The novel, which won the National Book Award in 1951, was published without any of these scenes included after the publisher insisted that Jones remove them.
Jones tried to fight the cuts, writing that:
"...the things we change in this book for propriety's sake will in five years, or 10 years, come in someone else's book anyway … and we will wonder why we thought we couldn't do it. Writing has to keep evolving into deeper honesty, like everything else, and you cannot stand on past precedent or theory, and still evolve … You know there is nothing salacious in this book as well as I do."
Kaylie Jones notes that her father had a very progressive attitude about gay issues:
"...[He] believed that homosexuality was as old as mankind itself, and that Achilles, the bravest and most venerated fighter ever described, was gay, and to take a younger lover under your wing was a common practice among the soldiers of the time. He also believed also that homosexuality was a natural condition of men in close quarters, and that it in no way affected a soldier's capabilities on the battlefield. What would have amazed him is that the discussion still continues to this day, cloaked in the same hypocrisy and silence as it was 60 years ago,"
Gore Vidal's The City and the Pillar had been published in 1947, of course, but with the New York Times famously refusing to review any of his subsequent books for years afterward, there was still clearly a bias against anything too gay being included in mainstream literature, even if the characters being written about were just 'gay for pay'.
Kaylie Jones did mention that if and when a new edition is published, the original gay scenes will be included, so we have that to look forward to. Maybe they'll be included in any future movie remake, as well!
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