Terre Haute

Edmund White’s Terre Haute is set in a high-security federal prison on death row. A young man (based on Timothy McVeigh) is about to be executed for blowing up a public building in Oklahoma. An older man (based on Gore Vidal) is attracted to the young man and to some degree sympathizes with his quarrel against the government – though he is appalled by the form of protest and the shedding of innocent blood. These men are different in every way; one gay, the other a virginal heterosexual. Sexual tension and the conflict between political conviction and personal remorse result in an utterly unexpected form of intimacy between the two.