Who's that Queer?
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Gore Vidal is an American novelist, screen writer, playwright, and politician. Early in his career he wrote the ground-breaking The City and the Pillar (1948) that outraged mainstream critics as one of the first major American novels to feature unambiguous homosexuality.
In 1956, Vidal was hired as a contract screenwriter for MGM, and collaborated with Christopher Fry, reworking the screenplay. Vidal later claimed that in order to explain the animosity between Ben-Hur and Messala, he had inserted a gay subtext suggesting that the two had had a prior relationship, but that actor Charlton Heston was oblivious.
As a political activist, in 1960, Gore Vidal was an unsuccessful Democratic candidate for Congress (running as Eugene Gore), losing an election in New York's 29th congressional district, a traditionally Republican district, by a margin of 57% to 43%. He received the most votes any Democrat in 50 years in that particular district.
