Just watched the documentary "Best of Enemies on Netflix

[McCamy Taylor]

about Vidal and Buckley. The final bit of narration is wrong. Vidal will never ever be forgotten. When, at long last, he got Buckley to lose his cool and call him "queer", Vidal smiled. It was more than a victory over Buckley. It was a personal victory. And that is a timeless story, one we can never see or hear too often.

In a world where Vidal had it all---health, male gender, American birth, Caucasian (mostly), education, political family---he flaunted the one thing that made him Other, his sexuality. I am sure that during the Lavender Scare of his youth, Vidal was given a chance to sign on board the McCarthy witch hunt train---put his sexuality in the closet and become a career politician, propping up capitalist America in exchange for scraps from the table. He said Fuck Off. He spelled out his Fuck Off in great big capital letters in a novel that made him (in)famous. And he even made a lot of money doing it, which has to have really pissed off the Calvinists.

I don't really care who Buckley fancied. But to Vidal, Buckley must have represented what he would have become had he done what he was expected to do rather than choosing to become the nation's conscience instead.

[dhill926]

1. I'll never forget watching their debates live....

scintillating intellects at work. Of course, Vidal's was the better....

[Fla Dem]

2. You might find this review interesting.

Buckley vs. Vidal: The Real Story
What does ‘The Best of Enemies’ get wrong? Just about everything, but especially the battle between left and right.

By MICHAEL LIND August 24, 2015

I’m disappointed to report that “The Best of Enemies,” the new film about William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal, is the worst of documentaries. I should know—I was acquainted with both men, and neither the individuals nor their philosophies are accurately portrayed. Worst of all, the movie badly misrepresents the very issue it purports to illuminate: the titanic battle between liberalism and conservatism in the middle of the 20 th century.

From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, as a second-generation neoconservative Democrat, I was as close as anyone of my generation to Bill Buckley, outside of his staff at National Review. I worked with him on books and op-eds, spent weekends at his estate in Connecticut, sailed and vacationed with him. Later, after I became one of the best-known young defectors from the intellectual right, I became slightly acquainted with Gore Vidal, supposedly a representative of the intellectual left. I corresponded with Vidal and sent books to his home in Ravello, Italy, received a blurb from him for my book Up From Conservatism: Why the Right is Wrong for America, and once joined him at a dinner party in his honor when he visited Washington, D.C.

More....
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/buckley-vs-vidal-the-real-story-121673