Update:
I’m marveling at the hypocrisy of the mainstream media in trashing Gandhi as a pedophile, when there is not a jot of evidence that he had sex with any of the post-pubertal women who attended him.
Gandhi was renowned for talking about every single thing he did and thought, so his words can easily be taken out of context and used against him.
Yet on Gore Vidal’s actual documented promiscuous pederasty, about which he talked volubly and publicly, for his open and proud support for removing all age-of-consent laws (whatever you think about them), and on his well-known support for NAMBLA (the pro-pedophile advocacy group) there is complete silence in the mainstream media.
Why? Because Vidal was one of them.
But why the adulation for Vidal in the alternative media?
Because he was antiwar.
A good enough reason.
But, still, any genuine assessment of Vidal’s life and work should put his antiwar statements into context. Where they become much less admirable.
Vidal was anti-war, because America was involved in war, and, first and foremost, he hated things that were quintessentially American and middle-class.
So he hated Christianity and Judaism and monotheism itself.
He was a militant atheist who wrote books that didn’t just criticize but mocked figures sacred to Christianity, making Jesus into a kind of buffoon.
With the sado-masochistic sexologist and pedophile-enabler Alfred Kinsey, whom he admired, he mainstreamed homosexuality and pan-sexualism, including pederasty…in keeping with his love for the Greeks. He believed in global warming and gun-control. He loved Hillary and Bill Clinton, thought Obama too good for Americans, name-dropped incessantly, and adored the Kennedys.
He had good words for blacks and women, because they were ideological allies, not because he was anything but naturally misogynistic and implicitly Eurocentric.
He claimed to hate “identity,’ but like most people who attack “essences” on ideological grounds, he was notably ready to adopt the language of identity whenever he wanted – referring to Obama as a “slave,” calling himself a “fag,” calling Buckley a “crypto-Nazi,” calling Polanksi’s victim a “hooker,” and indulging the racial paranoia most characteristic of liberals – fear of “Asiatics” or yellow domination, as he put it.
He claimed to loved humanity, but in fact hated a large number of human beings around him, being notoriously unable to say a good word for his rivals. He once called humanity a virus and believed reducing the human population was the most important task at hand.
He was liberal in calling other people names. He just didn’t want to be called that one name that tormented him.
Tellingly, there was nothing new about Vidal’s critique of America. It was a reworking of Ezra Pound’s criticism, with which he was surely familiar, both as an erudite man and as a member of an aristocratic Southern family, in which such criticism was widespread. Vidal also lived for a large part of his life in an Italian town not too far from Pound’s Italian home.
Vidal’s critique of America didn’t hurt him one bit. There was no courage involved in making it. In fact, it made him a member in good standing in the elite, cosmopolitan, European circles in which he moved.
Antiwar writing did nothing to set him back either socially, professionally, or personally. It only helped him. It was even a kind of therapy for the psychic wounds he wore on his sleeve.
To make him out to be a kind of Western Solzhenitsyn is really quite thick. Solzhenitsyn suffered. He lived for a decade in the Soviet gulag and then he had cancer. He belonged to no popular circle and even when he was a critic of communism, never became a friend to the West on that account. Solzhenitsyn rose above the binaries of modern propaganda and state-craft.
Vidal, on the contrary, was firmly a part of it. He was a leading spokesman of one pole of it.
This is a man, after all, who was close friends with Larry Flynt (the pornographer and documented child abuser) and with Hugh Hefner (the founder of Playboy), as well as with Alfred Kinsey.
He was, in brief, a perfect tool of Foundation-funded ideology.
Vidal would have taken up any dogma that would express his hatred for hetero-sexual white Republican America (that is, his family). Most importantly, he would have taken up with anyone and anything against the monotheism of that group.
In him the political WAS the personal, even if he was unaware it was.
His fundamental problem was with the concept, not even of monotheism, but of a divine giver of moral law, indeed, of any kind of moral law that would judge his actions.
He wasn’t sorry about things he did to people. He just wanted to create an alternate universe in which there would be no judgment of his actions.
A universe in which he was good and God was evil.
A thorough-going hedonist, materialist and atheist, he hated the notion of a moral law which might find him wanting, as it finds all of us.
Only he differed in this from most of us.
Instead of correcting himself, he made it his aim to set right his creator
ORIGINAL POST
I posted Johann Hari’s piece (Huffington Post) on the strange way people are defending pedophilic molestation, when an artist in involved. It refers to Vidal’s defense of Polansky’s rape of a 13 year old girl.
Hari’s piece is especially interesting as he’s gay and admits to having been approached by an adult when he was a teenager.
VIdal’s defense deserves a little more attention, in light of claims that he was a vocal supporter of NAMBLA (the North American Man-Boy Love Association), which was founded in 1978.
SIDE NOTE:
I posted the piece twice, as well as a link to NAMBLA’s papers (you can google for the link) that shows that Gore Vidal spoke out against an anti-gay witch-hunt (in the PC version of the story) at a meeting of a group (the Boston-Boise committee) that later went on to found NAMBLA. That’s not the same thing as being involved in the founding of NAMBLA, so I made a correction to my original post and added the link.
At that point, my blog broke. I called in to technical support, who told me that a couple of files had been corrupted, apparently by someone who’d hacked the blog. The technician restored it and I noticed that the Hari post, as well as the correction about NAMBLA had both disappeared. I reposted them, and voila, the blog promptly broke again. I tried asking for a restore again, but it didn’t work, so I tried deleting my post and the link to NAMBLA. That seems to have worked. No idea what that was all about….
Anyway, check out the Hari piece…it’s from a while back.
POST CONTINUES
To return to the NAMBLA allegations, if you google the magazine Pan, you can find a statement that only Allen Ginsberg, the poet, spoke out publicly in favor of NAMBLA at the time it was created.
Conservapedia refers to Vidal’s support of NAMBLA, with a link to an interview in the Paris Review in 1978. But I couldn’t find anything of the sort in the only interview of Vidal’s I read there (I didn’t read all the pieces referring to him, so it might be there somewhere).
I did find this (http://www.williamapercy.com/wiki/images/Great_moments_in_politics.pdf) enthusiastic endorsement by Vidal of the gay magazine Fag Rag, created by the founder of the outfit (the Boise-Boston committee) that created NAMBLA.
Also, see the Fag Rag interview (1974) in “Conversations with Gore Vidal,” ed. Peabody and Ebersole, 2005. Vidal and the interviewer are quite unambiguous about his (Vidal’s) preferences::
Vida: “I don’t flatter the young, either as a writer or a performer (LR: sexual performer, from the context LR: correction: actor). And I don’t flatter them sexually. That doesn’t mean I don’t like them.”
And from the same interview, discussing the meaning of the word “jam,”:
Vidal:: “Jam was a much used word. Kind of trade, but not really trade. Pretty hard to get. Perhaps when the fact was removed, the word withered away too. No one seemed to be impossible. “Jam” referred only to boys. “You’ll find “jam” in the City and the Pillar, I think. I think I did a little glossary in there in my World Almanac way. “Dirt” was a word. That was for a bad piece of trade. I’m supposed to have coined the phrase, “Last year’s trade is this year’s competition.”
And then comparing his sexual interactions with the young with those of Paul Goodman:
Vidal: “I think flattery has a lot to do with his sexual techniques. It has nothing to do with mine.”
See also this comment in The Telegraph:
” Certainly, he tells Fag Rag in 1974, “the quality of trade has fallen off”. When he was young, many construction workers, firemen and cops “would sell their ass for a period of their lives”. Vidal’s life and work prove that some guys have all the luck.”
“Young” does not necessarily mean underage, of course.
Additional evidence of Vidal’s extreme promiscuity include his admission that he’d had more than 1000 partners before he was 25, his collaboration with Albert Kinsey in Kinsey’s controversial research into human sexuality, his documented preference for anonymous interactions at bathhouses or with prostitutes, even while being almost completely celibate with his partner of fifty years, Howard Auster (also, Austen).
Vidal called Kinsey the most important man of the decade on BBC and stated publicly that he had collaborated with him in his research.
While academic pedophile advocates and pan-sexual activists continue to defend Kinsey, new research and interviews with adults used in the Kinsey experiments when they were children show show that Kinsey did not simply analyze the reports of one paedophile; he was encouraging and organizing paedophilic abuse and rape, even corresponding sympathetically with Nazi paedophile, Fritz Von Balluseck, who abused hundreds of children when he was a commandant in Poland during the second world war. Balluseck was later convicted of the murder of a child.
It is now clear that Kinsey himself was a sado-masochist who routinely coerced colleagues into his sexual experimentation, filmed them in his attic, and used his persona as a research-scientist as cover for his 24/7 obsession with every variety of sex. He is reported to have included the sexual diaries of the notorious occultist Aleister Crowley and the ongoing molestation of children by around nine paedophiles (including Balluseck) in his work.
This is the man to whose research Vidal contributed. This is the man whose views on sex Vidal also said were very much like his own.
What were those views? Human sexuality, to Kinsey, has no more moral component in it than the coupling of any other creature and should thus be regarded as benign in all its variations. These dicta can be seen on NAMBLA’s website, and Kinsey is seen by its members as a god-father.
Kinsey, like Vidal, was a strong atheist, materialist, and hedonist.
There is nothing in the Kinsey experiments that relates sex to procreation or motherhood.
The Kinsey-Vidal world view is expressed in Vidal’s attitude toward most of his partners, except for Auster, and is illustrated in a 2008 interview published in the Independent:
There are rumours that you have a daughter from a relationship with a woman living in Key West, Florida [in the 1950s]; are they true?”
“Possibly. I don’t believe so. The father was either me or a German photographer. I believe the mother is dead. The child was a girl. Every Christmas, I would receive ‘ a picture of them all around the tree, and there’s the little girl, looking like me. I could have a daughter, yes.”
“Have you tried to contact her?”
“No. Why would I?”
“Because you might have a sense of responsibility, which, in the age of DNA…”
“I sent her mother money for an abortion. Which she used to go to Detroit, where she found a rich man.”
In the play Terre Haute, the writer Edmund White, also gay and a friend, referred to Gore Vidal’s support for and interaction with Timothy McVeigh as a “raging crush”. Apparently, Vidal accepted the description before the play came out and then afterwards tried to sue. Nothing came of it but the two friends broke off after that.
McVeigh was of course in his twenties, but the incident does suggest that in at least some cases Vidal’s political positions had for their source his sexuality.
Given all this, there may well be truth to the allegations of support/involvement in NAMBLA at a time when Vidal definitely belonged to the set of openly homosexual (in his case, pansexualist) advocates of radical sexual liberation.
At least publicly, NAMBLA focused mostly on eliminating all age-of-consent rules and catered more to pederasts than to pedophiles, as commonly understood. It would certainly be right up the alley of an open and radical activist, as Vidal was.
Vidal himself said that he had done everything except incest and folk-dancing, a typically clever line.
Whatever the case, Vidal’s Polansky comment is more revealing than anything else than can be said on the subject, in its dismissive coldness and fundamental misogyny.
[Just saw this line of his – about Obama’s speech-making ability: “Slaves have a hard time making poetry, unless it’s got a beat.”]
That being so, there’s probably no sense in tarring a dead man with matters from his private life, since just as cogent criticism of him can be made simply on the basis of what he said over and over quite publicly.
Still, aristocrat, Democrat icon, and populist hero that he was..and apparently still is… this blog might not be the best place to make them now.