Baiting straights

Gore Vidal has always made it his business to state "the unacceptable obvious". He does not mince his words: "the only thing Americans really respect is a kick in the teeth." The hard-hitter is also a switch-hitter.

He believes we all are: "there is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts." His insistence on having a foot in both camps - "sexual exclusivity is odd and suggests obsession" - used to prompt hissy fits from militant queens, but Vidal, of course, did not change his tune. As this collection of essays reveals, he never has. What he says in the 1990s is much the same as what he said in the 1960s. He has never been unsure of his own mind.

Thirteen of these 14 essays can already be found in Vidal's United States 1952-1992, published in 1993. That volume represents his greatest hits, so it is not surprising to find Pink Triangle and Yellow Star ("Jews and homosexualists are in the same fragile boat"); Christopher Isherwood's Kind ("This desire for differentness is not unusual: misalliance has almost always been the name of the game hetero or homo or bi"); or Oscar Wilde: On the Skids Again ("Must one have a heart of stone to read The Ballad of Reading Gaol without laughing?") included here.

Vidal is a brilliant critic. He has a horror of being categorised, of being "ghettoised", yet seems to specialise in analysing gay male writers. Book reviews are not very sexy, but, claims Vidal, "sex is politics" and, whatever one's position in the bedroom, "there is only one team, the human, and the rest is politics".

The rest of Sexually Speaking is made up of interviews culled from such illustrious publications as Fag Rag and Gay Sunshine. Vidal clearly liked being quizzed in the 1970s. Back then, the pink American press tickled the literary lion's tummy rather than pulled his tail. The flattery does not make Vidal pull his punches. He baits the straights whether they are Right-wing queer-bashers or innocent sportsmen: "I can't imagine anyone who was not largely homosexual wanting to be a baseball or a football player."

Vidal bangs on and on about the need for population control. There are too many of us. Consequently, homosexuals are doing the world a massive favour.

This is an odd justification of "belly-rubbing". Sex is about hedonism, not altruism. "The more active I am, the better I write," confesses the outspoken novelist. Why then has he never hymned the joys of gay sex? Maybe because he was brought up not to discuss such things (Updike's candour appals him); maybe because the attraction was fleeting. 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.