Dec 09, 2005  |  By: Gregory Hamm  | COMMENTS     

CELEBRATED SOCIAL COMMENTATOR and literary man-about-town Gore Vidal has never wanted for relevance. We can even see shades of Vidal in “Brokeback Mountain.” What caused a stir in the months leading up to that movie’s release, of course, is the sympathetic portrayal of gay male characters who wouldn’t fit in anywhere on the set of, say, “Will & Grace.” Men who have sex with men who don’t identify with gay culture? Shocking.

And yet, in 1948 Vidal managed to publish “The City and the Pillar,” which caused a scandal for its insinuation that gay men mix, unnoticed, in straight circles.

In her new book “How to Be an Intellectual in the Age of TV: The Lessons of Gore Vidal,” Marcie Frank treats Vidal’s landmark novel as one example of his skillful mobilization of the written word in the service of some larger agenda. In the case of “The City and the Pillar,” she quotes the author directly.

“I decided to examine the homosexual underworld (which I knew rather less well than I pretended), and in the process show the naturalness of homosexual relations, as well as making the point that there is no such thing as a homosexual,” she quotes him as saying.

This latter belief — that the term “homosexual” identifies an act, not an individual — has prompted Vidal to distance himself from that very label. “Sex is,” he posited in 1960. “No other meanings follow, and as a result, attempts to make them follow are simply wrongheaded.”

FRANK HIGHLIGHTS AN important moment in the summer of 1968 when the subject of Vidal’s sexuality garnered national attention. Covering the Democratic National Convention for ABC with Vidal, ultraconservative writer William F. Buckley Jr. famously referred to his co-host as a “queer.” Marshalling his characteristic wit to turn the tables on his accuser, Vidal responded the following day, “I’ve always tried to treat Buckley like the great lady he is.”

It is this wit that has allowed Vidal, over the course of his life, to disavow any association with the term “homosexual” even as he courted rumors and name-calling with his very public musings — on screen and in print — about gender and sex politics. Frank wisely questions why homophobic American culture did not rush to defend Buckley’s honor, and, in a related vein, how the gay movement has not been able to co-opt Vidal as one of its own.

Frank’s discussion about Vidal’s pursuits outside the realm of sex and sexuality give some sense of how he has frustrated the attempts of gay activists like Larry Kramer to enlist him in the fight for equality. For more than 50 years, Vidal has surfaced on talk shows, debates and political campaigns inveighing against everything from the banalization of American culture to the shortness of collective historical memory.

With each appearance, Vidal toys with his public persona without ever settling on a “type.” Neither macho like Norman Mailer nor effeminate like Truman Capote (with whom he famously feuded), Vidal willfully obscures his own image even as he exploits his celebrity across a variety of media.

The line of questioning that runs throughout Frank’s book precludes any argument that might elevate Gore Vidal to the level of gay hero. Yet Frank inadvertently deifies her subject on that score. Her insistence on Vidal’s intellectual virtuosity and creative range makes him something of an unlikely gay icon, one who attaches his name to everything and nothing at once and, by doing so, creates a model for new kind of spokesperson for the gay rights movement: a man not in or out of the closet but standing beside it.