Abstract

Dorothy Allison, Crossover Blues

The article presents an interview with Gore Vidal, the first well-known American writer to talk freely about his same-sex orientation. In response to query about his first book "The City and the Pillar," Vidal said that it was the first book, at in the U.S., that made the point that perfectly normal boys fall in love and have sex with each other-a subject on which he was an expert, having spent three years in the Army, in the Pacific and aboard a ship. This was the great secret of the male lodge. In response to another query about any kind of a cultural community that comes out of the oppression, he said that there's ghettoization and people in a ghetto will camp around in the same way. It's like the Jews. The best humor in the U.S. for a long time was during the days when the Jews were despised and they made jokes about themselves.