Myra Breckinridge by Gore Vidal

from Romanoff's, a really formidable man, capable of quite astonishing endurance and restraint); then she promptly fell asleep with her head in the lap of Clem, whom she had been attending to in an absentminded way. To his great alarm, she could not be awakened. Fortunately, we were able to pry her mouth open and salvage the tiny treasure before serious damage was done. Ten minutes later our Gloria was wide awake and ready for fun. This time Clem provided it. Having strapped on a formidable dildo because, as he said, "You got to have head," he was able to give her maximum pleasure with a minimum of exertion on his part. My own participation was limited. I watched, and only occasionally helped out: a tickle here, a pull there, a lick, a bite, no more, except for one sudden rude intrusion from the rear which I did not see coming. It was one of the Four Skins, a hillbilly type who explained to me, as he was relieving himself, that he had first committed this particular act at the age of twelve with a sheep and so, to this day, he not only preferred back to front but sheep to goats, or did he say girls? Like the rest of the Four Skins his conversation is as difficult to understand as the lyrics they sing. Had there been a pair of shears at hand, I would have made a steer of him on the spot but since there were not I did not, suffering in silence and even, to be honest, deriving a certain perverse, masochistic, Myronesque enjoyment from the unlikely situation of Myra Breckinridge, victorious Amazon, laid low. Then, having discharged himself, the Skin abandoned me and proceeded on his bully way. I shall of course take my revenge upon him some day, somehow... even if I must wait twenty years! Myra Breckinridge is implacable and pitiless. These graphic notes are really for your benefit, dear Randolph. Examples of the way that the goyim you essentially despise behave (of course Clem is Jewish but he has been entirely absorbed by California, that great sponge into which all things are drawn and promptly homogenized, including Judaism). Yet even you, with your prejudices, could not help but be impressed at the ease with which these young people let themselves go, without any apparent fear of commitment or of compromise. The males do not worry about acting out what the society believes to be the man's role (brutal, destructive, vagina-centered); they play with one another's bodies in a sportive way, and seem to have no secret dreams they dare not act out. All is in the open, or as one of them said to me as he rested on the floor between engagements, "After a scene like this I don't need it again for a week. I've had it, and there's nothing left I want, and I never feel so good like I do after a real party." So the Dionysian is still a necessity in our lives. Certainly its absence has made the world neurotic and mad. I am positive that access to this sort of pleasure in my adolescence would have changed me entirely. Fortunately, as it turned out, I was frustrated. If I had not been, Myra Breckinridge could never have existed, and the subsequent loss to the world of Myra, the self-creation, is something we, none of us, can afford at this time. As I write these words, I suddenly think of Myron making love to Gloria Gordon! Why? How strange--just the thought of such a thing makes my eyes fill suddenly with tears. Poor Myron. Yet, all in all, he is better dead. One must not underestimate the influence of these young people on our society. It is true that the swingers, as they are called, make up only a small minority of our society; yet they hold a great attraction for the young and bored who are the majority and who keep their sanity (those that do) by having a double sense of themselves. On the one hand, they must appear to accept without question our culture's myth that the male must be dominant, aggressive, woman-oriented. On the other hand, they are perfectly aware that few men are anything but slaves to an economic and social system that