'City' revisited

'City' revisited
Kicking gay culture out of the closet

Cynthia Robins, Chronicle Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 1, 2001

Some people are born at the right time. Author Armistead Maupin is one of them. Twenty-five years ago, just as gay liberation was striding confidently across San Francisco, Maupin, a former Associated Press scribe, was hired by The Chronicle to write a daily, 800-word serial called "Tales of the City." Always skittering on the border between outrageousness and good taste, Maupin managed, by stealth, pure guts and elaborate bluff, to entertain and educate at the same time.

"There is a time in your life when you realize you've hit on something terrific," he says of his roman a clef. "In 1976, there was no gay beat at all,

in fact, the only reference to (San Francisco's first gay strip) Polkstrasse was in Herb Caen's column. . . . So I want to make it absolutely clear that I was acutely aware I was breaking new ground, that with this job, my life and my politics were one. I could express my liberation and exhilaration at the same time, and it was not an easy task."

At one point, a "mole" as he calls it, in The Chronicle People department informed him that a column was about to be pulled because management deemed it "unsuitable for people in the Sunset." It was right after the anti-gay initiative Anita Bryant led in Florida, says Maupin, "and I heard from a lot of gay people: This is a message to go back into the closet, so I had Michael say, 'When I came out of the closet, I nailed the door shut.' " Maupin called one of the paper's owners and threatened to quit. Two days later, the owner, laughs Maupin, "caved."

Dishy and deliciously topical, "Tales" was inspired, Maupin says, "by every crappy job I had, ever boring party, every one-night stand that went awry." It was all useful. Not to mention irony-enriched subversion. "I was constantly pushing the envelope," says Maupin, mentioning Gordon Pates, The Chronicle's managing editor then. "A lovely, avuncular man, he used to say to me: 'It's such a waste you're not dating girls. Homosexuality, transexuality, adultery --
the only thing you haven't got in here is cannibalism' -- and I immediately went back to my desk and concocted (a cannibal cult that practiced on the catwalk of Grace Cathedral)."

Ideas came to him from every source, especially from listening to the callers on Society Editor Pat Steger's answering machine ''auditioning for her column," he says. In one episode, for instance, his Pat Montandon character, Prue Giroux, and Paddy Starr (a.k.a. Pat Steger) are gossiping over lunch about a kleptomaniac socialite who left a house after a party, whereupon a Faberge egg fell out of her pantyhose. "That's when Denise Hale called to say that I had finally begun to strike terror in their hearts. . . . I mean, you can't make this s-- up. That can be the motto of San Francisco."