Need to be Needed

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.