In Bed with Gore Vidal

I've been fascinated by Gore Vidal. Not his own writing but him as a persona, a public intellectual. Particularly one with heterodox opinions on homosexuality.

This book starts out as a sort of trashy expose on Vidal's sex life and personal relationships. (The big revelations are that he liked to pay young men for sex and that he claimed to be a total top; not so shocking, but amusing enough.) This part of the book is really poorly written and edited. Page after page of meandering paragraphs, each paragraph often containing two or three unrelated anecdotes strung together as non-sequitors. Each little story is interesting enough but they don't come together coherently.

Surprisingly, the book gets a lot stronger when it moves past the gossip-rag stuff in to Vidal's conception of himself and homosexuality. Both his own personal life and his public writing and speaking about homosexuality. Vidal's a complicated man, and apparently somewhat of a miserable self-loathing man, and Teeman brings this out with insight and compassion. Even the parts where Vidal has degenerated into foul drunkenness, the author finds interesting and sympathetic things to say.

Totally worth a read if you want to know more about Vidal or are fascinated by this pre-gay-lib version of the public homosexual. Just bring some patience for a book that doesn't quite hold together.