Tag Archives: Gore Vidal

The Legendary Test

Mark Simpson on the (fast diminishing) difference between fame and legend (The Hospital Club magazine, Spring 2010) A recent bloody assassination attempt on Gore Vidal, the last great American man of letters by the English journalist Christopher Hitchens in the glossy pages of Vanity Fair prompted me, and I suspect many others, to ponder the …

April 5, 2010 – 9:37 pm | By Mark Simpson | Posted in article, journalism | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (18)

Edmund White’s Vulgar Fag-ism

I’ve always liked Edmund White’s refusal to get with the contemporary gay hypocrisy program and shrewishly condemn promiscuity in the hope that this will deliver lots and lots of wedding presents. In contrast to that pasteurised movie Milk, which lied shamelessly about gay men’s sex lives in the 1970s to make it easier for them to …

October 18, 2009 – 3:29 pm | By Mark Simpson | Posted in gay, journalism, review | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (56)

Gore Vidal Takes on The World — Again

God, I can’t help but love the old bastard.  Another tour-de-force from Gore Vidal (interviewed by Tim Teeman) appeared in The London Times last week, in which, as usual, he said so many things, so very loudly that so many people know to be true but daren’t begin to mumble. This frail, crippled, diabetic, alcoholic, …

October 8, 2009 – 5:18 pm | By Mark Simpson | Posted in commentary | Tagged , , , , | Comments (11)

Gore Vidal Turns Off The Lights on the American Dream

Mark Simpson speaks to the mother of Myra Breckinridge and scourge of imperialism, monotheism and monosexuality (Arena Hommes Plus, Summer 2009)   I’m having trouble hearing the last living Great American Man of Letters. He says something else I don’t hear and I ask him to repeat it. Suddenly this 83 year old legend is …

May 19, 2009 – 10:35 am | By Mark Simpson | Posted in article, interviews, journalism | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (27)

Little Britain Touches Up Uncle Sam

By Mark Simpson (Guardian, 20 October, 2008) ‘What other culture could have produced someone like Ernest Hemingway,’ waspish bisexual American exile Gore Vidal once asked of America’s favourite so-butch-he’s-camp writer, ‘and not seen the joke?’. The answer, was, of course, that only a culture that couldn’t see the joke could produce a Hemingway. I don’t …

October 20, 2008 – 7:12 pm | By Mark Simpson | Posted in bisexuality, comedy, commentary, masculinity, television | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (7)