Gore Vidal, Fred Astaire and the cock size question

Will Gore Vidal be remembered 50 years from now? I doubt it. Myra Breckinridge will, by 2063, be a forgotten contribution to a vast library of late 20th century transgressive fiction. Vidal's first gay novel The City & The Pillar - a bold work of juvenilia for 1948 - is already just italics. No one reads it. The historical novels? See the fate of Barbara Cartland's oeuvre. The scintillating essays? See last season's collections with front row Anna in her shades: instant period pieces. In other words, Vidal surfed the earthly moments splendidly but left no timeless time-capsules. 

However, Vidal fans can cling to one hope for his immortality - he could survive in time's freezer as a case study. He fucked thousands, mainly other men. Rampant cockery and cuntery have their own heroes - or case studies. I won't name them; google 'em. Now, this November, a new book is released which examines the extent of Vidal's cockery. Penned by someone called Tim Teeman, it's titled In Bed With Gore Vidal: Hustlers, Hollywood and the Private World of an American Master and promises to be 'explosive'. That's a publishing word for 'sex life not shared by publisher'. Readers may say, as they flick over the kindle pages on the bus, 'How did he find the time?' That's what 'explosive' amounts to these days.

More importantly, did Gore Vidal possess a massive cock? The book will answer this question. But why wait for publication day? Here's the answer Tim offers prematurely:

'One of Vidal’s oldest friends was Scotty Bowers who had sex with, and procured sex for, celebrities including Cary Grant, Spencer Tracy, and Vidal himself. “Gore had a medium-sized cock, seven inches, he looked circumcised but wasn’t,” Bowers recalls. The few times Bowers had sex with Vidal was “pleasant, not mad love.” Vidal was always “on the ball, not bashful or shy, rather aggressive and pushy,” and was “more or less into a quick trick. He did everything sexually: you sucked his cock, he would suck yours, but he preferred to fuck. He was young and hot and sex was rather quick.”' (From the Daily Beast)

I had no idea Gore had sex with Fred Astaire.

There.

Young Hitler: No beekeeper's arse this time, just a man of God

I see the fabulous Naim Attallah and his Quartet Books is releasing a "non-fiction novel" in April called Young Hitler. It was the boastful Truman Capote who first brought this category - the non-fiction novel - to my attention, with his bestseller In Cold Blood and then the unfinished, promising Answered Prayers. The author in effect novelises documented or researched fact - actually, I'd have preferred the title Young Hitler - A Novelisation. Sounds less poncy. But anyway ....

The author of Young Hitler, Claus Hant, is being sold as the first non-fiction novelist to focus on Adolf's early years. This maybe true, though let us not forget the late Norman Mailer's attempt to novelise Hitler's childhood in the unfortunate The Castle in the Forest, which I wrote about in 2007 - click here. Mailer's "Young Adi" is given an older brother with a penchant for inserting "his happy blood-filled organ into the yearning lips" of an old male beekeeper's arse whose buttocks "feel like the portals to a bounteously endowed temple." I questioned the temple imagery, wondering whether "sweatshop" might not be a happier substitute in the sodomitic circs. But anyway ...

I don't think Hant will be reliving this revenge fantasy. His fantasy is that Hitler was a man of God and not the atheist most historians accept he was. Hant says, "Hitler did not just believe in God, he believed himself to be someone through whom God was revealing his existence." That would depend on your meaning of God. To Hitler, God, Providence and nature/science were interchangeable terms to suit his purposes of self-glorification, not the same thing as spiritual self-deification. Turn to Hitler's Table Talk 1941-1944 - transcripts of Hitler's unguarded chit-chat - and you find him saying: "A movement like ours must ... stick to the spirit of exact science."

He adds: "It would be appalling for me ... if I were to end up in the skin of a Buddha."

There is a line to be drawn between a despot's wish to make a cult of himself and a faith in a metaphysical system of ideas. I shall be interested to see where Hant goes with this in his non-fiction novel. I wonder whether he is yet another atheist propagandist with a fashionable loathing for religious faith. I could Google and find out, but I won't. I'll leave that one in the air for now.

The site for the book is fascinating and worth perusing - there are book extracts. I had no idea that Hitler's family home in Braunau, in Austria, is on the market (for £2m) and that the local council are trying to buy it with EU funding to fend off neo-Nazi interest. At another Hitler family home, Hant comes across a teenage girl lolling about in her bedroom, once young Hitler's, walls adorned with popstar posters. Asked what she thinks of the room's demonic past occupant, she replies: "It's just so super cool."

Fucking kids.

Oh, here's the super cool video for the novel.

Norman Mailer: 'I think masturbation is bad ...

"I wouldn't say all people who masturbate are evil, probably I would even say that some of the best people in the world masturbate. But I am saying it is a miserable activity ... Masturbation is bombing. It's bombing oneself."
From An Impolite Interview with Paul Krassner, collected in Pieces and Pontifications.
RIP