Classic William F. Buckley
An infamous exchange between two patrician bluebloods is now available online for your edification: on the right, pompous New England affected Anglo-Catholic William F. Buckley; on the left, homosexual Southern Bourbon with a hankering after a long-lost Republic that never was, Gore Vidal. The exchange is set during the bloody Democratic National Convention of 1968 and is presented online in several parts. Vidal's comments are mostly banal defenses of basic freedom of speech, while Buckley makes as many excuses as he can for the thuggish behavior of the police. But the great, penultimate moment of tension is of course when the grand old man of the American right tells Vidal: "Listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I'll sock you in your goddamn face." He also says that Vidal should "go back to his pornography."