RIP: Gore Vidal. Remembering his gifts and shaping of American culture

When I came out, I read many of the collected essays of Gore Vidal and his fierce intellectual take-down of homophobic Republican leaders.  I loved his acerbic style and elegant story-telling.  For example, I will always remember this paragraph from an essay he wrote for The Nation. Vintage Vidal!

At one level, the Jews are perfectly correct. A racial or religious or tribal identity is a kind of fact. Although sexual preference is an even more powerful fact, it is not one that creates any particular social or cultural or religious bond between those so-minded. Although Jews would doubtless be Jews is there was no anti-Semitism, same-sexers would think little or nothing at all about their preference if society ignored it. So there is a difference between the two estates. But there is no difference in the degree of hatred felt by the Christian majority for Christ-killers and Sodomites. In the German concentration camps, Jews wore yellow stars while homosexuals wore pink triangles. I was present when Christopher Isherwood tried to make this point to a young Jewish movie producer. "After all," said Isherwood, "Hitler killed six hundred thousand homosexuals." The young man was not impressed. "But Hitler killed six million Jews," he said sternly. "What are you?" asked Isherwood. "In real estate?"

I also appreciate Gore's role as the cultural shaper, reveling how he infused a gay subtext, as a screenwriter, into the classic movie "Ben-Hur." Watch him talk about this with Vito Russo: