"A Left Conservative"

That was Norman Mailer's self-description. Hitch pens a lovely tribute. I have no strong feelings either way and have barely read anything Mailer wrote, so it behooves me to say very little. But it says something about a man so obsessed by faggotry and sodomy that he chose to live much of the time in Provincetown, Massachusetts. As well as all the usual tedious, bossy lefties in that little town, there are still a few free spirits, and Mailer was one of them:

Probably more than anything, Mailer was a libertarian and a foe of any system or mindset that involved the censorious (feminism) or the overweening and the grandiose (imperialism/communism).

Amen to all of the above. And on those few occasions we met - we once had a long, animated discussion about the joys and pains of sex with condoms - he was never boring.