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.
It is a sad fate for a man to die too well known to everybody else, and still unknown to himself.
Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men.
The most fateful change that unfolded during the past three decades was not an increase in greed. It was the expansion of markets, and of market values, into spheres of life where they don’t belong.
Let no Christian therefore, whether philosopher or theologian, embrace eagerly and lightly whatever novelty happens to be thought up from day to day, but rather let him weigh it with painstaking care and a balanced judgment, lest he lose or corrupt the truth he already has, with grave danger and damage to his faith.
No man understands the Scriptures, unless he be acquainted with the Cross.
The accretion of dangerous power does not come in a day. It does come, however slowly, from the generative force of unchecked disregard of the restrictions that fence in even the most disinterested assertion of authority.
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