The American man of letters, who died last year, had been “terrified” that a longstanding literary foe would release a file accusing him of having sex with underage boys, according to family members.
They told Tim Teeman, the British author of In Bed With Gore Vidal, that he ran up a million-dollar legal bill trying to prevent the conservative journalist William F. Buckley from publishing the claims.
“Gore didn’t want these records to come out,” Nina Straight, his half-sister, told Teeman. “He was very upset, terrified, about the material.” Ms Straight said she believed the records alleged that Vidal committed “Jerry Sandusky acts”.
Sandusky, a football coach at Penn State University, was last year convicted of sexually abusing young boys.
Asked whether Vidal believed Buckley had incriminating evidence of him having sex with underage men, Ms Straight told Mr Teeman: “You would not be incorrect in taking that from what I’ve said”.Claims that he called the victims of paedophile Catholic priests “hustlers”, supported NAMBLA (the North American Man/Boy Love Association) in the Seventies, and “spent a lot of time in Bangkok” can be found in the Daily Mail (here). I have no idea if these are true, but in 2009, Vidal undoubtedly stated that he felt no sympathy for the 13-year old girl whom the film director Roman Polanski drugged and raped in Los Angeles, dismissing her as a “hooker”.
One might be less inclined to help spread these revolting allegations had Vidal not appeared at the launch of a Hollywood male prostitute’s sleazy kiss-and-tell memoirs two years ago – and attested to the blighter’s veracity. What's good for the goose, old boy!
I wonder how our liberal media would have reacted had Bill Buckley’s family claimed that he had spent a million dollars suppressing a dossier compiled by Gore Vidal which allegedly revealed the great conservative writer's proclivity for sex with underage girls? (Just to be clear - nobody has ever made any such suggestion.) I suspect the BBC and the Guardian might have thought it worth mentioning – after all, they hated everything Buckley stood for.
My warm and generous obituary of Gore Vidal, posted last year, can be found here.
There is a strong rumour that the BBC tried to recruit Mr. Vidal as a disc jockey for years [showtunes, that sort of thing], but given the recent scandals the Corporation probably did not want that fact to be revealed. So they kept quiet about these stories about Vidal and his tendencies.
ReplyDeleteI avoid the Guardian newspaper in case I come across an image of Polly Toynbee and suffer an attack of the screaming ab-dabs. So I cannot comment.
Now, about this NAMBLA organisation. Have you got their e-mail
address? How come you know about these things?
Wikipedia claims the "poet" Allen Ginsberg was a "defender and member". Apparently it still exists, and it's no suprise to learn that it's based in New York and San Francisco (where else?). Among their publications is a prison newsletter. Some liberals claim that outlawing this sort of organisation drives the pathetic freaks it caters for underground, where they're more dangerous. But a society that has become so liberal and morally relativistic that it can't signal its abhorrence of paedophilia by outlawing its promotion in any form is doomed - and deserves to be - far as I'm concerned. (And, yes, I know just how strongly you agree - I seem to remember an incident where you having "a word" with a predator who had taken to hanging around a local bus stop at the exact time when the school bus dropped the kids off. Respect.)
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