Political Firebrands From Decades Past Still Burn Hot

Gore Vidal's third novel, in which two buff dudes do it under a "lovely dark sky," then tumble "back on the blanket" and do it again, came out in 1948. Vidal was only 23. The City and the Pillar was the English-speaking world's first mainstream book to conjure vivid man-to-man sex without damning anyone to hell. It is virtually impossible to grok now how new that was then.

Nearly 60 years and as many books later, Vidal was one of the first famous Americans to start calling the Bush administration a junta.

His knee is titanium. His skin sags. He ran for Congress in 1960 and the Senate in 1982, against Jerry Brown -- long before many now buying Vidal's new anti-war books were born. After burying his longtime companion in 2003, he left the villa near Naples where his house guests had included Greta Garbo, Rudolf Nureyev and Hillary Clinton. He moved into a Hollywood Hills house he had bought in 1977 but planned never to inhabit before "the Cedars-Sinai years" -- Cedars-Sinai is a nearby hospital. Call him hostile. Call him radical. Call him anti-social and controversial, as critics have. He couldn't care less.

"Controversial? I can't say that I have ever had much interest in what I've been called," Vidal tells me now. "What others think is their business, not mine. What I mostly do is examine contradictions in public discourse. This sometimes causes distress, but 'the unexamined life is not worth living,' as Plato says Socrates said. ... Now that we are post-Runnymede," he tells me, invoking the Greeks and the Romans and the Magna Carta, what frightens him most in America is "the loss of habeas corpus."

Call him gay and he will tell you it's a "nonexistent category." Call him old and you'll get no argument.

This is the year of new memoirs by old radicals. Vidal's elegiac "Point to Point Navigation" (Random House, 2006) is like a long electifying seance, conjuring a string of departed souls the author once knew in politics and the arts, from Fellini to Capote to JFK. Flores A. Forbes remembers busy days arming Black Panther Party firing squads in "Will You Die With Me?" (Atria, 2006). Progressive art critic Robert Hughes dishes on '60s icons in "Things I Didn't Know" (Knopf, 2006). Sixties rocker David Crosby's "Since Then" (Putnam, 2006) is subtitled "How I Survived Everything and Lived to Tell About It." He writes about his environmentalism, his civil rights and anti-war work. The first photo shows him with an upraised fist.

You know what they say about hindsight.

Growing up in the '60s or '70s, it was impossible to imagine anyone being cool and old. "Don't trust anyone over 30" wasn't a joke. The Who sang, "Hope I die before I get old." Only Keith Moon did, so does that make the other guys hypocrites?

We have reached an era in which firebrands wear Depends.

If these authors are tribal elders dispensing lore around campfires -- if these memoirs are the Iliads of shaky-handed, age-spotted bards -- then what do they say? How do the old gods and creation myths hold up?

A bit bent. Bruised. In some cases flayed. Gazing way back, these authors now write neither in the heat of youthful passion nor even at the middle-aged putative peak of their powers. They appear unwilling to candy-coat. Maintaining their principles, and aware that in this Information Age countless Sherlocks are fervently winnowing truths from lies, these authors cast the past in such a pure unfiltered light as to make us flinch. Because heroes in that light appear only human. Because some hopes and dreams never came true. Because we realize that history repeats itself, that ideas and ideals we prize as avant-garde, as our own inventions, really aren't.

Writhing under their own gaze, these authors wonder what was worth what. "I'm quite literally a case of arrested development," David Crosby confesses. "I don't think I grew much." Flores Forbes remembers how terrified he was to realize, at 20, that as "part of the Black Panther Party's best and brightest ... I would more than likely die as a Panther or go to jail for life or disappear as a fugitive never to be heard from again. ... One way or another, I was doomed." Wounded during a botched hit on a prosecution witness, Forbes -- whose comrade-in-arms and best friend died that night -- spent eight years in jail.