Fred Astaire, Rock Hudson, Jack Kerouac, and even Jacqueline Kennedy show up in a new “sexual biography” of writer Gore Vidal. Author Tim Teeman examines why discussing the iconic writer’s sex life expands our understanding of him rather than contracts it.
Gore Vidal in 1947.
Jerry Cooke / Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images
In December 2011, about seven months before he died, Gore Vidal turned to his good friend Scotty Bowers as the two relaxed in Vidal's home in the Hollywood Hills. "You suppose we could find Bob and bring him over?" the frail, nostalgic Vidal asked. "Bob" was Bob Atkinson, a favorite male prostitute of Vidal's whom Bowers had first set him up with around 60 years prior. They had long lost touch. "Gore liked Bob because he had been in the Navy and he had a cock as big as a baby's arm," says Bowers, who recorded his life as a trick, then pimp, to Hollywood's rich and famous in the book Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars.
"Scotty was the closest person to Gore in the last four years of his life who wasn't a servant," says Matt Tyrnauer, Vidal's close friend and former editor at Vanity Fair.
Vidal, one of America's most preeminent authors and lionized cultural-political figures, himself supplied a laudatory testimonial for Bowers' book: "I have known Scotty Bowers for the better part of a century. I'm so pleased that he has finally decided to tell his story to the world … Scotty doesn't lie — the stars sometimes do — and he knows everybody." Presumably, then, Vidal would have sanctioned as fact Bowers' revelations to me that Vidal not only had sex with him, but also with "many" hustlers Bowers arranged for him, as well as Hollywood stars Rock Hudson, Tyrone Power, and Charles Laughton.
The numerous stories about Vidal's sex life I unearthed while researching my book, In Bed with Gore Vidal: Hustlers, Hollywood and the Private Life of an American Master, about Vidal's private life and sexuality and how both intersected with his public life and identity, were inevitably salacious and fun. Vidal had a lot of sex — 1,000 men by the time he was 25, he once estimated. But the stories were also revealing and moving.
This was someone who, after all, did not believe in gay people but rather "gay sexual acts"; who claimed to be bisexual, but who — apart from some early sexual experiences with women — was gay. Vidal never came out in a conventional sense, though remained radical, and a public supporter of sexual freedom and equality, all through his life. He genuinely believed categorizing sexuality was foolish, but also had his own very personal reasons for not being fully open.
Vidal would have sex with hustlers in the afternoon, quickly, and only after he had completed a day's writing. The hustlers Vidal paid were young men, and the encounters would be quick. Control in this part of his life matched the control he sought to exert as a public figure and writer. He said he hated the gossip in books and newspapers about people's private lives — yet he relished gossiping about others' private lives.
Chris Felver / Getty Images