Novelist, essayist and playwright Gore Vidal has died in his home in the Hollywood Hills, of complications from pneumonia, aged 86. The celebrated New York born writer penned 25 novels and numerous essays. He “outraged mainstream critics as one of the first major American writers to describe and embrace unambiguous homosexuality,” USA Today reports. His third book The City and the Pillar (1948), the first American novel to deal frankly and positively with homosexual love. “He was viciously criticized for it, but he attracted the notoriety he would rail against and savour for the rest of his life,” the newspaper says. Vidal resisted being called gay, saying there was no such thing as a homosexual person, only homosexual acts. In his second memoir, Point to Point Navigation (2006), he wrote about the illness and death in 2003 of his partner of five decades, Howard Austen. They lived in self-imposed exile in Ravello, Italy, for more than 30 years. Of their relationship, Vidal wrote, "It's easy to sustain a relationship when sex plays no part and impossible, I have observed, when it does."
Credit: GayNZ.com Daily News staff
First published: Wednesday, 1st August 2012 - 6:04pm