Love Quote by Gore Vidal

Vidal is smuggling a manifesto into the language of confession: come out, yes, but do it with the cool authority of someone refusing to beg for permission. “Declare ourselves, become known” isn’t just personal bravery; it’s a political tactic. Visibility turns private rumor into public fact, and public fact into something harder to legislate away. He frames desire as “subterranean,” not to romanticize secrecy, but to describe a social ecosystem forced underground by polite society. The kicker is that this hidden network “connects kings and farm boys, artists and clerks” - a deliberately class-crossing image that punctures the comforting fantasy that sexuality sits neatly inside respectable categories. If it runs under everything, it can’t be quarantined as a vice of some marginal “type.”

The sly move is how he shifts the argument away from morality and toward recognition. By insisting “the important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself,” Vidal rejects the era’s obsession with the “right” target - the gendered, policed object - and relocates value in the felt experience. That reframing dodges the trap of pleading for tolerance on straight society’s terms (“We love like you do”). Instead, he universalizes the mechanism while keeping the disruptive implication: if emotion is the point, then the gatekeepers’ categories are administrative, not natural.

Context matters. Vidal wrote in a 20th-century America where being “known” could cost you work, safety, family, citizenship in the cultural sense. The quote carries his trademark patrician provocation: treat shame as a bureaucratic error, then step into the light and force the world to update its files.