Gore Vidal, the celebrated playwright, novelist and essayist who died July 31, was not one to adhere to the adage De mortuis nihil nisi bonum. He delighted in mocking his antagonists upon their deaths. He famously quipped that dying was a “good career move” for Truman Capote and memorialized William F. Buckley (himself no respecter of obituary protocol) as a “dishonorable American.” [Gore Vidal Speaks Seriously Ill of the Dead, Truthdig, March 20, 2008.]
This type of rhetoric garnered Vidal enemies on both the Left and Right who were eager to write their own negative obituaries upon his passing.
And Vidal left them with plenty of material to work with. Referring to Roman Polanski’s 13 year-old rape victim, he said “Look am I going to sit and weep every time a young hooker feels as though she’s being taken advantage of?” and claimed Polanski was a victim of an anti-Semitic media (!) who spread the narrative “this girl was in her communion dress, a little angel all in white, being raped by this awful Jew, Polacko – that's what people were calling him...” [A Conversation With Gore Vidal, The Atlantic, October 2010]
Of young boys, Vidal wrote in his autobiography that “Naturally, like most men, I am attracted to adolescent males,” He was marginally involved in the founding of the pro-pedophilia organization, the North American Man-Boy Love Association.
A few conservatives have decided to bring up these unpleasant quotes. [See Gore Vidal, Milton Friedman, and...Teenage Hookers, By Nick Gillespie, Reason Magazine, August 1, 2012]But Vidal’s Leftist antagonists have found a much more serious accusation than sympathy for rape and pedophilia: racism and anti-Semitism.
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