Success Quote by Paul Getty

Getty’s line is a master class in patrician self-defense: clipped, almost bureaucratic, and designed to end a conversation by pretending it’s only about categories. The wording is blunt enough to sound like honesty, yet careful enough to dodge whatever the real charge was. By listing “homosexual,” “eunuch,” and “vows of chastity,” he triangulates around one insinuation: that his distance from women (or from sex, or from conventional family life) must indicate some hidden deficiency, secret identity, or moral pose. He refuses all three frames at once.

The intent is less confession than control. Getty isn’t offering intimacy; he’s policing interpretation. “Neither...nor...nor” works like a legal brief, converting gossip into a checklist he can strike through. It’s also a subtle flex of power: he gets to define the terms, and they’re terms that reduce desire to spectacle, medical oddity, or religious commitment. That’s not neutral language. It’s the vocabulary of a world where masculinity is assumed, heterosexuality is default, and anything else must be explained away.

The subtext is anxiety about reputation in an era when elite male privacy was tolerated only if it could be read as “normal.” A businessman’s authority, especially mid-century, was tied to a certain domestic legibility. Getty’s sentence protects the brand: I am not abstaining because I can’t, or because I’m different, or because I’m holier-than-thou. He’s insisting on capacity and choice, even as the very need to insist betrays how loud the rumors must have been.