As a young, handsome, charismatic politically connected best-selling novelist, Gore Vidal was infamous for cruising the New York City gay bathhouses for nightly one-night-stand encounters. That is until he met Howard Austin there and took him home for what turned out to be a fifty-three-year, sometimes volatile, live-in arrangement. “Need to Be Needed” is inspired by this story, exploring the underpinnings of such a relationship in the guise of political novelist Cole Temple and Mike, the young man he took home from the New York baths and kept and dominated—a young man who gave up all his own dreams to serve his charismatic, self-absorbed, demanding, and assuming partner.
It was uncanny. Every time I looked out into the audience, he was looking at me. This despite having two young men hanging off him. And I knew that look. He wanted me. With all the young men at the Chelsea Bathhouse who were available to him, he wanted me.
Cole Temple was a legend at the bathhouse. He was even a bigger legend than just in the New York bathhouse scene. He was one of the foremost political novelists of our age. A lion of a man, the body of a Zeus into his forties and movie-star good looks, he famously was perhaps the most openly narcissistic and egotistical public figure in America in the current era. He was bigger than life, flamboyantly homosexual in an Oscar Wilde way before that became any sort of fashion and able to bring it off while still being acceptable in the halls of power and entertainment. His was the only opinion that mattered when he was holding court at a gathering. He sucked all of the air out of the room and still everyone there willingly laid down and opened their legs to him—emotionally, certainly, but also physically when he demanded it.
And he demanded servicing daily—often nearly hourly.
His father had been a major baseball player, his mother a raving beauty, whose father, a U.S. senator, had been the head of a political dynasty. Cole was related to a first lady on this side of the pond, and multiple royal houses on the other side. He was the last person leading families wanted to invite to gatherings, but he was the first one they wanted to hear give a acid-tongue riff on other members of the family. Therefore, he never was left off the guest list.
His homosexual affairs with novelists and actors and more than one royal when he was barely legal were legendary. And he had become a major novelist and political commentator and book reviewer in his own right.
He had shown up at the Chelsea Bathhouse from the day it had opened, and was reputed to have fucked at least one young man at the bathhouse and taken another one home each night. He was both insatiable and ever hard. A joke was making the rounds that a molding of his cock was going to be marketed as a dildo.
And now he was sitting at a table in the first row as, I, wearing only a gold lamé G-string, wrapped myself around a pole on the stage in front of the Phil Gauteau Band and sang my little heart out.
