SOURCE: “Live from Golgotha: Gore Vidal and the Problem of Satiric Reinscription,” in Mosaic, Vol. 33, No. 1, March, 2000, pp. 133-44.

In the following essay, Fletcher and Feros examine Vidal's satiric, postmodern critique of Christian theology, biblical veracity, and contemporary media culture in Live from Golgotha. According to the critics, Vidal's subversive comedy is undermined to some degree by his essentialist notion of bisexuality and his view of sex as primarily an expression of power and domination.

All attempts to critique may in fact reinstate or even strengthen their target, especially in the case of attacks on entrenched values or assumptions. This applies not only to traditional satire but also perhaps even to such contemporary modes as queer camp. According to Moe Meyer camp employs the “strategies and tactics of queer parody,” and functions to foreground “queer social visibility” (5). As he sees it, the nature of queer itself is “poststructural...