Gore Vidal - Personal Life

Personal Life

Vidal had affairs with both men and women. The novelist Anaïs Nin claimed an involvement with Vidal in her memoir The Diary of Anaïs Nin but Vidal denied it in his memoir Palimpsest. Vidal also discussed having dalliances with people such as actress Diana Lynn, and alluded to the possibility that he may have a daughter. He was briefly engaged to Joanne Woodward, before she married Paul Newman; after eloping, the couple shared a house with Vidal in Los Angeles for a short time. In 1950, he met his long-term partner Howard Austen. Vidal once reported that the secret to his lengthy relationship with Austen was that they did not have sex with each other: "It's easy to sustain a relationship when sex plays no part & impossible, I have observed, when it does."

According to literary critic Harold Bloom, Vidal believed his homosexuality had denied him the full recognition of the literary community. Bloom, meanwhile, claimed this had more to do with Vidal's association with the unfashionable genre of historical fiction.

Vidal was an atheist, and in 2009 was named honorary president of the American Humanist Association.

During the latter part of the twentieth century Vidal divided his time between Italy and California. In 2003, he sold his 5,000-square-foot (460 m²) Italian Villa, La Rondinaia (The Swallow's Nest) on the Amalfi Coast, and moved to Los Angeles. Austen died in November 2003 and, in February 2005, was buried in a plot for himself and Vidal at Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, D.C.

Vidal died at his home in Hollywood Hills, California, at about 6:45 p.m. PDT July 31, 2012, of complications from pneumonia. He was 86.