‘In Bed With Gore Vidal’
– the Amazon #1 best seller* and 2014 Lambda Literary Award nominee.
The book has been featured in press worldwide, including:
The New York Times
The Wall Street Journal
The New Yorker
The New York Daily News
The Guardian
Daily Mail
Daily Telegraph
The Times of London (paywall)
and online media such as:
The Huffington Post
Gawker
The Daily Beast
Buzzfeed
For media enquiries, please contact Tim.
Highlights of recent media coverage
Out magazine runs a piece by Tim on why Vidal refused to identify as gay
“Homoerotic” to Vidal meant “lust for one’s own sex, which I certainly did a lot of in my youth. ‘Homosexual’ implies really an organization of one’s life around it, and I never did that and always kept my options open.”
Out magazine, January 2014
Read the full article here
The New Yorker features the book in its “literary feuds of the year” round-up
Tim Teeman reported…that several of Vidal’s relatives are now challenging that will, saying that Vidal was not mentally sound when he wrote it, and that he had promised parts of his fortune—which is estimated at thirty-seven million dollars—to them.
New Yorker website, December 9 2013
Read the full article here
Ben Mirza interviews Tim for The Huffington Post UK
Much has been written about Gore Vidal, the man with a mind greater than Voltaire and Noel Coward combined, the author, the essayist, the curmudgeonly old gentleman who could easily rip you a new one if you dared criticise him. But as for his private life, well he gave interviewers glimpses into that, but never revealed too much.
The private life of Gore Vidal is what fascinated journalist and author Tim Teeman. In his illuminating new book In Bed with Gore Vidal: Hustlers, Hollywood and the Private World of an American Master, Tim reveals the sexual rollercoaster that was Vidal’s life, and how this rollercoaster shaped his views on sex and sexuality in general.
The Huffington Post UK
November 26, 2013
Read the full article here
Tim talks to The Leonard Lopate Show on WNYC public radio
WYNC New York City Public Radio
November 26, 2013
Tim talks to Take Two on KPCC Public Radio
89.3 KPCC Southern California Public Radio
November 20, 2013
Kenneth M. Walsh interviews Tim for The Wall Street Journal
“I think a private life can inform someone’s work. But I don’t agree with drawing a blanket equivalence between one and the other — it denies the writer the freedom to imagine. Vidal was so well looked after by Austen it gave him the freedom to write and work widely. My book looks at the parts of Vidal’s sexuality and private life [that] inform his work and public identity — so those texts and moments when Vidal’s sexuality or thoughts and writings about sexuality enter the public realm.”
The Wall Street Journal, ‘Speakeasy’ column
November 19, 2013
Read the full article here
Tim writes about Howard Austen for The Huffington Post
“[Gore] Vidal first encountered Austen at one of New York’s gayest locations of its time. Vidal, then 25, met Austen, then 21, on Labor Day 1950 at the Everard Baths, a well-known sex venue. Of meeting at the baths, Austen told Vidal’s biographer, Fred Kaplan, “I saw Gore … and he was really something. Good-looking. Somehow our eyes struck. … Then we started talking and ended up in bed. And it was just a total disaster.” However, “[t]here was an enormous attraction, but it wasn’t physical. … It was a kind of relief. I felt like I had met a soul mate.”
The Huffington Post
November 11, 2013
Read the full article here
Tim writes about Vidal for The New York Times
“On the ceiling of [Vidal’s] Hollywood Hills home were paintings by Paolo de Matteis, an 18th-century Baroque artist, which Mr. Vidal had hung in La Rondinaia, his home in Ravello, Italy, which he sold in 2005. Mr. Vidal, who died in July 2012 at 86 in a bed set up in the living room, with its view of tall trees that reminded him of Italy, once fondly described a de Matteis figure, a barely clothed maiden with arms wantonly outstretched, as one of his famous houseguests and friends: “Princess Margaret asking for a gin and tonic.”
The New York Times
November 8, 2013
Read the full article here
Tim writes about Vidal for Buzzfeed
“For Vidal, the great lover of history, modern culture’s obsession of categories was just that: annoying, bogus, not him. Though he didn’t feel entirely easy with his sexuality and a public declaration of the same, his very individual attitudes toward sex, desire, and even love also reflected Vidal’s innate contrarianism, the turbulent, fascinatingly complicated personality of their subject. No slave to identity politics or the crowd-pleasing sound bite, Gore Vidal was, and will remain, stubbornly, even heroically, impossible to classify — in and out of bed.”
Buzzfeed
November 6, 2013
Read the full article here
Tim talks to The Michelangelo Signorile Show on Sirius Radio
Sirius XMProgress 127
November 5, 2013
Interview with Tim on Four Two Nine
“Author and journalist Tim Teeman met Vidal in the twilight of Vidal’s life in 2009. The sometimes tense interview and the aging Vidal’s beguiling allusions to his past sexual escapades eventually yielded a book, ‘In Bed with Gore Vidal,’ in which Teeman tries to crack the eternally tough nut of Vidal’s sexual paradoxes.”
Four Two Nine magazine
November 4, 2013
Read the full interview here
William J. Mann interviews Tim
“Teeman has not only satisfactorily explored and considered Vidal’s sexuality but made an excellent case for why such consideration should matter to historians, and indeed to anyone trying to understand the complicated process that goes into self-identity.”
The Huffington Post
October 28, 2013
Read the full interview here
Doug Ireland reviews the book
“‘In Bed With Gore Vidal‘ is a great read. Besides, where else can one get such relevant, titillating gossip for only 20 bucks? Do yourself a favor and treat yourself to this absorbing, cogent exploration of a larger-than-life man of the arts and politics who, if he hadn’t been queer, might well have been what he always wanted to be — president of the United States.”
Gay City News
October 16, 2013
Read the full review here
Tim talks to Irish national radio
Newstalk 106-108
August 8, 2013
Tim writes about Vidal’s sex life and sexuality
“Vidal loved sex, and gossiping about it: he estimated he had had sex with a thousand men before he was 25. He told his nephew Burr Steers he had successfully pursued and had sex with Fred Astaire when he first moved to Hollywood. Steers says, “He also told me Dennis Hopper had a lovely tuft of hair above his ass. He never told me how he knew that.” Another close friend of Vidal’s revealed Vidal had asked, when hearing the friend was staying at the legendarily louche Chateau Marmont, “How is the Chateau?”, before adding: “Brad Davis [star of Midnight Express and Querelle] was a beautiful boy and I fucked him on the bathroom floor of the Chateau Marmont.” Davis, who was HIV-positive, died of a drug overdose in 1991.”
The Daily Beast
July 31, 2013
Read the full article
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* Gay and Lesbian Biographies, 14 November 2013