Gore Vidal The BDS (Boycott/Divestment/Sanctions) Movement’s current, partly successful efforts in the UK, the U.S., and Canada to coopt LGBT activists to undermine tolerant Israel’s right to exist while casting a blind eye to the oppression of gays in the Arab and Muslim world does not come out of thin air. Gore Vidal, who died almost a year ago, laid the groundwork for it. First, to give Vidal his due as a controversialist. Though denying that “there is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person,” Vidal is likely to remembered as a trenchant critic of anti-gay prejudice despite his rejecting the term “gay.” Unfortunately, Vidal coupled his advocacy of gay rights with a hatred of Judaism and the Jewish state. Although unwilling fully to admit the anti-Semitic implications of his views, Vidal was more honest about what he believed—and whom he hated—than his eulogists who protested too much that Vidal was not an anti-Semite. There can be few things more painful than being autopsied while still alive. This was the fate of Vidal, whose relationship with Jews and Judaism was dissected over two decades before his death by Edward Alexander whom I update. Alexander applied the scalpels of irony and sarcasm, but—most devastatingly—he allowed Vidal to eviscerate himself. An equal opportunity hater, Vidal loathed English professors for mangling the language and immigrants for being Johnny-come-lately vulgarians. The “New York Times” he loathed as “homophobic” and unwilling to sell advertising space to Nasser’s Egypt. “Commentary” was “the ‘Pravda’ of our Israeli Fifth Column.” Fellow gay literary personality Truman Capote was contemptible in Vidal’s eyes, but worse were Bellow, Malamud, and Roth, Jewish American writers unable “to put themselves into gentile skins—much less foreskins.” Christians worshipped a “Jewish-Christian God” who, by persecuting gays, had “made a hell of Western man’s life on earth.” Jews—especially “rabbis” Moses, Freud, and Irving Howe—were responsible for “an unusually ugly religion.” Israel’s American supporters like Midge Decter and Norman Podhoretz—whom he also loathed for their views on homosexuality—should be forced to register with the Justice Department as agents of a foreign power. And America—”a nation that worships psychopaths”—the “essential bigotry of the white majority” of which we must “never underestimate.” Like historian Henry Adams, Vidal disdained Jewish immigrants. Yet unlike Adams—the scion of presidents—Vidal lampooned the founders and their successors in historical novels including, Lincoln, portraying the liberator-president as a power-hungry politician. Alexander doesn’t trace back Vidal’s ideological pedigree to the dark side of the Enlightenment. Like Voltaire—whose anti-religious malediction, “écrasez l’infâme,” Vidal embraced—he used an attack on Judaism as a pivot for fusillades against Christianity. Again like Voltaire, his hatred of Judaism spilled over into a hatred of Jews—and Israelis whom Vidal’s despised as interchangeable with Jews. Alexander lacked the benefit of Fred Kaplan’s mostly admiring, 1999 biography of Vidal. No man may be a hero to his valet—but Vidal, like all men, defined himself by his choice of villains as well as heroes. He loathed his mother and had minimal regard for his father, Eugene, a flying instructor at West Point who helped found three airlines and became FDR’s evangelist for civil aviation. Gore’s hero was his maternal grandfather, Oklahoma’s blind Senator Thomas P. Gore, who bragged of having personally sunk U.S. membership into the League of Nations, and twenty years later imbued Gore with his hatred of Roosevelt’s “Jew Deal” as well as his Isolationist recoil against taking on Hitler in World War II. The crabbed values Vidal learned at grandpa’s knee were reinforced in prep school and then carried over to his military service in the Aleutians where he celebrated the news of FDR’s death in April, 1945. Despite hating FDR, Vidal used his father’s friendship with Emilia Earhart, a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt’s, to win Eleanor’s support for his unsuccessful run for a Hyde Park Congressional seat in 1960. Vidal also exploited his mother’s second marriage to Hugh D. Auchincloss, stepfather of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. This gave him entrée to the Kennedy clan (he shared patriarch Joseph Kennedy, Sr.’s anti-Jewish prejudices)—and then the Kennedy White House, though Bobby Kennedy disliked him. The front-page “New York Times” obituary dismissed Vidal’s anti-Semitism as mere “anti-Zionism.” After all, his long-time companion was a Jew, Howard Austen. Vidal’s solution to the anti-Semitism that his life partner faced in the advertising industry was for Howard to change his last name from “Auster” to “Austen.” According to Vidal, if more Jews also changed names, chameleon-fashion, that would go far toward eliminating Jew hatred. Behind a self-propelled publicity machine, worthy of the Wizard of Oz, Vidal’s liberalism was feigned, but not his enduring anti-Semitism.