LGBTIQA+

Julian Halls’s novel The Museum is a recent addition to Australian gay and lesbian fiction. The text engages with an important issue relating to same sex-attracted men and women, but it is ultimately disadvantaged by a distinct sense of amateurishness.

The editors of Conversations with Gore Vidal – a recently published selection of interviews conducted with Vidal over the course of his long career – introduce the volume by quoting a comment made in the New Yorker in 1960: ‘Nothing’s easier nowadays than to get the feeling of being surrounded by Gore Vidal.’ They go on to remark that, today: ‘Gore Vidal is again seemingly everywhere.’ Although this is something of an exaggeration, it is true that Vidal and his diverse oeuvre appear to have received more serious attention in the past few years than previously. Now eighty years old, this unique and often controversial figure in American culture has lived long enough to see accepted into the mainstream several of his ideas once regarded as outrageous or ‘unpatriotic’. Indeed, as a Publisher’s Weekly reviewer, quoted by Altman, remarked in 2004: ‘Vidal may be in tune with the zeitgeist again …’

In the era of gay liberation, ‘coming out’ has for many taken on the character of a religious experience. Gays and lesbians in the US draw easily on a religious culture of personal salvation even while denying the sometimes oppressive institutions it has created. In Australia, we are not given to the same public display of emotional and spiritual commitment, but ‘coming out’ has nevertheless come to be regarded as a gay rite of passage.