While I have been watching the fever over “Heated Rivalry” dramatically rise throughout many channels of social media (though I have yet to see the series — soon!), I have just re-read Gore Vidal’s “The City and the Pillar.” Published (somewhat miraculously given its explicit content) in 1948, this novel laid out nearly 80 years ago the tension of same sex, frustrated lust and attraction. I won’t write love because Gore Vidal wouldn’t have described the powerful magnetic draw he writes about as such, but clearly “Heated Rivalry” ascends to a higher plateau of attraction, and actually, love.
In the preface of a 1995 re-release of the book, Vidal writes something that has hit me as part of our human condition and baked in intolerance for all that actually makes us human, meaning our flaws. He writes:
Much has been made—not least by the Saint himself—of how Augustine stole and ate some pears from a Milanese orchard. Presumably, he never again trafficked in, much less ate, stolen goods, and once this youthful crime (“a rum business,” snarled the unsympathetic American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.) was behind him, he was sainthood bound. The fact is that all of us have stolen pears; the mystery is why so few of us rate halos. I suspect that in certain notorious lives there is sometimes an abrupt moment of choice. Shall I marry or burn? Shut the door on a life longed for while opening another, deliberately, onto trouble and pain because…The “because” is the true story seldom told.
A very powerful opener. . .all of us have stolen pears; the mystery is why so few of us rate halos.
These are some random thoughts this New Year’s Eve. A happy start of 2026 to all of you. My advice during this time of convulsion and tension is to remember to laugh, to forgive, to push reset, and to love as much as you can.
All the best from someone who has stolen a pear or two from Milanese orchards and wants no halo,
Steve
