Actually, there is no such thing as a homosexual person, any more than there is such a thing as a heterosexual person. The words are adjectives describing sexual acts, not people. The sexual acts are entirely normal; if they were not, no one would perform them.
Interpretation
Gore Vidal challenges the labels of sexual orientation, suggesting they are merely descriptors of behavior rather than defining characteristics of individuals.
Gore Vidal's quote emphasizes that sexual orientation labels like 'homosexual' or 'heterosexual' are insufficient to fully define a person. Instead, he argues that these terms refer to specific sexual acts, and that engaging in such acts is a normal aspect of human behavior that shouldn't carry stigma. By framing sexuality in this way, he encourages a more nuanced understanding of identity as complex and multifaceted, resisting simplistic categorization.
In practice
In a discussion about sexual diversity at a community event.
We must declare ourselves, become known; allow the world to discover this subterranean life of ours which connects kings and farm boys, artists and clerks. Let them see that the important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.
American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither.
Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.
The important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.
For the average American, freedom of speech is simply the freedom to repeat what everyone else is saying and no more.
Ayn Rand's 'philosophy' is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society.... To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.
A great safeguard is the entire faith, the true faith, in which neither anything whatever can be added by anyone nor anything taken away; for, unless faith be one, it is not the faith.
The goal and target of our life is He, the Christ who awaits us -- each one singly and altogether -- to lead us across the boundaries of time to the eternal embrace of the God who loves us.
Show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and 8 times out of 9 I'll show you a man with detestable spiritual qualities.
The cause of freedom is identified with the destinies of humanity, and in whatever part of the world it gains ground by and by, it will be a common gain to all those who desire it.
We must be free for the truth; and conversely, to be able to be open toward the truth may be our deepest freedom as human creatures.
If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.
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