In Bed with Gore Vidal: Hustlers, Hollywood, and the Private World of an American Master

Tim Teeman – 2013

Granted, Teeman’s book doesn’t purport to be the definitive biography of Gore Vidal, but still it comes off as a bit insubstantial. While acknowledging Vidal’s gifts as an author and public intellectual, the book is ultimately preoccupied with demonstrating a core hypocrisy in Vidal’s public statements; i.e. the fact that Vidal claimed to be less interested in relationships than he really was, claimed to be more bisexual than he really was, and claimed to have been more involved with his first crush than he really was. In every case, Teeman seems to be under the impression that Vidal had some special obligation to bare all in his various interviews, essays and even private conversations, as if he lived his life on the witness stand. The bulk of the examples of conflicting ideas that Teeman cites didn’t strike me as all that controversial at all. Vidal was of a generation that did not make a spectacle of its emotions. His generation was not prone to picketing in public either. Neither of these things are a crime. But Teeman portrays Vidal as willfully unsupportive of the gay liberation movement of the 70s, apparently believing, as many activists did, that simply disliking the label “homosexual” was itself a homophobic or even a self-hating act. In retrospect, Vidal seems vindicated in this regard. He was hardly a closeted or fearful person. There was little mystery about his personal tastes when it came to his sexuality. He merely believed, though, that boxing people into categories would have no long-term benefits, and was in fact the opposite of liberation. He believed in the Freudian and Kinseyan concept of borderless sexuality in which human beings could gravitate one way or the other for different reasons throughout their lives and had every right to enjoy that freedom. As for Vidal’s personal relationships, much stuff in the book was well-known already, and the rest is little more than celebrity gossip. If Teeman reports something salacious about Noel Coward, for example, it’s because someone told it to him, not because he really believes it to be true, nor because he’s even aware of a confirming source. The book is not a hatchet piece by any means, but like a lot of biographers of famous people, Teeman is alternately scintillated and scandalized by his subject, yet without ever reconciling the two attitudes. He can read hypocrisy in the fact that Vidal may have been joyously promiscuous in the 60s and 70s while refusing to become a leader of the gay rights movement, but Vidal addressed both issues often in his lifetime, citing his reasons for doing and believing what he did, and he expressed himself a lot more eloquently than the underwhelming prose Teeman uses to critique Vidal.