QUILLBLOG

Gore Vidal threatens to sue playwright

American author Gore Vidal is threatening to sue playwright Edmund White over a play that debuted last month in London, the National Post reports. The play, Terre Haute, is a fictional presentation of a relationship between Vidal and Timothy McVeigh, who killed 168 people when he bombed a government building in Oklahoma City in 1995.

Vidal did write about McVeigh and raised questions about his guilt and possible accomplices, which led to some written correspondence between the two before McVeigh was executed in 2001. “Yesterday, Vidal called him a ‘fall guy’ for a larger conspiracy,” according to the Post article, but Vidal never met McVeigh.

The play, however, is reported to speculate about a sexual attraction between the two. It first aired as a radio play in Britain in 2005 and had a short run in San Franciso, but a production in London’s West End is now a prominent venue.

“I’m gonna sue the guy,” Mr. Vidal, 81, said yesterday, calling Mr. White “slimy” and “sleazy.”

“He’s a writer who only writes about homosexuality. He has no other subjects, so he has to write about that, which has nothing to do with McVeigh or my interest in McVeigh,” Mr. Vidal said.

For his part, White says Vidal is being “silly” and that he has a fax from the author giving him approval before the radio production. Also in a recent essay for The Guardian, White wrote:

My play is about strictly imaginary visits that a Europeanised American, much like Gore Vidal, pays over a period of several days to a death-row prisoner, much like Timothy McVeigh. I changed their names because all the action and dialogue – and the encounter itself – are invented. Nor are their motives and political positions precisely like those of the originals.

Vidal said he will file his suit in London because British libel law is very strict.