GORE VIDAL: AN INTERVIEW
Dreifus, Claudia
THE PROGRESSIVE Interview Gore Vidal The writer as citizen BY CLAUDIA DREIFUS For more than forty years, Gore Vidal has made a career of saying things no one else will say and saying them with...
...So I would say in no way am I protected...
...Still, it's a trap to believe that if you just have a really good guy, it's going to be all right...
...I just say it gets worse: journalism, the ability to read and write...
...He did all three...
...I would have worked hard to get the Pentagon budget examined...
...But it was clearly about as unautobiographical a book as you can find...
...He has written fifteen novels, five plays, five collections ofessays, and countless magazine pieces...
...Everyone thinks I did, because the press saw to it, but I've never discussed myself...
...Another, it's Nicaragua...
...So we have the Enemy of the Month Club...
...Five novels were not reviewed in the daily Times—of which two were really very good...
...VIDAL: No...
...Of course, they run every God-damned bank in the country...
...You have to keep the heat on...
...Do you think you're protected, in a way, because you come from the same social class as those who run things...
...That, and pills and diaphragms...
...The tree of liberty must be periodically fed with blood," said Thomas Jefferson...
...He's about as masculine as Marjorie Main...
...his recent best-seller, Lincoln, filled in another part of the national picture—one President's personal and political agonies in keeping the Union together...
...VIDAL: I'll tell you the big thing the last race taught me: that money is The Game in modern politics...
...It had its problems, but the place worked...
...VIDAL: He never tells you bad news...
...There's a lot more fantasy life going on with power people, as opposed to other folks who have other hang-ups...
...After all, the blacks have not got the means for getting around to the extent the so-called gay population has...
...VIDAL: I would say that half of the United States Senate that reads have read all the historical novels...
...The media don't say and don't know—reporters, they have no idea that they're employees of the ruling class...
...It isn't taught...
...VIDAL: Oh, I don't think so...
...I think that's going on right now...
...You've got a population that's pretty obedient...
...And there was the Mayor of Fresno with $600,000 to $700,000...
...So it's there: the fact...
...Sometimes, it didn't even show up until years later, and you died...
...Then penicillin came in and there was a very great change in the world...
...Ever...
...I used to try to explain to him that he wasn't, but he could never get out of that ghetto...
...It's col-legial and oligarchical...
...Q: You've written elsewhere that the Presidential elections are a lot like the Grammy Awards...
...In his novels and plays, the protagonists often act out particular parts of American political drama...
...I said, "It's not my family...
...Or helping gallant little Afghanistan...
...It blows their minds...
...He represents the board rooms of the Republic and not the common man, and they just love him...
...I am a text for the oligarchs...
...He's convinced a lot of people that there are wicked communists down there who will eventually cross the border and commit abortions from one end of Texas to another...
...His maternal grandfather was Senator Thomas Pyror Gore...
...And also have no election campaign that lasts longer than six weeks...
...Q: Is the Reagan Administration fighting for national manhood in Central America...
...Well, to me, it's just 1943 again...
...VIDAL: You know, it's hard to separate the individual from the way he got elected...
...I don't go by decades...
...Q: If sex is politics, how are we seeing sexual politics manifested in the 1980s...
...He doesn't mind lying...
...Id be embroiled in political battles all the time...
...Two years later, Vidal published his second work, The City and the Pillar, a sympathetic tale of sex between boys— and the applause quickly turned to catcalls...
...And we've never had political parties other than the main one...
...Perhaps I could have been more useful than most because I wasn't planning on running for re-election—and so I would have been totally free to advance my ideas in Washington...
...VIDAL: Yes...
...It's thirty-five years we've been a garrison state...
...He has no plan...
...wear a rubber...
...VIDAL: Not much...
...Q: Given this reality of money buying political office, what can a civic-minded citizen do...
...He was the stereotyped queen...
...Beyond his literary work, Vidal ran for Congress from upstate New York in 1960...
...The fags are not going to take that...
...But this could be much bigger...
...Such a regular fellow...
...Actually, if he were, he'd be too threatening...
...VIDAL: Private relations are perfectly pleasant...
...His mother, Nina Gore VidalAuchincloss, was a Washington socialite whose marriage to financier Hugh Auchincloss gives Vidal a distant family connection to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis...
...Q: So...
...Television is everywhere...
...Japan has become the world's leading economic power...
...VIDAL: I think so...
...THE PROGRESSIVE Interview Gore Vidal The writer as citizen BY CLAUDIA DREIFUS For more than forty years, Gore Vidal has made a career of saying things no one else will say and saying them with style and elegance and wit...
...Tennessee [Williams], when he read it, said, "Your family is just like mine...
...None of these things has anything to do with the people of the United States...
...He understands that television is nothing but fleeting images—either pleasing or displeasing...
...Syphilis was a killer then...
...They are having a field day and they are scaring the folks—which was their intention...
...By then I was so well known, there wasn't much they could do about it...
...I think he did more damage than any other figure of our time, including Anita Bryant...
...We're bankrupting the country with "defense spending...
...And I'll say to you what I've said elsewhere: We've never had a democratic system...
...You just don't know their names...
...There are areas of disagreement...
...The oligarchs have fixed it so that unless you're a multimillionaire yourself, you have to spend all your time raising money...
...And then again, he's rather boyish...
...Q: You've often written of the nobility of citizenship—saying that being a citizen, participating, is just about the best thing a person can do...
...The fourth secret is the first three: You're not supposed to talk about any of this...
...It isn't adverted to...
...I would have worked to get the CIA budget out into the open—which they do not reveal to the joint committee that allegedly oversees their activities...
...I do, and the country was a very good one...
...For 200 years, they've been governing, and they've convinced everyone that the WASPs are just a funny little old group remote from everything, living out on Long Island, and only Louis Auchincloss writes about them...
...If they keep doing this to that minority, which is a very big one, I could see violence...
...The 1960s disturbed the oligarchs because the blacks burned down the cities—and they note the destruction of property with great concern...
...There was me with name recognition—and all-told about $100,000...
...Q: You've written that "Sex is politics...
...If he thinks he can win down there, he can't...
...Du-luth's citizens experience life as a jumble of television images and none of them can differentiate between what is on the tube and what is actually happening to them...
...I found myself saying that about me when I was running for the Senate from California in 1982...
...Needless to say, these kinds of ideas have never attracted good reviews...
...But yes, I do think there is some of that going on now...
...Q: Is it that the country has no real leaders any more...
...Kinsey in 1948 said over a third of the male population had some experience...
...They'll find a cure...
...and this is even more sinister in a way, cut corporate taxes...
...For my generation, not only could you be killed in the war, but you could die of syphilis...
...To want power right off is slightly aberrant...
...VIDAL: Oh, yes...
...I wrote a sympathetic story in The City and the Pillar—as they say, "the first of its kind"—in 1948...
...Q: Is there anyone in public life whom you respect...
...Claudia Dreifus's last interview for The Progressive was with Daniel Cohn-Bendit in the May issue...
...VIDAL: I really wasn't writing about just American life— this is about modern Western life...
...Q: Come on: AIDS is a little worse than that...
...The people who really get overexcited about me are their employees—the people at newspapers and television stations who want to curry favor with their employers, the rulers, and who know that attacking me will please them...
...Yes, there are people in the Senate I find agreeable...
...The AIDS thing has been very useful to get back at what they would call "the fags...
...But these kinds of things have always been with us...
...Nobody is going to have it by the year 2000...
...You never knew if you were going to get it...
...Orville Prescott [of The New York Times], who was then the most powerful reviewer in the country, said to my publisher, after The City and the Pillar, "I will not read, much less review, any book by Gore Vidal after this...
...Q: You've attempted to be that kind of Platonic citizen...
...So then I took ten years off and worked in television, the stage, movies, and politics...
...Q: Well, how do your cousins in the oligarchy—you are actually related to some of the people who run this country—feel about your unconventional pronouncements on sex and politics...
...You sit there with polls...
...He writes of powerfulfamilies because he comes from one...
...There was an Orange County state senator named Carpenter, very popular with the Right Wing, who had about $600,000 to spend...
...founded, in the late 1960s, the People's Party— a forerunner of the current Rainbow Coalition, and made a creditable showing in the 1982 California Democratic Senate primary, coming in second after Governor Jerry Brown...
...There's one called "The Nightly Quest," in which he realized that everyone else was perfectly crazy, that he had been living in an insane society—that he may have gone crazy from time to time, but that the society was a lot crazier...
...I think the people who feel that they have to be Number One—then I think there is a kink in the personality that does seem to go with the sex life, though we don't know how far...
...Everything is falling apart...
...People are being denied jobs, involuntarily arrested or detained because they have this virus in their saliva or they might have...
...But in America, you've got a President whom you see on the "Late, Late Show" as a young man...
...VIDAL: We are going through a great period of repression, which serves the right-wingers very well...
...No one has any idea of what my private life is or was or will be...
...In 1986, his books are inevitable best-sellers, and Johnny Carson welcomes Vidal for periodic chats...
...The AIDS thing has been very useful to get back at the fags...
...Reagan does things that play well...
...Q: In your 1983 novel, Duluth, riots break out in a mythic American city called "Duluth," which may or may not be located in the Middle West—or near Louisiana somewhere...
...I am not against violence by any means in the pursuit of liberty...
...And then, toward the end of his life, he came over to my view...
...To get any writing done at all, Vidal lives half the year in a penthouse in Rome...
...We don't have an overt above-ground McCarthyism right now, but it isn't needed...
...Q: Censored or not, your life, personal and professional, has been a statement—that sexual stereotypes don't hold, that sex should be free, polymorphous, and unconfining...
...spend as much as he possibly can on "defense...
...If I had won, I would have been able to do things up to a certain degree—that's all...
...I can really see a kind of civil war breaking out...
...Vidal grew up in Washington in the 1930s...
...I've also written that "Sex is...
...Q: In your two most recent books of essays, The Second American Revolution and Matters of Fact and Fiction, you assert that there are four great secrets to American national life...
...Now nobody understands it...
...The genius of our system is that ordinary people go out and vote against their own interests...
...We're back to the days when I was in the Army—that's all...
...And you're not supposed to know...
...I interviewed Vidal in Rome before he entered his latest controversy—a bitter name-calling dispute with Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary, and his wife, Midge Decter...
...have a power personality, but at least I think it's the points I have to make that brought this out in me, not the other way around...
...Q: But how well is Central American war really playing...
...Vidal's style is aristocratic...
...Money is less of a factor in those elections, and that's useful...
...He was elected to do three things: cut the income taxes for the rich—he did that...
...We have plenty of leaders...
...VIDAL: I'm saying I see no reason to get alarmed...
...Whoever really did this would become a national hero—the country is waiting for this to happen...
...Actually, despite my lack of funds, I did well...
...VIDAL: You could eliminate the need for money in television and radio by providing free time to candidates...
...My publishers nicely went on publishing me...
...In such satirical novels as Duluth, Myra Breckenridge, and Myron, Vidal examines the impact of popular culture on contemporary national life...
...This will have great repercussions in terms of civil liberties...
...Elections, they're all mechanical...
...I always had 10 per cent with 18 per cent leaning heavily towards me—but they had to see I was "serious," and that meant they had to see lots of television ads...
...AIDS is more awful...
...Q: Some political observers say that in the 1980s Mc-Carthyism won't come in the form of "There are communists under every bed" but rather in the form of "He's a homosexual," or "She's had an abortion...
...I suppose you can run for offices on the local level—school board, mayor in a small community...
...VIDAL: He's a superb politician, but he has no interest in government...
...Which is real...
...So yes, Duluth is about a culture that exists without having any context with which to view the text, which is the present, and that, I feel, is very harmful to most people...
...I was in the Army at seventeen for three years...
...The figures on who is gay are much larger than the 10 per cent given—if you count the numbers who cross over back and forth...
...Euphoria is in the air when he speaks...
...Q: Any insights as to why he's so beloved...
...You don't have to have it when you have such a conformist population and the general terror now of people keeping their jobs, being able to rent a house—people are pretty cowed...
...I mean, the way our ruling class keeps out of sight is one of the greatest stunts in the political history of any country...
...We're no longer good enough militarily to win a jungle war anywhere, certainly not there...
...Otherwise people will say, "Why are you taking our money and wasting it on Star Wars when the farmers are going broke...
...Q: That gays will no longer tolerate the suppression of their civil rights is something we can rejoice for, but I do hope you're not saying AIDS isn't a real problem—that fear of it is all hysteria...
...The first is that there is this hidden ruling class—which you call "The Bank...
...They can't read it without getting what's going on...
...VIDAL: I've even gone so far as to say, "There's no such thing as homosexuality—or heterosexuality...
...If they keep doing this to that minority, I could see violence...
...For one thing, we believed in the country more...
...He understands about television and what it does to people...
...Between the two, he comes off as non-threatening...
...VIDAL: I'm just paraphrasing Plato...
...Then, Senators aren't running around trying to get PAC money from Northrop—and they're not selling their votes...
...If I may say so, you subsequent generations seem to think that you've been given a ticket to immortality that we didn't have...
...The second is that there is only one political party— the "Property Party...
...VIDAL: Yes, of course...
...I can see a kind of civil war breaking out.* Q: Many people say that the 1980s are nothing more than a rerun of the 1950s...
...They finance the schools, and the professors in the schools don't know...
...He was twenty-one years old, and instantly hailed as one of the most brilliant postwar novelists...
...Q: Was it particularly threatening to reviewers that you were sexually comfortable with yourself...
...And if they start anything repressive, I could see police getting themselves killed, judges getting shot...
...I wouldn't be able to resist...
...Tennessee [Williams] really believed all this peasant-Christian fundamentalism: that he was a wicked, evil creature for his sexual desires...
...He only gives pleasing news...
...Then, there are no costs—no corruption...
...There were nine candidates in the primary—four "serious" ones...
...Somebody your age doesn't even remember what the country was like before...
...And they can be busted for drugs—everyone is taking something...
...VIDAL: Oh, I don't know...
...I'm opening up their horizons...
...It's all silly...
...I came in second in the primary...
...But they have to think of their next election—of raising money...
...bisexual...
...That's all they do now...
...It wouldn't have made a huge difference—my being elected...
...Penicillin was not invented until the end of my time there...
...His ideas are populist...
...Dress Gray, his mini-series about the destruction of the military "honor code" by the Vietnam war, was shown on NBC last winter...
...One month it's Angola...
...VIDAL: I never said a word about my private life...
...VIDAL: Sometimes, yes...
...He doesn't mind making no sense...
...Every poll we've seen says the American populace doesn't want involvement in a war there...
...Q: You were one of the first writers to come out as openly gay...
...Jerry Brown, with $2 million raised, was the sitting governor...
...I presume Duluth is a metaphor for all of America...
...I wanted to make the thing the most normal story—the two most normal boys in the world, so I made them two Virginia boys whom I had observed growing up in Fairfax County...
...VIDAL: The last one certainly was...
...You see him on the afternoon rerun as a middle-aged man...
...I would rather a militant middle class read my books and learned from them, but, you see, the spirit of the 1960s was to destroy the past...
...Q: Do you ever wonder at the sexual lives of our leading political figures...
...Vidal embarked on a literary vocation in 1946 with the publication of his men-at-sea novel, Williwaw...
...throw some light on darkness...
...Q: Any prescriptions for fixing this...
...One of the reasons they loved [Truman] Capote—and one of the reasons I loathed him—was that parents could turn on the television and tell their sons, "See, you want to be gay—you'll end up like that...
...His 1960 hit play, The Best Man, examined the mechanics behind a Presidential nomination...
...I have a place in California," he says, "but if I lived there full time, I'd never write...
...The abortion thing is looking really scary now...
...VIDAL: Yes...
...Q: Are you looked to as an entertaining fellow—or someone who actually has something to say...
...Just watch the way the press plays the AIDS stuff: "Everybody is going to have it by the year 2000...
...I don't know what Reagan is doing in Central America...
...VIDAL: The population is largely indifferent, but to the extent that they understand it, they don't like the war...
...Every other country does this...
...I would get Sunday Times reviews...
...Sex is used in politics and you certainly cannot get away from it...
...They hold seminars...
...At night, he's at a press conference...
...They were not remotely connected with my family, as anyone would now know, but I was then shut out for almost a decade by The New York Times, Time magazine...
...The Rambo stuff: Reagan swaggering around...
...Some of his later stories are marvelous...
...But, you see, if you have a military budget that is one-third of the budget, you have to have an enemy...
...I would say the oligarchs are loyal to their own in a sense that they will put up with a lotas people in a family put up with a lot...
...Poor old thing...
...Q: Is Ronald Reagan the Michael Jackson of politics...
...First of all, the bad people want alarm and panic so that they will have the means to exercise control over the population in the interest of containing plague and pest...
...Q: You say some pretty outrageous things...
...The system doesn't really allow it...
...The rebels don't understand the context of the times...
...The more intelligent of the oligarchs are quite aware that something drastic is wrong...
...I'm told that all of the Princes of Darkness at the State Department and the Pentagon have read Lincoln...
...1876, and Washington, D.C., Vidal's fictional trilogy, traced the rise of one political family and showed how money, manipulation, and empire-building made our society what it is today...
...You ran for Congress from upstate New York in 1960, and there was that 1982 Senate race against Jerry Brown...
...It's Old Glory wrapped around the torso of Sly Stallone—and that's about it...
...The third secret is that both Democratic and Republican wings of the Property Party are in league to scare the citizenry so that military spending will increase...
...He was never a symbol of masculinity—though he sort of plays it...
...If people got active on that level, they might be able to make for better candidates for Congress...
...I've had a few friends die of AIDS...
...As time gets worse, more and more they turn to me—not for the way out, but to provide them with a world view...
...And I would suspect it is even more, after three years in the U.S...
...It was censorship...
...I mean, this is like returning to prohibition...
...We are plunging into foolish and meaningless wars—in order to maintain the corruption at home...
...That John Wayne type, that really tough male type, is too aggressive, and it scares people...
...Burr...
...VIDAL: You know, time can't be divided up into decades...
...And if you try to repress, you're going after butchers, bank presidents, football players, a wide spectrum of people who are not going to put up with it...
...His father, Eugene Luther Vidal, was one of the founders of civil aviation...
...For a great many years, Time and Newsweek never referred to me...
...There is something rather grandmotherly about Reagan...
...I was very struck about how much S&M goes on, according to Washington prostitutes, in their dealings with Capitol Hill...
...All the major stars are slightly androgynous—otherwise, they'd be unbearable...
...That I'm a sexual libertarian, that's well known...
...There are a few nice guys in there, a few intelligent ones...
...Particularly if you have a power personality and there's no point to it...
...VIDAL: So...
...I have a different perspective on this—if I may pull the rank of age...
...There's no way to appear a "serious" candidate without buying television commercials—and that takes funds...
...Army in World War II...
...The polls all said that if I could appear more "serious"—i.e., have television commercials—those undecideds would have swung to me...
...That means that half the people don't vote because they know there's no point to it...
...You could get cured of just about everything except the dreaded herpes...
Vol. 50 • September 1986 • No. 9
