Palimpsest

Gore Vidal

Random House, 1995, ISBN 0-679-44038-0, US$27.50

pp 101-102

The Astor Bar in Times Square was easily the city's most exciting meeting place for soldiers, sailors, and marines on the prowl for one another; few civilians, and no woman, ever dared intrude on these male mysteries. Even the military police and the shore patrol kept their distance. After all, we had - all of us - won the great imperial war, and thanks to us, the whole world was briefly American. . . .

I got to know [Alfred C.] Kinsey in 1948 - his book came out a month after The City and the Pillar; and the shocked New York Times would not advertise either. For a time, Dr. Kinsey used the mezzanine of the Astor as a sort of office, where he would interview "human males" about their sex lives. I think that the somewhat phlegmatic Dr. Kinsey was secretly delighted by this warrior display, and I like to think that it was by observing the easy trafficking at the Astor that he figured out what was obvious to most of us, though as yet undreamed of by American society at large: Perfectly "normal" young men, placed outside the usual round of family and work, will run riot with each other.