As Truman approached his 12th birthday in 1936, Lillie Mae and Joe Capote pulled him out of the Trinity School and sent him to military school for a year — an effort to try to de-gay him.
“Oh, my God! That killed him! I mean, really!” Rudisill screams to me. “Everybody told her, ‘That’s the worse thing you can do for that child.’ But she went ahead and did it anyway.”
Rudisill tells me she believes Capote would not have been gay if he had been raised differently.
“I believe this as firmly as I am sitting in this chair! And I wrote an article about it (never had it published, but I really should have had it published): ‘Are You Raising a Homosexual?’ Now I am going to tell you, homosexuals are not born. They are raised! I believe that as surely as I am sitting here. If Truman Capote had followed in the footsteps of Bud [Sook’s brother] … he would not have been a homosexual. But he chose Sook. And she used to take him to the attic and put on these things and wear high heel shoes and all that.
“I mean I really believe that! I met so many of them through Truman. You go back and it’s always somebody in that family that has encouraged him. Not that I object to it. I don’t care if anybody is homosexual. But I do think as a rule they have a very unhappy life. That’s all I care about. I worried about Truman getting beat up, which he was beat up many times and all that. I was afraid somebody would kill him. It’s an unhappy life. I don’t care how you cut the cake!”
According to her, Capote told his aunt everything about his private life. Often, she didn’t want to hear it.
Rudisill breaks down just once during our interview. It’s when she recalls “the first time Truman ever had a sexual encounter with a priest.”
She was living in Greenwich Village, having followed Lillie Mae and Truman to New York.
“He was sitting on my doorstep when I came home from work, and he had blood all in his pants, and then he told me about this priest,” she said. “And nobody, I don’t think anybody in the world ever knew that but me.”