Major Themes
One major theme is the portrayal of the homosexual man as masculine. Gore set out to break the mould of novels that up until The City and the Pillar depicted homosexuals as transvestites, lonely bookish boys, or feminine. Gore purposefully makes his protagonist a strong athlete to challenge superstitions, stereotypes, and prejudices about sex in the United States. To further this theme Vidal wrote the novel in plain, objective prose in order to convey and document reality.
Two additional themes identified by Dennis Bolin are the foolishness and destructiveness of wishing for something that can never be and to waste one's life dwelling on the past, the second of which is reinforced by the novel's epigraph from the Book of Genesis 19:26 "But his wife looked back from behind him and she became a pillar of salt."
Read more about this topic: The City And The Pillar
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