Gore Vidal Quote
In Broadway, I suddenly found myself face to face with William de la Touche Clancey.Well! A long drawn-out syllable, in which fear and condescension were unpleasantly mingled. What is the young Old Patroon about to turn his hand to next?The Vauxhall Gardens, I should think. My dislike of Clancey is almost physical. Yet I stare at him with fascination; note that his protuberant eyes are yellowish; that he scratches himself compulsively; that his tongue darts in and out of his mouth like a lizard's catching flies.Of the delicious nymphs you sport with there?Of the delicious fauns, too — and their goatish friends.Uh-huh... A long, drawn-out attempt at sounding amused failed of its object. I hope you realize that your editor's unholy passion for the Negro grows more embarrassing each day. If I were he I should beware. He might simply one dark night.Murdered? Or sold into slavery? Clancey recently delighted his admirers by proposing that since the institution of slavery has been an integral part of every high civilization (and peculiarly well-adapted to those nations that follow the word as well as the spirit of Old and New Testaments), poor whites should be bought and sold as well as blacks.I don't believe that poor sick Mr. Leggett would command a high price in the bazaar. Only his diseased mind would have a certain morbid interest to the special collector. You, on the other hand, ought to fetch a pretty price.More than the usual two dollars you pay? Two dollars is the current rate for a male prostitute.Much more! Why, just for those pink Dutch cheeks alone! It would be nice to record that I thought to something terminal to say but in my rage I could think of absolutely nothing and so left him with the last word.
In Broadway, I suddenly found myself face to face with William de la Touche Clancey.Well! A long drawn-out syllable, in which fear and condescension were unpleasantly mingled. What is the young Old Patroon about to turn his hand to next?The Vauxhall Gardens, I should think. My dislike of Clancey is almost physical. Yet I stare at him with fascination; note that his protuberant eyes are yellowish; that he scratches himself compulsively; that his tongue darts in and out of his mouth like a lizard's catching flies.Of the delicious nymphs you sport with there?Of the delicious fauns, too — and their goatish friends.Uh-huh... A long, drawn-out attempt at sounding amused failed of its object. I hope you realize that your editor's unholy passion for the Negro grows more embarrassing each day. If I were he I should beware. He might simply one dark night.Murdered? Or sold into slavery? Clancey recently delighted his admirers by proposing that since the institution of slavery has been an integral part of every high civilization (and peculiarly well-adapted to those nations that follow the word as well as the spirit of Old and New Testaments), poor whites should be bought and sold as well as blacks.I don't believe that poor sick Mr. Leggett would command a high price in the bazaar. Only his diseased mind would have a certain morbid interest to the special collector. You, on the other hand, ought to fetch a pretty price.More than the usual two dollars you pay? Two dollars is the current rate for a male prostitute.Much more! Why, just for those pink Dutch cheeks alone! It would be nice to record that I thought to something terminal to say but in my rage I could think of absolutely nothing and so left him with the last word.
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About Gore Vidal
A grandson of U.S. Senator Thomas Gore, Vidal was born into an upper-class political family. As a political commentator and essayist, Vidal's primary focus was the history and society of the United States, especially how a militaristic foreign policy reduced the country to a decadent empire. His political and cultural essays were published in The Nation, the New Statesman, the New York Review of Books, and Esquire magazines. As a public intellectual, Gore Vidal's topical debates on sex, politics, and religion with other intellectuals and writers occasionally turned into quarrels with the likes of William F. Buckley Jr. and Norman Mailer.
As a novelist, Vidal explored the nature of corruption in public and private life. His style of narration evoked the time and place of his stories, and delineated the psychology of his characters. His third novel, The City and the Pillar (1948), offended the literary, political, and moral sensibilities of conservative book reviewers, the plot being about a dispassionately presented male homosexual relationship.
In the historical novel genre, Vidal recreated the imperial world of Julian the Apostate (r. AD 361–363) in Julian (1964). Julian was the Roman emperor who attempted to re-establish Roman polytheism to counter Christianity. In social satire, Myra Breckinridge (1968) explores the mutability of gender roles and sexual orientation as being social constructs established by social mores.: 94–100 In Burr (1973) and Lincoln (1984), both part of his Narratives of Empire series of novels, each protagonist is presented as "A Man of the People" and as "A Man" in a narrative exploration of how the public and private facets of personality affect the national politics of the United States.: 439 : 75–85