He is important for the gay literary heritage because of the straightforwardness with which he has pursued gay themes and included gay characters in his work, beginning in his teens when he wrote his first novel, Williwaw (1946).

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He has also steadily upped the ante about what sorts of gay material could be included in his mainstream works and as a result has made it easier for a wide range of other writers to find public acknowledgment of their material.

Although the grandson of a United States Senator, Vidal feels uncomfortable in America because of his sexuality and has lived mostly in Italy since the mid-1960s, sharing his life with his companion Howard Austen.

The City and the Pillar (1948), Vidal's third novel, is the story of professional tennis player Jim Willard, a man who never outgrows a boyhood crush on his best friend Bob Ford. The idea that men who enjoy sex with other men circulate among ordinary people undetected is implicit everywhere in this novel and outraged some original readers.

Although Vidal argues here and in many places in his nonfiction that there is no homosexual identity and everyone is bisexual, the plot of the book proves the contrary. For The City and the Pillar is, despite itself, the first mainstream coming-out novel.

At the insistence of the publisher, the original book ended with a violent death, although Vidal had gone against tradition by having his protagonist kill his boyhood love rather than expiate his own supposed transgressions through death. Claude Summers notes that the ending originally published is unsatisfactory not merely because it is "melodramatic and unbelievable. It is also as falsely romanticized as the modes of thought the novel criticizes with such cool clarity."

In 1968, in light of changed social values, Vidal was able to publish The City and the Pillar Revised, a substantially altered version of the book with a different ending. The revision is more shocking because in it Bob is , not murdered. But the violence of this revised ending is better justified since Bob does not simply reject Jim as "queer," precipitating Jim's retaliation; he initiates the violence. There is a strong statement of how inflammatory such name-calling can be.

Most of Vidal's works have more or less prominent gay characters, and he is important for the consistency with which he has continually expanded gay visibility in mainstream fiction and, to some extent, drama, for example, in The Best Man (1960), where the plot turns on a question of blackmail about an episode of homosexuality in the life of an essentially straight man.

In his plays and novels with modern settings, Vidal's ear for contemporary idiom is so perfect and his understanding of current fads and obsessions so sure that he is always readable and often an incisive critic of modern life as well. His stylistic experiments indicate both by their virtues and by their failings that when he controls his art he has the stylistic powers of a major craftsman.

In one such stylistic experiment, Myra Breckinridge (1968), Vidal returned to the public eye at the center of a major controversy. Going Virginia Woolf's Orlando one better, Vidal's Myra Breckinridge is the first instance of a novel in which the main character undergoes a clinical sex-change, a brilliantly chosen image for satire of contemporary mores.

Myra Breckinridge alternates first-person narrators (one as if transcribed from unedited tape recordings) very effectively. Regarded as scandalous and even dangerous when first published, the sexual content is fairly tame by the standard of what is discussed regularly on television nowadays.

The sequel Myron (1974) uses filmmaking effectively as a metaphor for time travel to contrast the present unfavorably to the past; the book is also highly successful in manipulating euphemisms to mock Nixon-decade politicians.

But even with all this and a raunchy sexuality, the book was neither a critical nor a popular success; because of changing standards of taste, although appearing only six years after Myra Breckinridge but five years after Stonewall, it was not even a succès de scandale.