagues and to a packed Arlington Street Church audience, where he was the primary attraction during an evening devoted to raising money for the Boston-Boise Committee and rallying the homosexual community to fight back. His topic was “Sex and Politics in Massachusetts.” With his usual combination of wit, anger, and good sense, he lambasted homophobic bigotry, puritanical Boston politics, and widespread civic corruption. The audience contained nonhomosexual civil libertarians, including Robert M. Bonin, the controversial recently appointed Superior Court chief justice, who had been selected by a liberal governor over the opposition of the entrenched legal establishment. He and his wife had purchased tickets to hear Vidal, whom they admired. A Boston Globe photographer had been alerted by a Bonin enemy within his office that the justice would be there. When, after Vidal’s talk, Mitzel introduced them backstage, flashbulbs popped. The next day, with a photo of the two men shaking hands, the Globe and Examiner headlined “Bonin at Benefit for Sex Defendants.” Sensationalistic charges and political vendettas soon overwhelmed Bonin’s reasonable and spirited defenses. The charges were a combination of old, minor matters and the claim that Bonin knew he was attending a fund-raising event to help pay the legal expenses of the defendants. Apparently the event was not for that purpose, at least so far as public advertisements revealed, and Bonin claimed he had no knowledge that it was anything but a rally in favor of civil liberties at which an author he deeply admired was to speak, that he did not even know that the Boston-Boise Committee was a gay-rights group until shortly before attending. He believed he was exercising his right as a citizen to attend a public lecture by a speaker whose writings he admired. His presence did not signify agreement or disagreement with the agenda of the sponsors or the speaker. At worst his attendance was imprudent, hardly a hanging offense, but it provided a powerful pretext for his enemies to attack. Homophobia, anti-Semitism, and judicial politics—including the resentment of the former chief justice, still immensely influential in Irish-Catholic political and legal circles—soon had Bonin up on what were considered serious charges, including that he had “engaged in ‘friendly conversation’ with Vidal after the lecture and knew that resulting publicity ‘would give the appearance’ that he endorsed the criticism … of the administration of justice and endorsed the raising of funds for the benefit of defendants.” In June, a few days short of the certainty of his being recalled by the partisan legislature, he resigned. “A fine American story with a happy ending,” Gore wrote to Mitzel. “I just read the verdict. Apparently in Mass., a man of rectitude, a jurist of incorruptibility, can only prove his virtue by committing perjury. It looks like anti-fag is now the new McCarthyism.”
Now, in 1981, repelled by Decter’s article, Vidal immediately wrote a response, in the expectation that The New York Review of Books would publish it. To Vidal it seemed morally appalling and strategically mistaken for Jewish writers and intellectuals not to recognize that Jews and homosexuals were natural allies, he argued in “Some Jews and The Gays,” soon renamed “Pink Triangle and Yellow Star.” Barbara Epstein, who told him by phone of the editors’ objections to the comparison between Jews and homosexuals, had the essay set up in type without the controversial paragraphs and brought it to him at the Plaza Hotel in the hope that he would accept her revised version. Vidal had already sent the original to Victor Navasky, the editor of The Nation, who was delighted to have it and published it in November 1981. It strengthened a pattern that had already been established and would grow stronger: the more radical Nation readily became the venue for what The New York Review was too timid to publish. As usual, Vidal blamed Bob Silvers, though in this case both editors were sensitive to the likely barrage of letters they might get from their readership, which included many Jewish-Americans. “The New York Review turned down my hard words about those Jews who attack the fags,” he wrote to Judith Halfpenny. “I had said that the position of Jews and fags is the same in the USA—both equally despised by the Christian majority. There is no analogy, they said loftily: apparently, the Jews have absolutely won in the US and there will be no troubles ever again—even though my piece was a pretty precise sort of warning. Well … take a look at it. I expect a lot of turmoil, a nice row as Ld Byron would say.”
It was a thorn in the side of the friendship with Barbara Epstein and reminded him of other articles of his The New York Review had turned down for political reasons. “Barbara was worried about the other people, the paranoid ones,” Vidal later remarked. “The New York Review does get into enough trouble from what I call the Jewish Letterheads. The president societies. Any time they mention Israel they’re going to get at least ten presidential letterheads saying, ‘How can a publication with Jewish editors print such lies and so on?’ Yes, the friendship has been close in spite of serious disagreements. Never being honest about their reasons.” As despised or at least mistrusted minorities, Jews and homosexuals, he argued in the article, had been and would again, if Nazi-like dark forces gained the upper hand, be destroyed in the same gas chambers. Decter’s depiction of homosexuals revealed ignorance, he maintained, and her strategy was to blame the victim for his victimization. On the contrary, homosexuals suffered the same sort of unprovoked persecution as that inflicted on blacks and Jews. “I would suggest that the three despised minorities join forces in order not to be destroyed…. 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…. 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.” Of course, some Jewish-Americans, particularly neoconservatives like Decter, Podhoretz, and Joseph Epstein, recoiled in horror. Homosexuality was a sickness. Ronald Reagan was their ally, not their enemy. The values associated with homosexuality were abhorrent. And many nonneoconservative Jews feared that making common cause with homosexuals would provoke an antagonism among Christians that would undercut the increasing acceptance of Jews as Americans. And, worse, to suggest a common gas chamber for homosexuals and Jews was to denigrate the Holocaust, a mordantly funny reference to which Vidal had used as an example of the common boat and the general disinclination of many Jews to share the Holocaust with other victims of the Nazis. “In the German concentration camps, Jews wore yellow stars while homosexualists wore pink triangles. I was present when Christopher Isherwood tried to make this point to a young Jewish movie producer. ‘After all,’ said Isherwood, ‘Hitler killed six hundred thousand homosexuals.’ The young man was not impressed. ‘But Hitler killed six million Jews,’ he said sternly. ‘What are you?’ asked Isherwood. ‘In real estate?’” Mainstream Jewish-Americans, including liberals, mostly declined to accept Vidal’s premise. Though some of their grounds varied from instance to instance, Jewish-American response in general would not and could not accept any argument that challenged the ethnocentric uniqueness of the Jewish experience, especially where the Holocaust was concerned.
Always the rationalist, usually willing if not eager to rock the boat of political correctness in both ideas and language, Vidal was treading on sacred ground. His language was refreshing to some, detestable to others. To those with a vested interest in the issue, his ideas as well as his language were unacceptable. As he recalls his conversation with Barbara Epstein about “Pink Triangle and Yellow Star,” “She said, ‘The Jewish situation is no way analogous to that of homosexuals.’ I said, “Well, Hitler felt otherwise. After all, he was an authority, a rather negative authority, but if he thought so, I can certainly say so. If you’re going to go into the scapegoating business, which American bigots love to do, each group is on the same unseaworthy boat and each will be sunk with the other.’ Well, she wouldn’t accept that.” If the society were going to proscribe the use of words like “kike” and “fag,” he would insist o
n purposely using them, in appropriate instances, with the self-consciousness of the raised ironic eyebrow, both to shock and to call attention to the reality and complexity of American attitudes toward minority groups. The next step after the proscription of language, he feared, would be the proscription of ideas, and unpopular ideas had a difficult, often impossible, time gaining a public forum anyway. Here was an instance in which an esteemed intellectual journal, which otherwise valued his contributions, declined to print his review-essay mainly, it would seem, because it disagreed with his ideas and feared hostile response. The New York Review fell far short of its implied libertarian standard. Vidal’s essay made a valuable point effectively, whether or not one agreed with the central premise, which in any rational perspective was sufficiently valid to warrant publication and serious discussion. But irrational taboos and self-serving special interests made the subject difficult to handle: prior to “Pink Triangle and Yellow Star,” an essay whose focus was on homophobia, there had been no particular association between Vidal and Jews other than that he shared his life with a Jewish man, that he had moved quite comfortably in the 1950s and ’60s in an intellectual and media world in which he had many Jewish friends, that he had been sympathetic to and strongly supported by the Jewish community in Poughkeepsie in his 1960 congressional campaign, that he detested anti-Semitism, and that his vigorous commitment to speaking out on behalf of justice for everyone included sympathy for Jewish suffering.