Posted on 11/25/2013 3:01:49 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
Aside from being an essayist, novelist and screenwriter, Gore Vidal was a grade-one gossip, his published writings and private conversation stuffed with rumour and conspiratorial hints. But now, less than 18 months after Vidal passed into history, he is himself subject to the most reputation-destructive scuttlebutt there is: the suggestion that he may have been a paedophile.
In connection with a new book about Vidal, his half-sister and a nephew have hinted that he may have had a secret passion for underage boys. And Vidal more or less admitted it himself, writing in his memoir Palimpsest that he was "attracted to adolescent males".
Given this context, an incident in 1977 will also now bring literary cops running. Martin Amis, interviewing Vidal for the Observer, was required to give him copy approval, and was asked to change Amis's description of "homosexual" to "pansexual". Vidal was prissily fastidious about the meaning of words and his suggested substitution can be taken as a confession that nothing and no one was erotically off-limits.
A sexual dirt file allegedly kept by one of Vidal's many enemies, the late conservative thinker William Buckley, is said to have been thrown away after Buckley's death, and so definitive proof will be tricky. It also seems odd that no one claiming to be a victim has come forward, especially as Vidal left an estate of $37m (£23m) – a possible source of ire from his relatives, as he bequeathed the lot to Harvard University, where he had never studied, rather than them....
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
He was known to be gay - that’s half-way to pedophilia anyway.....
I’m not sure why this would be a surprise, he was screenwriter on both “Ben Hur” and “Spartacus” and pushed for more homosexuality in both, then left the jobs.
Excellent.
And, boy, do I wish kids would have a clipboard and pencil handy when they voluntarily [!] sit down to listen to a show like "Firing Line" these days.
Hell. I wish there was a show like "Firing Line" these days. Oh, how far we've fallen in just our lifetimes.
Education and how humans learn is one of my great interests. You and I caught the very tail-end of something approaching an education and even that didn't match what our parents had.
So Mohammad the Prophet (may piss be upon him) was a genuine pedo for his sexual interest in the 9 year old girl?
More than likely. Though girls (and boys) enter puberty at widely divergent ages.
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