Sex and the city

Armistead Maupin's tales of single life in San Francisco in the 1970s and 80s gave gay fiction a sense of humour. After an interval of almost 20 years, he returns to the saga

by Hadley Freeman
The Guardian
6/9/2007

Tales of the City, the enormously popular series that Armistead Maupin began in 1974, is set at number 28 on a quiet, tree-dappled lane in San Francisco; Maupin himself lives at number 27 on a quiet, tree-dappled lane in San Francisco. After an interval of almost 20 years since the last Tales of the City book, Sure of You, Maupin's new novel, Michael Tolliver Lives, is published on June 18. Michael, the much-loved gay character who appears throughout the series, is now in his 50s and enjoying unexpected marital bliss with a much younger man, whom he first spotted on a gay dating website before serendipitously running into him on the street; Maupin - which the author pronounces, with a determined lack of pretension, as "Moppin" - is now in his 60s and recently married a much younger man, whom he first saw on the internet and then bumped into on the street soon after.

There are many other parallels between Maupin's work and his life. The novelist Patrick Gale, one of Maupin's closest friends, observes: "The thing with Armistead's work is that it's so inextricable from his personality. This is true with a lot of novelists, but especially so with him because he so blatantly mines his own life for material." In his Tales, Maupin has taken what Gale describes as his "'Madame Bovary c'est moi' syndrome" to extraordinary lengths, spreading his personality among the characters, from gentle Michael to the out-of-towner naif Mary Ann Singleton to Mrs Madrigal, the wise landlady with a mysterious past.

Maupin explains that because he kept his homosexuality a secret until relatively late in life, and led "a secret interior life for so long, it has always felt very natural to bounce between very different characters". The Night Listener, one of two books that are not part of the Tales series (and which has been made into a film starring Robin Williams), seems to be the most closely autobiographical of all his novels. It tells of a popular San Franciscan storyteller, Gabriel, who made his name through "grabby little armchair yarns ... My characters were a motley but lovable bunch, people caught in the supreme joke of modern life who were forced to survive by making families of their friends" - which, in self-deprecating fashion, pretty much sums up the Tales series.

Maupin concedes that his novels "are all emotionally autobiographical, and I often need the fires of real life to get the fiction going. But I tamper with the facts to such a degree that I don't see them as autobiographies ... As long as it's fiction, you can get to the truth without embellishment. Vanity comes into play once the author starts suggesting that this is reality." It is for this reason, perhaps, that the book he feels closest to is Maybe the Moon, the story of a Jewish female dwarf's search for stardom in Hollywood: "I could say the most intimate things about myself and look into the darkest corners of my soul through her."

This sense of liberation coincided with his own self-discovery around the time he started to write Tales: "I've been very open about myself for years because, once I came out, I felt such exhilaration about telling the truth that I thought it had endless possibilities." He even came out to his parents - a conservative lawyer and housewife in North Carolina - in the same manner as Michael, who, in the second book of the series, writes a letter to his parents telling them that he is gay. Maupin wrote that letter when he was 33 - "too old".

Maupin was born in Washington DC in 1944 and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. A shy, unsporty boy, he compensated by storytelling: "I was the one who made everybody sit around the campfire and listen to my version of North Carolina ghost stories. I was quite humiliated at sports, so it was wonderful to discover when I was 10 that I had the power to control people that way." His favourite books as a child were the Hardy Boys mysteries, which "really whetted my appetite for storytelling", and the influence of their gripping storylines and cliffhanger chapter endings is clear in the Tales. A slightly later, and perhaps more surprising, influence were the films of Federico Fellini, which showed him that "there was another world out there with a great variety of humankind, far more than I could imagine in North Carolina".

Maupin was expected to follow in his father's footsteps and become a lawyer. However, law school proved to be rather uninspiring, so he "flunked out - although, if you ask my parents, I left". He then, improbably, worked briefly at the TV station of the notoriously rightwing senator Jesse Helms: "It was something I did to please my father, because deep down I knew I had this secret that would one day blow him out of the water," he says.

In the late 60s he enlisted in the navy and was posted to Vietnam, where his chief job was taking an admiral's wife and the wives of visiting dignitaries on shopping trips in Saigon - "they knew what to do with the queer boy". He also spent several months on the Cambodian border, where there were "a couple of mortar attacks but mainly it was pretty safe".

When he returned to the US, he worked for Associated Press in Charleston, and was posted to San Francisco when he was 27. He immediately loved the city, but hated the job, feeling restricted by the facts, the deadlines and the formulae, preferring instead "to spend hours polishing my prose". He quit after five months and wrote "a little weekly serial" for the local newspaper, Pacific Sun, about a woman who recently moved to San Francisco and the people she met in her building. In 1976, a columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle spotted it and recommended it to the newspaper's publisher. This became Tales of the City. "So I came in and met this very stuffy old gentleman and I said I wanted to write a serialised story about a new girl in town, not telling him who the new girl in town really was ..." Maupin recalls with a wicked laugh.

Even in the relatively liberated atmosphere of mid-1970s San Francisco, Maupin's tales of the lives of gay men in the city were a shock. There were references to bath houses, drugs and men cheating on their wives with men, but rarely any graphic details, and at first any suggestions that two men might be sleeping in the same bed were made obliquely.

After two more years of writing the column, Maupin was approached by a publisher to collate the instalments into a book. He spent two weeks hammering them together in Rock Hudson's house - with a dismissive wave, Maupin says he'd met the actor "in the usual gay way, there was a party ...", and they were briefly lovers, then lifelong friends - and these became the first two books in the series.

The tone was strikingly new. "It's not so much that he gave the gay world a voice, but that he gave it a sense of humour," says Peter Burton, the former literary editor of Gay Times. "Much of what was coming out of America at that time was either very po-faced or pulp." The novels were so unusual that it was rumoured that Maupin was a mysterious pseudonym, an idea aided by the discovery that his name is an anagram for "is a man I dreamt up". When one reader accused him of being "a lesbian collective in Marin County", he solemnly replied: "Sometimes I feel like a lesbian collective in Marin County, but I'm not."

Although Maupin's characters deal with highly emotive issues, not least Aids, the writing is always warm and lightly humorous, thereby bringing into the mainstream subjects that were still fairly off-limits at the time. But it was Maupin's depiction of gay and straight men comfortably mixing together that was particularly new. "He dared to remind the increasingly self-ghettoising gay communities around the world that life might be healthier and happier lived somewhere a little more mixed," says Patrick Gale. "He also dared to say that gay people can be air-headed jerks at a time when all gay fiction felt honour-bound to portray gay men as cute or victimised."

It is possibly for these reasons that some gay critics in America criticised Maupin, and continue to do so today. In Europe, Maupin is far more accepted by what he calls "the gay literary mavens" than he is in the States. In America, he didn't even make the Publishing Triangle's recent top 100 gay and lesbian authors, whereas he beat homegrown authors such as Sarah Waters and Alan Hollinghurst to win Britain's Big Gay Read. In The Night Listener, his doppelgänger narrator Gabriel confesses that he feels "illegitimate as a writer, as if I'd broken into the Temple of Literature through some unlocked basement window". But Maupin was very comforted by some advice his friend Christopher Isherwood gave him early on in his career: "Don't let anyone put you in a cubbyhole of being 'a gay author', and don't be embarrassed to create entertainment."

Michael Tolliver Lives, unlike the preceding Tales, is written in the first person, from the point of view of the eponymous Tolliver, who is now HIV positive. Maupin "lost whole generations of friends - and readers, I might add - to Aids, and I listened to their stories and try to appropriate them". The book also contains many swipes at the current political situation in the US - including references to "phony Florida elections", "secret American torture camps" and "a far-from-intelligent president". He wanted "to record the times and the fabric of San Francisco discourse".

Maupin has been compared to Mark Twain and Jack London for putting San Francisco on the literary map, and has become something of an urban landmark himself: taxi drivers point out his house, and Quentin Crisp once introduced him with the flourish: "This is Mr Maupin, he invented San Francisco." "It makes me incredibly proud, I love this city - it is part of my soul now," he says.

The elegiac tone of Michael Tolliver Lives has led some to assume that it is the last in the Tales of the City series. "Not at all," Maupin smiles. "I'm rejuvenated and this is the first chapter of a new series."

Inspirations

A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood

Alfred Hitchcock

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

Charles Dickens

La Dolce Vita by Federico Fellini

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/jun/09/fiction.armisteadmaupin