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Vidal became a supportive correspondent of Timothy McVeigh, who blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 killing 168 people. The huge loss of life, indeed McVeigh’s act of mass murder, goes unmentioned by Vidal. “He was a true patriot, a Constitution man,” Vidal claims. “And I was torn, my grandfather [the Democrat Senator Thomas Gore] had bought Oklahoma into the Union.” McVeigh claimed he had done it as a protest against tyrannical government. The writer Edmund White took the correspondence as the basis for a play, Terre Haute (the jail McVeigh was incarcerated in before he was executed in 2001), imagining an encounter between the bomber and Vidal charged with desire.
“He’s a filthy, low writer,” Vidal says of White. “He likes to attack his betters, which means he has a big field to go after.” Had he wanted to meet McVeigh? “I am not in the business of meeting people,” Vidal says. “That play implies I am madly in love with McVeigh. I looked at his [White’s] writing and all he writes about is being a fag and how it’s the greatest thing on Earth. He thinks I’m another queen and I’m not. I’m more interested in the Constitution and McVeigh than the loving tryst he saw. It was vulgar fag-ism.”
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[Edmund White responds]
<http://www.salon.com/books/int/2009/10/15/edmund_white_interview/index.html
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I'm assuming you read the Gore Vidal interview in the Times of London. He says a number of very nasty things about you -- but he also makes accusations that you "gayed-up" his relationship with Tim McVeigh in your play "Terre Haute."
He signed off on it. Now, late in the day, he's decided he doesn't like it, or maybe he forgot -- he drinks a lot. The tension for the [Gore-inspired] character is that he doesn't actually approve of what McVeigh did, but he's attracted to McVeigh as a man and as a personality -- whereas Gore actually approves of what McVeigh did and thinks he's a great freedom fighter.
That's complete lunacy. Gore wanted me to rewrite it to show a lot more sympathy toward McVeigh, but I thought that would lose about 99 percent of the audience. I don't approve of killing hundreds of people in the name of some abstract ideal. I think Gore is a complete lunatic, and it doesn't bother me what he says about me. He's an awful, nasty man. Now he can't write. He's wheelchair-bound, and he's in pain. He lost his lover of many years. The last time I talked to him I said, "Come to dinner, and I'll have some cute boys for you to meet." "Oh, I don't want to meet any of them! " You know, he's just an old grouch.
He's been nice to me over the years, but he's always like this seething volcano and you're always wondering when he's going to go off.
I don't know what he's famous for anywhere, really, because I think those historical novels are complete works of taxidermy. Nobody can read those. "Myra Breckinridge" was funny but light. The essays are what everybody defends -- but a friend of mine who did a volume of the best essays of the 20th century said they're all so topical that they've all aged terribly. I don't know where his work is. You have to have one or two books that are actually good if you're going to have a lasting career, and I don't think he does.