In an interview last week in Vlife, Variety’s online magazine, our favorite author-provocateur Gore Vidal had a conversation with the director of Kinsey and Gods and Monsters, Bill Condon. As the subject was Kinsey and as Condon has specialized in homo-positive films, the talk was mostly about gay sex in Far Right America. Some choice Vidal excerpts:

KINSEY : "The atom bomb made absolutely no difference on foreign affairs, but Kinsey changed how the whole world looked at sex. [Kinsey, had taken Vidal's sex history as part of his ground-breaking survey of the American male and had Vidal introduce him to other artists.] Kinsey wanted to do a book on the homo/hetero balance in the arts. He was a little suspicious because so many people in the arts seem to sway both ways. He was always trying to interview actors and musicians. He got to [West Side Story composer] Leonard Bernstein and afterwards you just couldn’t keep Lenny away. I think Lenny became the Scheherazade of the Kinsey report."

‘GAY’ VS. ‘STRAIGHT’: "There’s no such thing as a gay person or a straight person … There are no identifying signs, no simple classifications. Human beings are human beings, there are no two alike … [These labels] are not nouns, they’re adjectives — they describe actions."

WHY KINSEY’S PROPOSITION THAT EVERYONE IS BISEXUAL ENRAGES CULTURAL CONSERVATIVES: "[Universal Bisexuality] means everybody’s here to participate in the infernal party, to act against nature, to sin. And that can’t be right since our little Lord Jesus was against it. But our little Lord Jesus wasn’t against it. He said nothing about homosexuality. It was St. Paul. It was Leviticus. That rule book from the Babylonian days that came up with a list of proper activities, condemning homosexuality and — brace yourselves out there — shellfish. Not to mention rayon; you were hell-bound if you went in for rayon. How they sold a Bronze Age religion in the 21st century — well, that is the trick of the week."

THE 2005 ELECTION OF GEORGE W.: "We have a totally ignorant people who are drenched in the Blood of the Lamb. We’re stuck with this stone-age religion that has many, many superstitions about sex and everything else. And there is, by and large, no proper educational system for the lower classes. So how on earth are these people ever to know anything? That’s why I call it the United States of Amnesia. Information does float about, the press does eventually write about everything. Even if people read the press at its most awful, they would’ve learned a little something. But they watch Fox News and they watch the football game and they’re all just wandering around in a kind of daze with all this dumb stuff in their heads. The last election is proof of this."

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