The word ‘patrician’ brings up an interesting thing about Vidal: he was as closely connected to the American patrician class (old money, big money, politically prominent and monied, etc.) as one can be without being a part of it.
For those who don’t know his genealogy:
His grandfather was Thomas Pryor Gore, the senator from Oklahoma, very conservative with public monies and briefly named in an Indian oil scandal that GV wrote quite a lot about later. Because Senator Gore was blind (the result of two different childhood accidents- one for each eye) his grandson walked him into senate hearings and served as his go-fer, thus exposing him to high level politics at an early age.
His father was Eugene Luther Vidal, a pilot and aviation enthusiast and military man who became superintendent of West Point for a while and then an aviation executive. Vidal Sr. wanted to make airplanes as much a part of the middle class family as automobiles were and to further this he developed a prototype for a personal plane that his son flew, on camera, when he was about 9 years old. (If you’re wondering whether the “private plane in every garage” idea ever took off, I won’t spoil it for you. 
) Vidal Sr. was a close friend and most, including Gore, speculated a lover of Amelia Earhart.
When his parents divorced his mother, Nina Gore, married Hugh D. Auchincloss, an extremely wealthy patrician D.C. insider with family connections to Aaron Burr, whose portrait hung in Auchincloss’s mansion and caused his stepson Gore to develop an early fascination for him. Nina and Hugh had two children, then divorced. (Gore detested his mother, made absolutely no secret of it before or after her death, and this seemed to be an opinion shared by a lot of people- coincidentally, both Vidal and his enemy Capote had alcoholic social climbing mothers named Nina.)
After Nina divorced Auchincloss- and here it gets a little complicated- Auchincloss married the mother of Jackie and Lee Bouvier. He was not, as often reported, the stepbrother of the future Mrs. Kennedy/Mrs. Onassis and Princess Radziwill- was no relation to them at all in fact- but they were stepsisters of Gore’s half siblings, and through his half-siblings (whom he later became completely estranged from) and other common friends from his Auchincloss years he knew them well and continued to when JFK entered the picture, and he often visited the White House. (He later had a major falling out with RFK.)
However, he was basically the odd man out- no family fortune, no real connections of his parents, but was outside looking in. Made for some great stories and even by his own admission Washington D.C. and other stories were largely roman a clefs.