SOURCE: “Live from Golgotha: Gore Vidal and the Problem of Satiric Reinscription,” in Mosaic, Vol. 33, No. 1, March, 2000, pp. 133-44.

[In the following essay, Fletcher and Feros examine Vidal's satiric, postmodern critique of Christian theology, biblical veracity, and contemporary media culture in Live from Golgotha. According to the critics, Vidal's subversive comedy is undermined to some degree by his essentialist notion of bisexuality and his view of sex as primarily an expression of power and domination.]

All attempts to critique may in fact reinstate or even strengthen their target, especially in the case of attacks on entrenched values or assumptions. This applies not only to traditional satire but also perhaps even to such contemporary modes as queer camp. According to Moe Meyer camp employs the “strategies and tactics of queer parody,” and functions to foreground “queer social visibility” (5). As he sees it, the nature of queer itself is “poststructural,” having to do with practices rather than with an essential identity, in keeping with Michel Foucault’s view of sexuality as something produced discursively rather than being a natural condition (2–3). In Myer’s view queer camp is also anti-essentialist (3) and differentiated from “rhetorical and performative strategies such as […] satire” (7). The purpose of queer, then, is to destabilize heteronormativity—what Chrys Ingraham calls the heterosexual imaginary or hegemonic heterosexuality (168)—and in doing so also to challenge what Steven Seidman describes as “the assumption of a unified homosexual identity” (11). Because cultural meanings are controlled by the dominant ideology, however, queer can enter public dialogue only as parody, and thus as Judith Butler argues, drag and other queer forms are not unproblematically subversive; they may expose heterosexuality as performative and naturalized, but the parodying may “reidealize” without undermining (231). Nonetheless, discursive approaches may be less fragile than traditional ones.

Few contemporary writers better enable one to explore the problems of camp satire than American novelist Gore Vidal. Born in 1925 into one of America’s prominent political families, Vidal has maintained a love/hate relationship with the establishment throughout his life. Vidal’s stylistic and thematic preoccupations hint at the extent to which his politics are the result of his contentious homosexuality. His criticism of mainstream views makes open use of values traditionally associated with the homosexual lifestyle: elegance, narcissism, sex as power, and wit and ridicule used as verbal weapons. Vidal’s The City and the Pillar was perhaps the first major American novel to depict homosexual activity as acceptable. His most camp and controversial work is the 1968 novel, Myra Breckinridge, which along with its sequel, Myron, reduces all life to the phallic. Vidal’s satire in Duluth also utilizes these themes, while Messiah critiques Christianity and particularly Saint Paul. Vidal’s historical recreations, such as the novel Julian and the trilogy on American public life—Washington, DC, Burr, and 1876—frequently employ ribald sexual anecdotes. This fictional convergence of sex and politics is duplicated in a number of Vidal’s essays, especially “Notes on Pornography” and “Sexuality.” While Vidal sees hetero and homosexual as terms that apply to acts rather than to categories of people, these essays reveal his sexual essentialism in that he argues that everyone is naturally bisexual.

Live from Golgotha is particularly apposite for our purposes because in it Vidal continues his critique of Christian doctrine and its ethics of sexual preference. We argue here that although Vidal combines a number of strategies to launch a clever and complex attack on Christian morality, and his work is often called “camp,” nonetheless his essentialist orientations exacerbate the degree to which satire always reinscribes as well as destabilizes its targets. They do this, first, by eschewing a constructivist approach to depicting 1st-century Palestine in favor of an unmasking approach revealing the “real” conflict and violence under the facade of religious harmony and virtue, and, second, by adopting a “pop” camp form that differs from Myer’s queer camp and undermines the openness of what Eve Sedgwick calls the “speculative naivete” of queer readings (2–3). Vidal attacks Christianity through association with Saint Paul’s depicted homosexuality, which undermines Christianity but also reinforces normative judgements against homosexuality; while this problem is partially offset by Vidal’s characterization of Timothy as a joyful sexual being, Timothy in turn re-inscribes a phallic sexuality that is both penetrative and power oriented. After briefly describing the premise and major events on the novel, we will identity the targets of Vidal’s critique and analyze the major strategies that he uses to effect his satire. In conclusion, we will identify some of the limitations of Vidal’s approach and discuss the way that these relate to the problems of camp and satire in general.

The title Live from Golgotha refers to a 20th-century media scheme to televise the crucifixion. The basic premise of this novel is that all history and memory exist only on tapes, and that a computer hacker is destroying the tapes and thereby eliminating any knowledge of previous events. Chet Claypoole, from NBC TV creative programming, time travels to the 1st century to convince Saint Timothy to write his version of the life of Jesus and the beginnings of Christianity. As the novel progresses, it is revealed that the hacker is Jesus, who had been a Zionist zealot but had escaped from Gethsemane to the 20th century in the form of Marvin Wasserstein, leaving Judas to be crucified in his place by the Roman centurions. Other significant participants from the 20th century include Cutler One, a computer genius and professor of comparative religion; and Cutler Two, who is really Cutler One at a later stage of his life. Timothy had worked for and been intimate with Saint Paul, and much of the novel centers on Paul’s ministry to the Gentiles. Although neither Paul nor Timothy had actually met Jesus, Timothy undertakes to write the gospel and save (Pauline) Christianity. At the end of the novel, the crucifixion is restaged for 20th-century television, with the Japanese using special effects to hijack Jesus and the spectacle of the crucifixion for the greater glory of the Sun Goddess Amaterasu.

Vidal’s project in Live from Golgotha is to undermine the claims of Christianity to purity and Truth. Vidal’s approach involves exposing both the contingency of Christian dogma and the impurity of motives among early Christians by depicting conflicts, unsaintly behavior, and the precariousness of the outcome. The first strategy Vidal uses in Live from Golgotha is to extend the postmodernist notion that all is text by positing that all history and memory is on tape and about to be erased. Using this device, he undermines the Truth claims of Christianity by suggesting that our understanding of reality is socially constructed and that texts are all we have to go on to convey constructions and perceptions of historical events. Similarly, enlisting postmodernism’s challenge to the notion of the coherent subject, he presents Cutler One and Cutler Two as the same person at different stages of life, interacting directly in the 1st century, and Saint Paul’s mistaken identity of Judas as Jesus extends this to farce.

If there is no basis for distinguishing what is true (or True), then what we are left with is faith, and once miracles and visions are accepted then anything goes, even channeling and spoon-bending. The power of religion comes from possession of the Truth. Christianity claims to provide the Truth because it is based on the Word of God, and therefore the source of its pronouncements is important. But how can the authenticity of such a claim be verified, especially since—in what Vidal terms “the Great Embarrassment” (31)—Jesus has never fulfilled his promise to return to earth? What prophets take to be the word of God may instead be the voice of the devil or the result of egomaniacal delusion, hallucinogens, or dreams or nightmares: “a voice from above or, worse, within” (132).

Appropriately, the first sentence of Live from Golgotha is Timothy’s statement that “in the beginning was the nightmare” (3), referring to the occasion when Paul forced him to be circumcised to mollify such Jewish Christians as Jesus’s brother James and “the Jerusalem crowd,” and Timothy’s dreams are haunted by his circumcision—all of which suggests the violence underlying religions, questions the authenticity of visions, and brings the central issue of Timothy’s circumcision down to the quotidian level of human pain. Similarly, Paul appears to Timothy in his nightmares, later graduating to visions (8), while “channelers” from the 20th century appear as holograms (138), perhaps comparable to angels, and Jesus explains his appearance to his disciples three days after the crucifixion as having been by hologram (192). Ultimately, Timothy cannot be sure whether he is remembering dreams or dreaming about memories.

If mistakes are possible so also is deliberate fabrication, especially given the stakes involved in establishing accepted versions of reality. Paul is consistently described as a liar, and even Jesus is said to have lied about his age to seem younger and more “with it” (15, 30). The crucifixion is being faked for TV, making the phrase “seeing is believing” doubly ironic (223). In addition, whatever their source and authenticity, texts can be lost/destroyed/hidden, and in Live from Golgotha the whole history of Christianity, known to us largely through the New Testament, is being “un-written” by computer viruses. As Timothy tries to convince Saint John: “‘All we know is what has been written down and remembered, but if, through a control of the tapes, we can determine what was written down as of then, then that is the only reality now’” (100).

Not only are texts vulnerable, they involve both selection of exactly what is to be said and translation from speech into written form and from the word of God into precepts for human guidance. Thus, in his arguments with the Jewish Christians, Paul uses the ambiguities of translation from the Greek to evade the question of whether he is claiming that Jesus is the Son of God or only His servant (123). In Vidal’s version of Paul’s story of his conversion on the road to Damascus, Jesus’s statements must be interpreted because his voice is so shrill that only canines can hear him (32), satirizing the notion that religions need middlemen to explain to the masses what the visionary sees. And Timothy worries that simply writing things down is “a danger to the truth” (135).

After the work of the hacker, Timothy is left writing the final version of the birth of Christianity well after the event and never previously having met Jesus. His major sources are the “lost or fading testaments, epistles, postcards” still available, and Mark’s text as told by the “practically illiterate” Saint Peter (150). In Vidal’s version, not only was Judas crucified in place of the Zionist Jesus, but Saint Paul softened the original Christian message (194), effectively inventing Christianity with the Damascus story, the logo of the cross, and the idea of the trinity (214), suggesting that he was more interested in the risen Christ than in the life and sayings of Jesus. Timothy realizes that the attraction of Christianity is the mystery of the three-in-one, parodied in the way that the Cutlers are two-in-one. For him, as long as everyone thinks that Jesus was crucified, it does not matter that Saint Paul invented Christianity (180), and the reason why the crucifixion cannot be permitted to be televised live is that featuring the four-hundred-pound Judas will destroy the whole image of Christianity (204).

Particularly the postmodern aspect of this part of Vidal’s project extrapolates from the accepted interpretation that the Books of the New Testament were written after Jesus’s time, in a manner influenced by the concerns of the day, and written by the “winners”—the Gentiles rather than Christian Jews—just as the Books of Timothy and Titus were not written by Saint Paul. In a sense, Vidal gives Timothy Luke’s job, which, as Alan Segal argues, was retrospectively to synthesize Saint Paul and the Gospels (163), smoothing over early conflicts. Nor, of course, can Timothy’s version be seen as any more authentic than the others, since it also is constructed after the fact.

Vidal’s second major strategy is to reconstruct the events of the 1st century, emphasizing conflicts over practice and doctrine with a view to demonstrating that events in that period were not ordained by God but could have had different outcomes and undermining Christianity’s claim to having the one and only Truth. This archaeological strategy, however, is made more complicated, if not more complex, by the fact that Vidal’s satire cuts in a number of directions. For example, in using 20th-century technology to recreate 1st-century Jerusalem not only are the events of early Christianity revealed as spectacle, 20th-century media is also exposed as trivializing even such momentous events as the crucifixion of Christ, wanting it to be scheduled for prime time or edited to exclude the “dull spots” (198).

In-so-far as the sole “Truth” constitutes Christianity’s authority, any suggestion of competing interpretations is subversive. As Vidal presents it, there is primarily the contrast between the message of the gospels and the church, on the one hand, and the actual events of the period, on the other. There also are competing interpretations of central events, with Vidal emphasizing that it was not only Jesus, but myriad prophets who were executed by the Romans (111). There is confusion over whether it was Jesus or Judas who was crucified, and particularly Paul’s assumption that Jesus was “the fat one” (39) doubly undermines the visionary basis of his conversion on the road to Damascus (32).

Among the conflicts of the time between Jewish and Gentile converts to Christianity, many focused on the issue of purity as prescribed by the Torah, particularly Jewish dietary restrictions in the context of Christian communal meals, the Jewish insistence on circumcision, and the Jewish avoidance of homosexual acts as mixed and therefore impure, if not as “sins” (Countryman 41–42, 61–64). Naturally, however, these differences extended to and were based on other types of conflict and rivalries. For example, Paul was a strict Jew, but as main missionary to the Gentiles he came into conflict with James and with Peter. According to Alan Segal, Paul was a Jewish convert to Christianity, while James perceived Jesus’s teachings as simply an extension of his own understanding of Judaism (103); Vidal extends this to indicate a fundamental difference between the views of the hardline Zionists, Jesus and James, on the one hand, and Paul’s version of Christianity and his ingenious invention of the crucified Christ, on the other (108–10). As Vidal presents it, Paul also never really liked John, who was “part of the Jerusalem crowd and close to James” (9). In addition, James thinks that he is heir to leadership of the church, as Jesus’s younger brother, and, although Jesus agrees (103), there is also sibling rivalry between the two brothers (106).

Such differences are central to Christianity and the stakes are high, involving not only the correct road to salvation but also control of the church. Thus, aside from the Jewish-Christian conflict, they also take the form of manichean opposition of Christ or anti-Christ. In some streams of Christian tradition Saint Paul is regarded as a distorter of Jesus’s message rather than its preserver, while traditional blasphemous works have often interchanged Jesus and Judas or referred to Paul as a juggler. Vidal plays with all these notions, and charge and counter-charge increase the confusion. From Timothy’s perspective, the evil Hacker might be Jesus or he might be Satan (10), or Jesus may be “Lucifer incarnate” (214). It is only through the tortuous proceedings of the entire novel and the violence of eliminating alternatives that the competing views ultimately are reduced to a single version, namely Timothy’s (22). Even then, however, there is a final twist, as his single gospel is presented in an Oriental version wherein the crucified Jesus ascends into the arms of the Sun Goddess Amaterasu (224). As Heather Neilson notes, the novel ends with the old meta-fictional trick in which the last page repeats the first page, with the variation in this case that the last page is written in Japanese (89).

Vidal’s third major strategy is to undermine the pretensions of Christianity to divine origins by exposing the failings of the major participants in early Christianity. One method involves the use of nicknames: the four evangelists are referred to as “Matt, Mark, Lu-lu and John-John” (10), while Jesus’s brother James and his supporters are referred to as “the oily James” (4) and “the [Jesse] James gang” (71). Timothy is often reduced to Tim or Timmy (or even Timikins, Tim Boy, Timaximous and Timmy-Wimmy). Paul is referred to throughout as “Saint,” except that Jesus, James and Peter always address him by his Jewish nickname, “Solly,” because they know it irritates him. Saint Peter receives the sobriquet Simple Simon Peter (142) and the reason he is called The Rock is that his head is so thick (4), while the flatulent and “differently advantaged” Judas (210) is referred to as “lard-ass” (73) or “Judas the Overweight” (184). Similarly, Paul is subjected to zoomorphic reduction, being described as short but “thin and carpeted with short black hairs like a spider” (30). Timothy compares him to “a monkey off his leash” (76), and Petronius identifies him as the one who looks like a monkey (155).

Vidal also employs (mis)use of a foreign language to reveal pretensions, including frequent recourse to what is called “faux gallique” (46). The viciously lampooned social climber, Priscilla, is particularly associated with faux gallique in her interactions with Timothy, while Vidal also capitalizes on the way that foreign language phrases—Latin for Greek and even Italian for Latin—were used for centuries to disguise references to homosexual activity in the classics (Boswell 20). Vidal’s pastiche of styles also includes sub-cultural idioms, such as a Negro spiritual rendition of “the begats” and Hollywood/TV jargon, as well as having Paul occasionally lapsing into his “ye old” biblical style (32). At the same time, the entire ambience has a sword and sandal quality, reminding us of how much our view of Christianity has been influenced by Hollywood.

A related way in which Vidal ridicules Christianity’s pretensions to sanctity is to show how the founders were fueled by secondary motivations, especially desire for material and sexual rewards. The temple at Jerusalem is described as an international banking center (105), and Jesus’s major contribution when he took it over was lowering the prime interest rate (118). Similarly, James is presented as a stereotypical Jew—he is a financial adviser and stock speculator first and religious figure second (108, 107), and although he does not like Paul or his message, he accepts the funds that Paul raises from rich Gentiles (ostensibly for poor Jerusalem Jews). Paul’s “inspired fund-raising” is what gave him control over the Jerusalem Christians (4), just as he capitalized on the advantages of getting in on the ground floor by commercially franchising the idea of “One God in three sections” (33) and getting copyright on the word “Christ” and the logo of the cross (41). Paul is also characterized as a con-man (7) who habitually lies (15, 30) and as having “this fantastic double standard” (45), a reference perhaps to the hypocrisy that in Galations 2:11–14 Paul assigned to Peter for eating with Gentiles but not when James and other strict Jews were present (Countryman 99). According to Timothy, “‘I’ve never known anyone who could make things up so quickly and so plausibly when he was really wired’” (30), and he also accuses him of proselytizing by entertainment: there was more to Paul than tap-dancing, Timothy confirms, he was an excellent juggler as well (42).

Another way that Vidal undermines Christian hagiolatry is through an emphasis on the sexual proclivities of Paul and Timothy. While in Christian tradition Saint Paul is associated with love in the form of charity, Vidal presents him as using his religious position for sexual access to boys. Although recent scholarship indicates that Paul regarded homosexual activity less as a sin and more as an impurity (Boswell 106, Countryman 110–20), Vidal accepts the popular view that Paul was strongly against homosexuality and therefore paints Paul in particularly unattractive terms. In keeping with Vidal’s association of sex and power, Paul’s position—“Saint had us all, literally as well as figuratively, by the balls” (108)—is paralleled to Nero’s: “You don’t argue with the emperor of Rome” when he asks for sexual favors (161). Similarly, what is primarily emphasized in the case of Timothy is his racial and sexual impurity and his status as camp super-stud. The biblical Timothy, recruited by Paul to his ministry to the Gentiles, was part Greek and part Jewish, and it was for this reason that Paul had Timothy circumcised to appease the Jewish Christians (Acts 16: 1–3), even though he did not generally expect Gentile converts to Christianity to observe strict Jewish purity codes. In Vidal’s version, Timothy describes himself as “son of Eunice the Jewess and George the Greek” (3) and he is also bi-sexual and therefore doubly “mixed” and impure.

Having joined Paul’s ministry for the sexual opportunities, Timothy sets the tone for the novel with his early statement that “I have golden hyacinthine curls and cornflower-blue, forget-me-not eyes and the largest dick in our part of Asia Minor” (3), later wondering whether “my whang (will) one day be a major relic” (132)—an obvious invocation of the belief among Christians in the miraculous powers of a saint’s body parts and especially Saint Timothy relics. In Timothy’s view, the entire conflict between Paul and James and thus within early Christianity was over his “whang” (3), and here Vidal is presumably mocking what Bredbeck calls Freud’s identification of narcissism with homosexuality (60).

In Vidal’s version Timothy was a very busy “stud” before joining Paul and continues to be so—hardly someone to be sent to the Corinthians to end fornication among them. Corinth, was “sex, sex, sex” (42), and as a missionary to this city Timothy initially spends most of his time in bed with Priscilla (45) before becoming hyper-critical of her social climbing. In Ephesus, Timothy has an interlude with Stephanie, second in command to the pagan High Priestess Diana (Acts 19), including a three-way tumble with Stephanie and her understudy (82–84), after sexually bribing one of her male attendants for access. In Malta, Timothy is sexually excited by Selma Suydam, and is prevented from achieving intercourse with her only by the fact that she is “channeling” and present only as a hologram (132). In Rome, Timothy moves in with the widow Flavia, “as her spiritual adviser and bedmate” (149, 33), in keeping with the Biblical admonition to care for widows (1 Timothy 5). He also is propositioned by Petronius (154) and much more forcefully and successfully by Nero (160).

Vidal’s satiric achievement is significant but limited. On the positive side, he presents a powerful and complex rendering of Christianity that challenges its claims to Truth and purity, its internal consistency, and its “natural” development as a single, seamless story. Parody and satire, however, always reinscribe as well as destabilize, and Vidal’s approach exacerbates this tendency, partly because he attempts too much, but also because he begins from an essentialist position.

Vidal’s extension of the notion that all is text to the idea that all is a set of tapes about to be erased works well, and is only partially undermined by the degree to which we read the book from Timothy’s perspective, and to the extant that the book does not actually erase as we finish it, as implied in the closing pages of the text. Vidal’s “archaeological” strategy also works as satire, presenting an alternative, active reading of the early decades of Christianity based on known conflicts, especially those between Jewish and Gentile Christians. However, he is inconsistent here, and instead of being genuinely exploratory claims to expose the “real” conflict and violence underlying the biblical version of events during this period. Thus, the outcome is much closer to Michel Seidel’s characterization of satire as exposing institutions and conventions as having violent origins than it is to what in Michel Foucault’s early writing (Archeology, “War”) is called archeology—going back to relive the contestations of an earlier period to expose the contingency of any specific outcome.

By way of comparison, Salman Rushdie more successfully approaches similar issues with similar strategies in The Satanic Verses. Rushdie also questions where religious ideas come from—the Word of God, or of Satan, or just indigestion—and parallels contemporary lives against dream sequences of defining moments in Islamic history, and with an openness that undermines traditional interpretations without replacing them with another “truth.” In Homi Bhabha’s perception, Rushdie’s “sin” was not criticizing the content of the Koran, but rather “opening up a space of discursive contestation that places the authority of the Koran within a perspective of historical and cultural relativism” and introducing “other enunciating positions and possibilities” (226).

In sexual matters, also, Vidal is essentialist rather than social constructivist, leading to similar problems. Although in Live from Golgotha he avoids the blatant essentialism which Claude Summers detects in Vidal’s early novel, The City and the Pillar, in which each character is consistently either hetero-or homo-sexual, he succumbs to the extent that he presents everyone as naturally bi-sexual. Further, he also assumes, in this novel and in his non-fiction (“Sexuality” 219, 227), that sex is essentially egocentric and penetrative. As Catherine Stimpson has argued concerning Myra/Myron, this is a phallic rendition of sex, characterized in terms of power (191), and as James Tatum has argued, Vidal’s understanding of and interest in the Roman erotic conception of empire is related to his eliding of notions of political aggression and sexual aggression (217). This phallic emphasis obviously differs from Meyer’s view of camp as always queer, and reflects instead the exaggerated masculinity of “pop” camp, epitomized finally in Timothy’s “scarred tool” (46). Although bisexual, Timothy “never had the slightest gender confusion” (8). When approached from behind on one occasion, he “growls” that he is “a top” (78), and he is shamed when Nero forces him to be “a bottom” (159).

Finally, then, Vidal’s approach exacerbates the problem of reinscription. Vidal undermines Christianity by identifying Paul as its real founder and then associating him with hypocritical homosexual activity, but that also reinscribes the broader value judgement against homosexuality. This is countered by Vidal’s positive depiction of Timothy, natural and happy in his role as stud and carrying the message that (homo and hetero) sex is a good thing. But this goes beyond undermining Christian claims to the moral high ground to introduce an alternative grand narrative or positive good. In addition, for Timothy sex is penetrative and power-related, which reinscribes phallic sex.

The problems inherent in Live from Golgotha thus serve to elucidate some of the dangers that pertain to critique in general. While satire need not provide a convincing alternative to what it exposes, both its targets and the bases of its ridicule must be recognizable to its audience. In-so-far as it is effective in communicating its message, it runs the risk of reinscribing its target or at least the broader values that allow effective recognition that ridicule is taking place.

Works Cited

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.

Bredbeck, Gregory W. “Narcissus in the Wilde.” The Politics and Poetics of Camp. Ed. Moe Meyer. London: Routledge, 1994. 51–74.

Boswell, John. Christianity, Tolerance and Homosexuality. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980.

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Countryman, L. William. Dirt, Greed and Sex: Sexual Ethics in the New Testament. 1989. London: Xpress Reprints, 1996.

Foucault, Michel. Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. Sheridan Smith. London: Tavistok, 1972.

———. History of Sexuality Vol. I: An Introduction. 1976. Trans. Robert Hurley. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981.

———. “War in the Filigree of Peace.” Oxford Literary Review 4 (1979): 17–18.

Ingraham, Chrys. “The Heterosexual Imaginary.” Queer Theory/Sociology. Ed. Steven Seidman. London: Blackwell, 1996. 168–93.

Meyer, Moe. “Introduction: Reclaiming the Discourse of Camp.” The Politics and Poetics of Camp. Ed. Moe Meyer. New York: Routledge, 1994. 1–22.

Neilson, Heather. “Live from Golgotha: Gore Vidal’s Second ‘Fifth Gospel.’” Linq 22.2 (1995): 79–91.

Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses. London: Viking, 1988.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading.” Novel Gazing. Ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Durham: Duke UP, 1997. 1–37.

Segal, Alan F. Rebecca’s Children: Judaism and Christianity in the Roman World. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1986.

Seidel, Michael. Satiric Inheritance—Rabelais to Sterne. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1979.

Seidman, Steven. “Introduction.” Queer Theory/Sociology. Ed. Steven Seidman. London: Blackwell, 1996. 1–29.

Stimpson, Catherine. “My O My O Myra.” Gore Vidal: Writer Against the Grain. Ed. Jay Parini. New York: Columbia UP, 1992. 183–98.

Summers, Claude J. “The City and the Pillar as Gay Fiction.” Gore Vidal: Writer Against the Grain. Ed. Jay Parini. New York: Columbia UP, 1992. 56–57.

Tatum, James. “The Romanitas of Gore Vidal.” Gore Vidal: Writer Against the Grain. Ed. Jay Parini. New York: Columbia UP, 1992. 199–220.

Vidal, Gore. Burr. New York: Random, 1973.

———. The City and the Pillar. London: John Lehmann, 1949.

———. Duluth. London: Heinemann, 1983.

———. 1876. London: Heinemann, 1976.

———. Julian. London: Heinemann, 1983.

———. Live From Golgotha. New York: Random, 1992.

———. Messiah. New York: Dutton, 1948.

———. Myra Breckinridge. London: Panther, 1968.

———. Myron: A Novel. New York: Random, 1974.

———. “Notes on Pornography.” Reflections Upon a Sinking Ship. Boston: Little, 1969. 85–99.

———. “Sexuality.” Views from a Window: Conversations with Gore Vidal. Ed. Robert J. Stanton and Gore Vidal. Secaucus, NJ: Lyle Stuart, 1980. 217–46.

———. Washington, D.C. Boston: Little, 1967.