In Mexico City Waddell placed sixth among the 33 competitors and broke five of his own personal bests.Īfter his release from the army, Wadell completed his medical residencies and at Conducted research on viruses at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. Instead of being court-martialed, to his surprise he was sent to train for the decathlon in the 1968 Olympics. But he protested when he learned he would be shipped to Viet Nam.
When he was drafted in 1966, Waddell was assigned to be a medicine officer and paratrooper. (The same year he participate in the Selma March.) By 1965 he was interning at Beth El Hospital, Brooklyn. After the death of a close friend, he switch to focus on Pre-Med. Tom Wadell attended college on a Track scholarship, originally majoring in Physical Education. Soon, perhaps, we can drop the labels, when we all realize that sexuality is not black and white, but a marvelous nuance.“ Dr. Sometimes I think I’m experiencing twice as much living as others who have not liberated themselves. “About my homosexuality - I feel privileged.
They were eventually buried together in a joint grave in Washington DC. Furthermore, Vidal said the secret to their long relationship was they did not have sex with each other.Īusten managed the their financial affairs, travel arrangements and housing needs. He described their Union as “two men who decided to spend their lives together”. Vidal’s life long relationship was with Howard Austen who he met in 1950. Lang’s muscular butt was also cherished by Leonard Bernstein and Arthur Levante. One verifiable lover was Harold Lang, a dancer-actor who starred on Broadway in “Kiss Me Kate” and “Pal Joey”. Vidal dedicated the novel “The City and the Pillar” to Trimble.Īmong his sexual conquests Vidal claimed to have slept with Fred Astaire when he first moved to Hollywood and also with a young Dennis Hopper. Vidal’s one true love was Jimmie Trimble, who he met in 1937 when they were students. “The difference between Italian boys and American boys, is Italian boys have dirty feet and clean assholes, while American boys have clean feet and dirty assholes.” Regarding men… he preferred masculine young men and paid them because the cash transaction limited messy emotional entanglements. For a time, all three shared a house together in Los Angeles. He was also engaged to actress Joanne Woodward before she married Paul Newman. On the straight side of the fence, Vidal had an affair with French author Anaïs Nin. Vidal set a goal to make his life as “promiscuous as I could make it.” He wrote in his diary that by age twenty-five, he had had more than a thousand sexual encounters. It was made into the 1970 film starring Raquel Welch and Mae West. She tries to take down the macho patriarchy of Hollywood. The book made Vidal an early champion for sexual liberation.Ī later satirical novel “Myra Breckenridge” (1968) described the exploits of Myron who undergoes sexual reassignment, and becomes Myra. At the time, some critics were so offended by the subject, they refused to read the book, let alone review it. In “The City and the Pillar” (1948), one of Vidal’s earliest novels, he wrote about a young man coming to accept he was homosexual. Vidal famously had feuds with Truman Capote and Norman Mailer as well. Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi, or I’ll sock you in the goddamn face, and you’ll stay plastered.”īuckley later regretted using “queer” but still disliked that Vidal was an “evangelist for bisexuality”.īuckley was not his only literary opponent. Vidal’s lifelong opponent William F Buckley once said to him on National TV: He was also a self described bisexual or pansexual. Gore Vidal was an writer, a political pundit and one of the most polarizing figures of the 20th Century.