The work is something of a roman à clef satirizing Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Anaïs Nin, Norman Mailer, and other celebrities--and perhaps Vidal, who has written himself into the book as one of the two main narrators.

Sponsor Message.

This self-projection is in the tradition of Somerset Maugham or Christopher Isherwood, but Vidal writes with much more forthrightness about his sexuality, thus taking the nonfiction novel to a new plane of self-revelation. He shows himself exploring sexual as well as artistic freedom in Europe away from the conservatism of America.

Early in his career Vidal wrote occasional short stories. Kiernan credits the stories collected in A Thirsty Evil (1956) with bringing Vidal's style to maturity by enabling him to develop a feel for a variety of narrators. And these stories include Vidal's most focused attention on gay milieux before Myra Breckinridge.

"Three Strategems," for example, uses two narrators in the manner of several of Vidal's most technically proficient novels to bring insight to an encounter between an epileptic hustler and a prospective client. And "The Zenner Trophy" with a third-person restrictive point of view shows a teacher gaining respect for a boy being expelled from school for homosexual activity by the clear certainty with which the boy apparently understands himself.

In addition to fiction and drama, Vidal has written a large number of essays, often disputatious ones. He has a broad range of insightful but usually not very comforting comments to make about American politics and the American character in general.

In an analysis unfortunately still apt today, the essay "Pink Triangle and Yellow Star" (1981), for example, describes how Jewish intellectuals have been undermining their own minority rights by their conventional stereotyping of practitioners of what Vidal calls "same-sex sex."

Although largely invisible to the general public, a large body of twentieth-century gay male literature by American authors was published prior to Stonewall, some of it positive but most of it tinged with misery or bleakness as the price of being published and disseminated.

After Stonewall, gay male literature became focused as a movement, aided by the development of gay newspapers, magazines, and quarterlies and the founding of serious gay and lesbian bookstores.

Although glbtq people and issues have been inadequately covered by American television news, there have recently been signs of improvement.

Perhaps no other book has been more influential--for better or worse--in determining the construction of gay and lesbian identity in the modern world, as well as social attitudes toward homosexuality, than the Bible.

Although Western culture's reliance upon binary systems of classification and identification has meant the practical erasure of bisexuality, as such, from literary and cultural analysis, bisexual experiences appear in many literary works from ancient times to the present.

In literature, the gay male cross-dresser and the lesbian cross-dresser are depicted quite differently.

Like other minority groups, gay men and lesbians have had to develop both a particular sense of humor among themselves in order to make their marginal social status endurable and also a defensive awareness toward the rest of the world in order to disarm their adversaries with laughter.

In the decades since Stonewall, gay male mystery fiction has burgeoned in United States, both in quantity and in quality, and has increasingly been issued by mainstream presses.

Since World War II, the gay male novel has progressively flourished in England and especially in America.

Although film may be a director's rather than a writer's medium, gay and lesbian screenwriters have made significant contributions to both mainstream and independent film.

The male athlete has been an important gay icon in several cultures from ancient times to the present.

Representations of transsexuality in films range from freak-show exploitation, to dramatic and documentary depictions, to the use of transsexuality as a metaphor for exploring the crossing of all kinds of borders.

Australian political scientist and self-described "international activist-academic" Dennis Altman has studied both the glbtq political movement and the globalization of sexual identities.

One of the first Jewish-American writers of his generation to write in English rather than Yiddish, Myron Brinig was also one of the first to create homosexual characters, though he remained publicly closeted all of his life.

Members of New York's early twentieth-century avant-garde, Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler are also the authors of a widely suppressed and largely unread experimental novel of 1930s gay life, The Young and Evil.

A major Anglo-American novelist and a pioneer in the gay liberation movement, Christopher Isherwood created gay characters whose homosexuality is a simple given, an integral part of the wholeness of personality and an emblem of their common humanity.

Frightened by the Oscar Wilde trial, Somerset Maugham avoided treating homosexual themes and characters in his novels and plays.

American publisher and writer Robert McAlmon made significant contributions to twentieth-century literature, both by publishing avant-garde writers and by depicting a queer subculture in his own works.

The bisexual novelist Anaïs Nin is best known for her sexually frank diaries and the erotica published after her death.

One of the most significant and influential American movie directors of the twentieth century, Nicholas Ray created characters and situations that continue to resonate with queer viewers.

Passionate friendships with women were essential to the life and work of novelist Virginia Woolf.