Psychologist headed to prison

South Bend Tribune - South Bend, Ind.
Date:     Oct 3, 2009

A Plymouth child psychologist has received a 13-month federal prison sentence for health care fraud.

Marc Allen Zackheim pleaded guilty to defrauding Indiana Medicaid of $137,000 over three years by fabricating diagnoses and attaching those diagnoses to the medical records of his juvenile patients.

The U.S. attorney for northern Indiana had asked Judge Robert L. Miller Jr. for a 21-month sentence, while Zackheim's attorney, Martin Kus, asked the judge to consider home detention.

Miller fined Zackheim $4,000, and ordered him and his business, Associates in Clinical Psychology P.C., to repay the state the $137,000.

Zackheim must report for prison Dec. 1.

Webmaster's note:  Marc Allen Zackheim is the husband of Victoria Fraginals Zackheim, the woman whose fraudulent invention of an ailing child inspired Armistead's novel, The Night Listener.

click here for a related article

Plymouth psychologist pleads guilty to Medicaid fraud

For those of you familiar with the real story behind "The Night Listener", you definitely know the Zackheims. Here is an update on Marc Zackheim.

By PABLO ROS, Tribune Staff Writer
Story Created: Mar 3, 2009 at 4:27 PM EDT
Story Updated: Mar 3, 2009 at 4:27 PM EDT

SOUTH BEND — A Plymouth psychologist has pleaded guilty to health care fraud for falsely billing Indiana Medicaid of more than $100,000, according to documents filed in court this week.

Marc Allen Zackheim was a licensed psychologist and owner of Associates in Clinical Psychology P.C., a domestic professional corporation, according to court documents filed in the South Bend division of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Indiana.

Zackheim was the subject of a criminal trial in 2006 in which he was acquitted of battery for inappropriately touching boys who lived at the ACP home in Plymouth.

But for about three years ending in June 2008, according to court documents, Zackheim and his corporation defrauded Indiana Medicaid, a health care benefit program, by filing billings and claims for reimbursement for therapies that were never provided to patients, were not medically necessary or were not entitled under Medicaid.

Zackheim also admitted to making up diagnoses and listing them in fraudulent authorization requests sent to Indiana Medicaid. He also filed for reimbursement from Medicaid before therapies were provided to patients or for therapies never provided, and Indiana Medicaid was billed for services allegedly provided to individuals who were not patients of ACP, according to court documents.

The total payments made to the defendants as a result of fraud totaled $137,000, according to court documents.

Zackheim, 58, faces 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine, while his corporation could be fined up to $500,000. Zackheim also has agreed to pay full restitution to Medicaid.

In 2006, a jury in Plymouth acquitted Zackheim of one felony count of practicing medicine without a license and three misdemeanor counts of battery for inappropriately touching boys who were his patients in 2003 and 2004.

Zackheim is expected to go before a judge Thursday for a plea hearing.

Webmaster's note:  Marc Allen Zackheim is the husband of Victoria Fraginals Zackheim, the woman whose fraudulent invention of an ailing child inspired Armistead's novel, The Night Listener.

http://www.wsbt.com/news/local/40661177.html

Honest Talk With the Outspoken Maupin

Author Armistead Maupin shoots more than the breeze with OutSmart's Blase DiStefano

How appropriate that Armistead Maupin is part of our Gayest & Greatest issue-he's way GAY, what with being extremely open and honest about his sexuality, and he rates GREAT, what with being a best-selling author and a damned good writer. Maupin is probably best known for his TALES OF THE CITY series of books, which produced five best-selling books and two wildly popular television mini-series, with a third on the way. TALES OF THE CITY and MORE TALES OF THE CITY interwove gays with straights with bisexuals with transgenders with AIDS with dope with sex. If you haven't read them, take some time to do so-they were ahead of their times and are still considered controversial. If reading doesn't flip your wig, rent the two videos, which are true to Maupin's originals. And now available for your reading pleasure is Maupin's newest piece of fiction, THE NIGHT LISTENER. (True Maupin die-hards have been listening to a "radio serialization" version of the novel read by the author on Salon.com from Sept. 5 to Sept. 29, an Internet first-"like having Uncle Armistead read to you every night before bedtime," Maupin describes it.) Meanwhile, sit back and enjoy these nonfiction tales.

OutSmart: Hi, this is Blase.
Armistead Maupin: Hi, Blase, it's Armistead Maupin.

How are you doing?
I'm fine, how are you after all these years?

Well, I'm fine. The last time we talked was 1985.
Back when you were with TWT, right?

That's right... So, I read your book [THE NIGHT LISTENER]. It's wonderful. It's been so long since your last one. What took you so long?
Well, I wrote and produced two mini-series. I was actively involved in TALES OF THE CITY and MORE TALES OF THE CITY. I was there on the set...

That's why they were so good.
Thank you, I believe that, too [laughs]. It's important for the writer for any property to remain close to the material, to see it survive. Especially something this personal. It would be so easy to get it wrong culturally. So I've been present for that, and I spent about a year and a half adapting my last novel, MAYBE THE MOON, as a feature film and have yet to find a producer. There's been a fair amount to occupy me and a story that was very slow in coming. I had the general mystery outlined in my head for a long time, but I was lacking an additional dramatic element which life managed to provide for me when Jerry and I broke up four years ago. I realized I could weave the experience of that into this little mystery.

What percentage of the book is...
True? [Laughs] It's FICTION, Blase. Writers write from every aspect of their own lives and weave it together. In some ways it's not true at all, so I won't even go down that road with you. I'd like to think it's all emotionally true. I tried to stay very close to my feelings when I wrote that novel and expose them, warts and all. I made myself a promise to be as honest as possible even when it was unattractive.

I actually started reading it at around 6:30 or 7:00 one evening and I didn't put it down until it was around 1:30 or 2:00. I finished the book.
That's just what I like to hear [laughs]... That continues to be the strongest drive I have when writing-the need to make people want to keep reading.

At the end of that first chapter, I was in tears. And then the story changed, and I was enthralled.
Good. Do me a favor when you write about it-try to stay as mysterious as possible without giving the surprise in the middle of the book.

Consider it done.
A couple of the advance reviewers gave very positive reviews but almost all of them went too far, [which] was tremendously frustrating.... Most of my life I've been inspired by the film VERTIGO. It had a big impact on me when I was a kid and it still moves me in ways that surprise me, especially now that I'm approaching Jimmy Stewart's age. And I've always wanted to write a novel that was about human longing and obsession that stays very close to the bone emotionally, but that completely turns you around halfway through.

And that it did. So, you're coming to Galveston in October.
I'll take your word for it [laughs].

Trust me, you will be here in October [doing a speaking engagement].... I wondered what that entails.
It'll entail reading the first chapter of the book, probably the first chapter, usually is. And chatting with the audience and answering questions. It's what I like to do the most. It allows me to have direct interaction with the readers. So I'm doing that and a number of gigs in seven or eight different halls around the country.

I'm glad that Galveston is one of them. That should be neat because the Grand 1894 Opera House is an intimate little place. It'll be perfect.
Yeah, it fills my age-old desire to tell stories directly. I used to do that when I was eight years old-you know, make my friends sit down around the campfire and tell ghost stories. It's changed a bit, I just make a living at it. Still the same little queen I was then.

[Laughs] So how is FURTHER TALES OF THE CITY coming?
FURTHER has wrapped. And it's being edited as we speak. It should be on Showtime in April or May of 2001.

So, what do you think?
Oh, I'm thrilled to death. It's twice as sexy as the other shows.

I can deal with that.
I thought you might like that. All of the actors get naked at one point. They've been extremely generous in that regard.

Is Thomas Gibson...
He died in the last one.

Oh, stupid me.
He's furious about that, by the way. I talked to him a few days ago, and he doesn't like to even hear me talk about the new show: "You could have let me come back as a ghost or something." But he remains a dear friend, but unfortunately we killed off Beecham last time around. Billy Campbell's coming back...in all his naked beautiful glory. And so is Paul Hopkins. We have the whole cast from last time around, including Mother Mucka (Jackie Burrows) who wasn't actually in the book. I never really dealt with what happened to Mother Mucka and I decided this time around I wanted to flesh out that storyline. And Lea DeLaria plays a bush pilot in it.

A what pilot?
A bush pilot. What other kind would you expect? It's like an Alaskan float plane pilot who flies through the bush.

[Laughs] Oh, that is too perfect.
She had such a laugh out of that. She wanted us to credit her that way on the credits, where it would say, "Lea DeLaria as The Bush Pilot." And Joel Grey has a cameo this time around playing the guy that presides over Rock Hudson's Boy Party. Rock Hudson is called Cage Tyler in FURTHER TALES OF THE CITY, not because I felt any compunction about avoiding naming him, but I was afraid viewers would spend their whole time saying, "That's not Rock Hudson." So we made him into a sort of generic closeted superstar named Cage Tyler. It happens that the actor we picked has some qualities that are very like Rock. So it was quite eerie for me to watch that portion.

Because you were friends with Rock Hudson.
Oh yeah, and the pathetic little sexual escapade you'll see in FURTHER TALES was drawn from my own life. [Laughs] It's pathetic, you'll see. It's in the book that way, but it's basically Michael...well, never mind. Lots of kissing, lots of humping. I think it's sexier, funnier, sadder, faster, and more adventurous.

And on Showtime!
Yeah, so far there have been no restrictions whatsoever. Several times I stood in front of the monitor during a love scene and found my own jaw dropping [laughs]. I turned to this woman producer and said, "Oh my God, are we doing this?"

Are you concerned about the editing process at all?
Oh sure, and I'll have a chance to look at the rough cut, to make suggestions if I feel the directors made a choice that doesn't comply with what I imagined the scene to be. But I also trust our director a great deal. We've come to know each other very well and like each other. His name is Pierre Gang. And he's gay and has a wonderful combination of sentiment and liberal sexual attitudes. And a great visual sense.

I may have to order Showtime just for that. The only other thing, when you were doing CELLULOID CLOSET, did you write that with other people?
I wrote the narration myself.

Then Lily Tomlin came in and narrated.
Oh, you don't want me to dredge up that tired old thing all over again.

What I was going to say is that I had read, probably a couple of months ago, that she actually came out.
You know, if Lily Tomlin had come out a couple of months ago, it would have been big news.

It was in a little publication.
That's where it always is.

Oh, so you think they just made it up?
I don't know, I don't know. She's been walking the line for such a long time that I've lost interest whether she's in or out. If she came out, it would supplant Ellen DeGeneres, you know. Lilly Tomlin's a major established star. The sad reality is it's too late for Lily. She had her chance and she missed it. And Ellen made that abundantly clear when she came out.

And it was remarkable, too. I'm not really jaded when it comes to that.
Oh, I'm hugely moved by what Ellen DeGeneres did. I have no patience whatsoever with gay people who find fault with her in any way. It's hard to imagine how she could have done it with more class. I don't know if you've seen her new HBO special. It's funny and honest and just gay enough. And totally her. I was sitting all by myself just hooting.

I'm looking forward to the video. And thank you so much for your time, I really appreciate it.
You're very welcome, Blase.

http://www.outsmartmagazine.com/issue/i10-00/interview.html

"The Night Listener" trailer

Trailer for Armistead Maupin's "The Night Listener".



If you did not get a chance to see this film, and are in the mood for a good, psychological thriller, check it out. Of course, read the book first, no one tells a story like Maupin.

This is a link to the 20/20 segment about the true story behind "The Night Listener"

Who's that girl? What's that book?

Date: April 5, 2007.

As she left her gym in London, Madonna was photographed carrying her copy of the book, "The Night Listener" by Armistead Maupin.

http://coolspotters.com/musicians/madonna/and/books/the-night-listener#medium-6450

Searching for Tony

Backstory for "The Night Listener"

From ABC News
http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Story?id=2784838&page=1

Who is Anthony Godby Johnson? To many, he was a 14-year-old author with a heart-rending story: he was dying of advanced syphilis, AIDs, had his leg amputated, and had suffered 54 broken bones -- both at the hands of his biological parents, and others. The story that first aired on "20/20" in July 2006 now has fascinating new developments.

For more than a decade, Tony Johnson's story sparked the interest of a publishing company, a movie studio, and even this network. But was it a true tale? Does the boy even exist? Or, as some believe, was it all a hoax?

The story that captivated millions of readers and viewers across the country began in Union City, New Jersey. Tony lived, the story goes, in Union City with Vicki Johnson, a social worker who had adopted him.

She'd saved him from a harrowing life in New York City where he'd been abused and forced into prostitution by his biological parents.

The story was first told in Tony's inspirational autobiography, "A Rock and a Hard Place," an astonishingly impressive work for a 14-year-old. Published in 1993, the book had six paperback printings.

Eventually, the heartbreaking story attracted the eye of movie-makers. Ron Bernstein, an agent at the well-known talent agency International Creative Management, Inc., sold Tony's book to HBO.

"I said to HBO, 'don't do your usual cheap deal with me. This kid is dying! You gotta do it for the kid,'" said Bernstein. "[It] made people feel good about themselves. It was, 'I don't care how bad my life is, there's somebody whose life is much worse and they're not beaten down.'"

Bernstein says he was among those charmed over the phone by the boy. Tony spent hours talking with friends and supporters, including San Francisco writer Armistead Maupin.

"He would call just out of the blue and start talking to me," said Maupin.

Maupin says it didn't strike him as odd that he was developing a phone friendship with a 14-year-old boy.

"It struck me as wonderful. He was saying 'I love you' in the way that a kid says it to a parent or an adult that's really close to them," said Maupin. "It's a level of intimacy that was quite extraordinary, maybe even stronger because it was on the phone -- just a voice in the night talking to you who seems to understand you, to respect you, to need you."

Tony's increasingly dramatic story was part of a 1997 ABC special titled "About Us: The Dignity of Children." Hosted by Oprah Winfrey, the Emmy-nominated special about the resilience of children was watched by millions. Tony himself was played by an actor, but his own voice narrated his story.

Bernstein described Tony's voice as "very strangely androgynous."

Tony says in the show, "I was bought for an hour, sometimes two, or maybe for a whole night."

It was a story that easily sparked deep feelings and sympathy in people.

According to Maupin, Tony was on the phone, connecting with many people on a regular basis, including an ex-nun and a rabbi. Maupin says the rabbi came from Israel to see Tony and was turned away at the door.

Maupin says that each time he tried to arrange to meet Tony in person, Tony's adoptive mother Vicki would say the boy's fragile health prohibited visitors. Maupin had to settle for pictures of the boy, sent out by Tony and Vicki.

Bernstein says Vicki told him that Tony was nearing "death's door." "[He] was so fragile that he couldn't see anybody because their germs could kill him."

One of the first people to suggest a hoax was Terry Anderson, Armistead Maupin's former business partner and former boyfriend. "I've not met Tony Johnson, because there is no Tony Johnson to meet," said Anderson. Anderson also suggested a shocking possibility: the voice they'd all been speaking with sounded oddly feminine because, maybe, Tony's mother was playing both roles.

"For six years, my brain was divided down the middle," Maupin said. "There were days when I would talk to Tony and think, 'this is clearly a boy, why would I ever doubt this?' and other days when I would think, it's her [Vicki]."

But in those six years, Maupin says he never asked the crucial question: are you a fake?

"How do you do that? Do you say, 'excuse me, are you fake, are you really a 40-year-old woman?'", asked Maupin. He says if he had questioned Tony over the phone, he would have been doing the one thing that he says you're never supposed to do: doubt the story of an abused child.

Maupin turned his agonizing personal debate about the suffering boy into a novel, "The Night Listener."

One day, ICM agent Ron Bernstein received "The Night Listener" in the mail. Until then, he says he had not known that Maupin had a phone friendship with Tony. "I read it because Armistead is a client. I was so stunned. I called Armistead and I said, 'Are you sitting? I was the agent for that kid. I sold his book to HBO. I cannot believe you had the same experience that I did.'" Bernstein said he and Maupin talked for an hour, both aghast.

Bernstein admits he never questioned if anybody was lying. "I was talking to two voices, Tony and Vicki." But Bernstein says he began to have his own doubts when the $125,000 deal to turn Tony's book into an HBO movie collapsed because Vicki said Tony was too sick to let anyone from HBO meet him.

As time went on, Bernstein took note that a boy on the brink of death kept hanging on for years with a bushel of ailments.

Maupin agrees that he found the number of ailments a bit unbelievable, too. "It did get more and more melodramatic, and as it did, my doubts grew."

But if Tony doesn't exist, then who wrote "A Rock and a Hard Place"? Could it have been Vicki Johnson? Either the mastermind behind a huge hoax, or the embattled guardian of a sick boy's privacy -- depending on whom you believe -- Ms. Johnson graduated from a Union City high school in 1975. Her real name is Joanne Victoria Fraginals.

Years after Tony's book was published, she moved to Illinois and married a child psychologist, Marc Zackheim.

The Zackheims declined to speak with "20/20." But faxes sent last summer by Dr. Zackheim insisted that Tony's story was true and had already been proven. He accused Maupin of spreading lies for commercial gain.

And a few days ago, Vicki Johnson's lawyer sent ABC a new, 140-page response to our story. It included signed affidavits by the Zackheims and three other people swearing to have met Tony. However, none of these people would discuss Tony with us directly. Also, the lawyer asserted that medical and adoption records for Tony exist, but will not be provided to ABC because they are "privileged and confidential." Further, the response contends that claims that Tony does not exist are an attempt to promote the movie version of Armistead Maupin's novel, "The Night Listener." "The Night Listener" was released by Miramax, a sister company of ABC, Inc. Just yesterday, Ms. Johnson's attorney accused ABC News of "bias and disregard for the truth."

ABC received other letters in support of Tony in July, some from people also claiming to have met him. One letter said, "Tony exists" and "is a beautiful and deep soul."

Jack Godby, who wrote the introduction to Tony's book, told "20/20" he still keeps in touch with Tony by email and by phone, although he admits that after all these years, he's never met Tony in person.

Bernstein's response to the people who still believe in Tony? "There are still people that believe in the tooth fairy." What's most interesting, Bernstein says, is not that Vicki may or may not have been Tony, but that people wanted to believe that Tony exists.

The movie version of Maupin's "The Night Listener" was released in August and comes out on DVD this week. Robin Williams plays the character Maupin based on himself. Williams says he's known Maupin for 30 years. "He became obsessed with the idea of finding out who is this person."

Maupin added, "It was very difficult for me. I didn't stop thinking about it. I didn't stop speculating over it. I didn't have any proof, so all I could do was turn to fiction."

Maupin says the movie is a fictional reflection of the complicated emotions he felt after bonding with Tony and Vicki on the phone and never being allowed to meet the boy.

"I think maybe Tony was her [Vicki's] imaginary friend. He was certainly mine," said Maupin with a laugh.

When "20/20" first broadcast this story in July, a haunting question remained. If Tony never existed, then who is the boy in the photographs people received? Like Maupin, Terry Anderson struggled to conjure the true identity of that boy -- a boy they only knew as Tony. "Somebody out there in the world knows who that is," says Anderson.

Of the many millions of people who saw the original "20/20" broadcast and the special web link which asked, "Do you know this boy?," exactly three people came forward to tell ABC the real name of the boy featured in the photos.

His name is Steve Tarabokija, not Anthony Godby Johnson. And he is not a writer suffering from life-threatening maladies, but is instead a very healthy traffic engineer from New Jersey.

As one can imagine, Steve was surprised when he received a call from an ABC News producer telling him the details of the story. "It was shocking. It took a couple of days just to sink in," he told "20/20."

So how did childhood photos of Steve Tarabokija come to be misappropriated, allegedly by Vicki Johnson? One viewer who came forward to identify "Tony" as Steve was Cary Riecken. She was watching at home the night of the original "20/20" broadcast.

"I said, I know this child! This is Steve!," tells Riecken. Steve, along with Riecken's son, Hassan, were classmates together at the Sacred Heart grade school in North Bergen, New Jersey. The school has since closed. As it turns out, Vicki Johnson was Steve and Hassan's fourth grade teacher. It may have been that Vicki used the photos of her young pupil in order to put a necessary face on a story that so many people believed.

Recalling her memories of Vicki, Cary Riecken explained, "She loved taking pictures of the children all the time. Her role as a teacher was not just as a teacher. She was like a friend to them." Steve's memories are similar. "She was a very nice teacher, one of the nicest that I've had." Nice or not, Steve's mother Lisa is not amused. What would she say to the alleged hoaxer, Vicki Johnson? "How dare you use my son's pictures? How dare you?," she told "20/20." Ms. Johnson's lawyer did not respond to "20/20's" questions about Steve's photos.

Armistead Maupin: leaping to the big screen

Article from: The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide
Article date: September 1, 2006
Author: Esther, John

GLR: What was going through your mind when you came up with the surname Noone or no one? He is a celebrity figure so he is someone.

AM: Well, it's more of a joke about who he's talking to, and how, to a certain degree, his own life is a collection of anecdotes. It's just a bit of a trick.

GLR: How close is Gabriel to you? How autobiographical is his character?

AM: What happens to him is, up to a point, similar to what happened to me. But he's far more neurotic and obsessive in his quest than I ever was. I think I was rescued by my storytelling instincts. Soon as this extraordinary mystery started happening to me, I started imagining ways I could spin it into a tale.

GLR: How similar is Gabriel's contentious relationship with his father?

AM: Yes, that's pretty close. I think in the novel that's the most accurate representation of a relationship in my life.

GLR: One of the most provocative conversations in the film is when Gabriel and his dad argue about the sexual orientation of the men who raped Pete. What can we make of sexual orientation and rape in this case?

AM: I simply think it plays into brutality and bigotry. I don't think anybody who rapes a child is being driven by homosexuality or heterosexuality. I think there's something separate going on. In this case, people relied on their own homophobia to make it worse for the kid or to justify [their behavior].

GLR: Considering the film deals with the breakup of Gabriel and Jess, how difficult was it exploring that part of your common past with Terry?

AM: A lot harder than either one of us imagined. We've had a longstanding friendship. We relied on that to get us through, but there comes a point where it's almost impossible not to see the character as yourself. Both of us did it, although both of us were trying to serve the film.

GLR: In portraying that time, there was very little physical contact between Gabriel and Jess. Was that due to box office or other considerations?

AM: It was simply reflecting accurately a time in my life. When Terry had left me, that was the way it worked. I think it's true of anyone who's broken up. There were no considerations about box office. I was quite surprised Miramax picked up the film.

GLR: Why is that?

AM: It was originally pitched to me as a gritty little indie thriller. That often means you're not going to get a wide release. I think it may be the first time a major star has played a central character who is gay yet his homosexuality is not particularly pertinent to the story. There may be an exception to that but I can't think of what it is.

GLR: The story's exploration into the reality of fact, fiction, and storytelling could be an allegory surrounding the mythical differences between gays and non-gays. Was that part of the plan?

AM: That's been a theme from my work from the very beginning and 1 do think that theme has been driven by the fact that I'm gay. Gay people distinguish from an early age between the way things seem to be and the way they actually are.

GLR: Is that something we could qualify as a gay aesthetic in film and literature?

AM: I think you could probably find that; you can certainly find it in my work. I'm not sure it applies to everyone's work. In everything I've ever written that disparity has been examined.

GLR: People seek truths and exactitudes regarding the differences between gays and non-gays. But on some level the film is trying to blur those boundaries, no?

AM: Well, I think there are differences. There are also some similarities. In terms of the film, it's the way we all grieve over the loss of a partner. I'm far beyond the point of trying to prove that we're just like anybody else. I'm pretty certain we're not and, for the most part, we become more complete human beings because of our homosexuality.

GLR: Really, why?

AM: Precisely because we are, by our very nature, forced to examine the way everybody thinks. A gay man or woman who walks into a room can assess the social dynamics far more readily than someone with sort of limited heterosexual vision. It's only because we're forced to be spies in the world from the very beginning. We're more observant about others.

GLR: You've received recognition from a few southern legislatures. What's your reaction to that?

AM: Georgia, South Carolina, and Okalahoma condemned Tales of the City when it appeared on PBS in 1993.I put that into my biography because I'm proud of it.

GLR: What do you think about these interviews? Do you think they serve the film or do you think the film should just speak for itself?

AM: I don't mind doing interviews. Yes, the work should certainly speak for itself. I do know that I tend to plant mysteries and teasers in my work, whether it's literature or film, and people are curious about it.

Esther, John. "Armistead Maupin: leaping to the big screen.(ARTIST'S PROFILE)(Interview)." The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide. Gay & Lesbian Review, Inc. 2006. HighBeam Research. 13 Dec. 2008 .

Armistead Maupin Chronicles His Gay Generation

by Robert Urban, August 14, 2006

Author Armistead Maupin's works have been reaching a new national audience lately. The film version of his novel The Night Listener hit theaters nationwide last week, and the miniseries based on his Tales of the City novels is currently enjoying a successful rerun on Logo.

“I'm thrilled that Tales is reaching a new generation of gay people,” Maupin tells AfterElton.com. “The work manages to transcend the decades.”

Maupin's literary works are often autobiographical in nature, inspired by true-life events and real people he has known. “I mine my emotions for my novels,” he says. “It's not that I have a deeply confessional nature. I actually enjoy keeping part of my life private. But I do know that the closer you get to your own heart, the more believable your work is.”

A San Francisco resident since the early 1970s, Maupin's philosophy of gay life is decidedly more West Coast than East Coast. “People here are far more concerned with their insides than their outsides,” he says. “There's a lot more spiritual exploration, and the pursuit of happiness is not seen as something that involves brand names or hot bodies.”

As with many gay men, Maupin's early years were uniquely influenced by a close relationship with a special, older woman figure. In his case it was his maternal grandmother, Marguerite Smith Barton.

“She was my Anna Madrigal,” Maupin recalls, referring to the character from his Tales of the City novels. “Much of Anna's spirit came from my grandmother. Marguerite was a theosophist [a religious philosophy seeking universal brotherhood], and one of the leading women's suffragettes in England back around 1917. She read poems. She practiced vegetarianism before anyone else thought of it. She was a free spirit. My relationship with her was lovely.”

Maupin recalls an anecdote that reveals the Anna Madrigal in Marguerite: “When I was about 14, my grandmother and I were walking to a garden party. There was a woman in front of us in serious Joey Heatherton drag — lots of pink and ruffles, perfume, spike heels. My grandmother turned to me and said, ‘Any woman who is all woman, or any man who is all man, is a complete monster — unfit for human company.' That was quite a radical thing to say back in the 1950s.”

Maupin's gift for colorful storytelling was often inspired by the movies, especially those from director Alfred Hitchcock, gay dramatist John Van Druten, and gay novelist and playwright Christopher Isherwood.

“Vertigo was my number one influence,” Maupin says. “I jumped at the chance to write Night Listener because I felt it was closer to a Hitchcockian exercise than anything I'd ever done.”

Maupin notes that Tales of the City also has Hitchcockian influences, and compares parts of it to Rear Window. “You have someone looking at someone through binoculars across the way. Of course, in Tales they were both masturbating,” he says with a laugh, “but it's roughly the same thing.”

Maupin says he was also influenced by Bell, Book and Candle, a film based on John Van Druten's play of the same name. “After seeing the film,” Maupin recalls, “I asked Chris Isherwood if the gay subtext of Bell, Book and Candle was intentional, and he said, ‘Oh, absolutely!'”

He elaborates: “Bell, Book and Candle is about witches living in New York City. They have special ‘witch bars,' and they are always worrying about being outed. It's one long gay parable. I screened the film as part of my Guilty Pleasures film program down in L.A. some years back, and pointed out all the gay subtext in it.”

Van Druten also adapted Christopher Isherwood's The Berlin Stories for the play I Am a Camera, which became the film Cabaret. And Cabaret was key in helping Maupin concoct both the premise for Tales of the City and its central character, Anna Madrigal.

“Cabaret helped formulate the idea of the apartment house in my head,” Maupin says. “Chris Isherwood was basically writing about an omnisexual group of people with an eccentric landlady in his The Berlin Stories.”

Maupin adds that he was also influenced by Breakfast at Tiffany's. “I've since come to appreciate the novella far more than the film,” he says. “But the movie did suggest that apartment houses held the secret to the universe.”

Maupin's literary works have lent themselves to all kinds of artistic treatments. As a librettist, he collaborated with composer Jake Heggie on Anna Madrigal Remembers, a musical work based on Tales of the City. Perhaps the only choral chamber piece ever written for a transsexual character, the composition received its world premiere in 1999 in San Francisco.

“It's surprising,” Maupin admits. “Frankly, when I write a novel I'm not thinking about it appearing in any other form, so I'm always a little bit stunned when it happens. Jake simply said, ‘Give me two or three pages and I'll set it to music,' so that's what I did.”

In addition, Maupin's novel The Night Listener was made into a BBC radio play, and he says that “there've been offers on it from every direction,” including an offer from composer Steven Schwartz (Pippin, Wicked) to adapt the novel into a musical. “Ultimately [Schwartz] found it was something he couldn't get a handle on,” Maupin says.

One of Maupin's current projects is adapting Babycakes, the fourth book in the Tales series, for film. “The screenplay is finished and I am very happy with it,” he says. “It is written as a stand-alone film. We are still looking for an outlet.”

As a novelist who has repeatedly had to edit down his books for film, Maupin expresses a special wish for a possible future project. “I would love to write an original screenplay,” he explains, “and not have the agony of having to reduce — as John Le Carré put it — ‘an ox into a bouillon cube.' It's very difficult adapting a novel for the screen. It's two different creatures entirely. Whole subplots have to be lost along the way. It would be fun to have the film as my starting point.”

Works like Tales of the City and Night Listener, which are so infused with Maupin's own life experiences, have a natural appeal for gays of his baby-boomer age group. His popular literary voice helped reveal this entire generation's gay life to the world.

“All of my work has been done in real time,” he says. “I always try to capture my emotions of the moment. If the clock says I've aged, well, so has my material. I'm not deliberately speaking to my generation; I'm speaking to my own experience . That, in turn, reaches people like me who were the first generation of openly gay men and women who chose to live their lives openly.”

Maupin is now at work on a new novel, Michael Tolliver Lives, that will no doubt reflect his own current stage in life; it is due to be published next summer. “It involves the central character, Michael 'Mouse' of Tales of the City, today,” explains Maupin. “He is now a 55-year-old gardener. Like a lot of gay men he thought he was going to be dead 20 years ago. And now he's lived to face the issues of AIDS.”

He continues: “Much like me, he has a partner who is considerably younger than he is. I've been partnered with a guy named Chris Turner for the past two years. So I'm able to draw off it — from the joy and the comedy of that experience.”

As a gay man entering his senior years, the subject of aging now takes center stage for Maupin. “I think it's the central issue of our generation,” he says. “There are a lot of people out there who are trying to figure out how to be good old gay people — how to do it well, how to be the best you can for your age. In my case that has to do with trying to be the best version of 62 I can imagine. Not to try and recreate something I felt I had 30 years ago.”

Maupin says, “Interestingly enough, my partner, Christopher, runs a personals website for men over 40.” Maupin laughs. “I actually met him on the site. I saw this handsome 34-year-old there that made my heart beat faster. I bumped into him in the street a few months later and asked him for a date.”

Maupin has no problem openly sharing his thoughts and feelings on his love relationship. “It's something we both talk about,” he says of he and his partner. “I'm interested in it from the perspective of someone who's actually ‘old.' He's interested in it from the position of someone who likes ‘older guys.'”

He concludes: “I don't feel either one of us has anything to be ashamed of. I'm happy to share because I'm so damned happy. If someone had told me life would be this great at 62, I'd be a lot more cheerful along the way. I'm having the love affair of my life, and it feels wonderful.”


http://www.afterelton.com/archive/elton/people/2006/8/maupin.html

Q&A: Armistead Maupin: The Author Discusses The Night Listener

WARNING: In the course of this article, several key twists in The Night Listener are revealed. Full-bore spoiler warnings are in effect.

Armistead Maupin is the best-selling author of Tales of the City and, more recently, The Night Listener, the motion-picture adaptation of which has just been released. The book is based on the real-life case of Anthony Godby Johnson, a young boy supposedly dying of AIDS who penned a memoir entitled A Rock and a Hard Place. In the 13 years since its publication, it has been uncovered as a likely hoax and Johnson appears to have been a fabrication of his "guardian," despite maintaining long-distance friendships with a number of prominent people. One of those people was Maupin, who talked about the experience, and its eventual development into The Night Listener, at a recent press conference. A rotund, jovial man with a handlebar mustache and a friendly twinkle in his eye, Maupin possesses a natural flair for the dramatic; it's not hard to see why Robin Williams was cast as his alter ego in the film. A transcript of his Q&A session follows.

Question: Do you like to write?

Armistead Maupin: No. I like having written. (Laughter.) I love the benefits; I love what it brings me, I love the way it connects me with people, but I find the actual process solitary and depressing sometimes. I've always compared it -- in my case anyway -- to laying mosaic: putting down each little piece very slowly. You don't get to see the product until you can actually step back and look at it, and you have to keep the faith.

Q: How do you keep the faith?

AM: A mortgage. (Laughter.) I'm about halfway through a novel right now -- don't tell my editors that -- and I have to remember that I've been there before. That you always go, "OK, this is the point where you say you're not worth anything," and you know to work through it. The thing that always gets me, I think, is that everything I've ever written is fiction. I think, "I'm making this up. They're gonna figure out that I'm making this up." And then you have to tell yourself, "Well, that's what you do: you make it up."

Q: To those who aren't familiar with your body of work, do all of your stories deal with the sort of twist or question that this one (The Night Listener) does?

AM: Tales of the City, which is six volumes, is essentially a comedic work. It has serious moments, but it's essentially comedic. Yet it has sort of Hitchockian twists, especially in the first one: people are never what they seem to be... it's obviously fascinated me my whole life. And it probably has something to do with being gay. Gay people tend to go through life [that way]. You learn, even as a child, to see the difference between the way things appear to be and the way they really are.

Q: But doesn't that set you up, then? I mean your audience grows to expect some sort of twist and you have to top it or outdo it in some way...

AM: Well, life has a way of handing me these things. The Night Listener was just something that happened to me -- up to a point. The basic setup just fell into my lap 13 years ago, and I knew instantly that I would have to write about it. I was sent the [draft] of a book by a publisher in New York, written by a 14-year-old boy who was dying of AIDS, who had suffered abuse at the hands of his parents -- [it had] a sort of pederast-y ring to it -- and who had been rescued by a social worker. The book came with a forward by my friend Paul Monette, who was a wonderful writer living here in L.A. He died 10 years ago of AIDS. He was very sick at the time, but he had been contacted by the boy who had actually coaxed him into writing it. So Paul had written the forward to the book and Mr. Rogers (Fred Rogers, the legendary children's show host) of all people had written the afterward. So it came with pretty impeccable credentials.

Q: What was your part going to be in all of this?

AM: I was asked to write a blurb. And I was so moved by the book -- and frankly a little envious of Paul, who had this amazing friendship with this almost saintly kid on the phone -- that I said, "Can I call him and tell him how much I like it?" So he spoke to the adoptive mother, and they said, "Oh he's a fan of Tales of the City, so he'd love to talk to you." And before I knew it, this kid with this surprisingly undeveloped voice was talking to me on the phone. I found him to be feisty and charming and bright, and not at all depressing considering all the things he had been through. And very gay-friendly, although he himself was heterosexually identified. He wasn't precious around me; he was just who he was. In those days, he was amazed that I didn't know who Cal Ripken was. We changed that to Derek Jeter [in the movie] to update it, but the interplay was the same.

Q: And you were in New York, and he was where?

AM: I was in San Francisco, and he was in Union City, New Jersey, just across the river from New York. Then about six months into this friendship, my partner at the time, Terry Anderson (who co-wrote the screenplay), listened to the mother for the first time. He had heard the boy before, and he talked to her for about 10 minutes, and hung up, and turned to me and said, "I can't believe you never noticed. It sounds like the same voice to me." That scene is in the movie, and it happened in real life. Terry actually didn't leave me until 1996, so the breakup was not concurrent with the mystery the way it is in the film. But as a writer, I felt I had to take the two pieces of really good shit that I had been given and combine them.

(Laughter.)

I could see it immediately, unlike Gabriel (Noone, Maupin's surrogate in the book), I wasn't obsessive about it. I made [Noone] obsessive because it was more interesting. I was mostly just excited as a writer. I thought, "My God, what if this is true? Why would anybody do this?" He was talking to the world. He was talking to Jermaine Jackson and Tom Robbins the writer, and Keith Olbermann had a very strong relationship with him. So I lived for six years, splitting my brain right down the middle: he's real/he's not real. Either thing could be true. And some days I would hear her very clearly in his voice, and other days I'd be certain that I was merely hoping that it was a ruse because it was such a good story.

Q: Did you ever confront him? I mean, in six years you weren't in New York once to just say, "Hey?"

AM: Oh absolutely. I tried many times, and I was invited many times, and the invitation was invariably retracted at the last minute for a number of reasons. "Oh, he's come down with something." "He's not feeling well now." Terry was HIV positive, and she'd say, "Terry might get something." We actually put it to the test in a big way because Tony -- that was the boy's name -- was a huge Yankees fan, and I was asked to make a speech at Yankee Stadium during the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion. These were the Gay Games. I was to make a speech from the pitcher's mound at Yankee Stadium to 50,000 people -- about AIDS -- and I thought, "This is perfect." So we called him up and said, "Look, we're gonna send an ambulance, a limo, whatever you want, and take Tony, and put him in the dugout at Yankee Stadium so I can make this speech. I'll include him in the speech." And she was having none of it.

Poor Paul Monette. Towards the end of his life, Newsweek was suggesting that he had written the book. He was desperately trying to hang on to his reputation before he died, and he and his partner tried several times to meet [Tony]. And it was hard, because all the people around him -- his editor and his agent -- were still saying, "Trust us. He exists. We haven't seen him, but we're sure he exists."

Q: Were there photos?

AM: Yes. The first thing I got was a photograph. And this fascinates me because that's somebody. And that somebody is probably about 30 years old now. Tony would be 28, but who knows when the picture was taken? So somebody's out there who looks like that.

Q: Did the publishers begin to get cold feet? Was the book ever published?

AM: It was published and they've never renounced it. I actually called the editor of the current house that's publishing it and asked about it. Shortly before, Tad Friend had done a long article -- a long investigation -- in The New Yorker about five years ago. And they still haven't publicly acknowledged that it's a fake.

Q: And you don't feel angry that it's possible someone has used AIDS as a way of getting attention?

AM: I feel very angry about that part. I'm sure in her head, she's drawing sympathy and attention to the subject, but in fact a lot of people with AIDS -- including Paul, who was very weak -- had the life drained out of them by trying to be generous to this kid. And Paul eventually just cut off his connection with him: in part I think because he was wearing him out, and in part because he worried about whether [Tony] even existed. Tony called me shortly thereafter, and said, "Paul isn't talking to me anymore." This kid sobbing on the phone to me. "What do I make of this?" What could I make of it? It was a very odd thing, to live in this mystery for such a long time, and it wasn't until I saw a voice analysis that I really fully said, "There it is. There's the truth."

Q: You never confronted him?

AM: No, I'm a very non-confrontational person. I came out as a gay man to my parents in Tales of the City. I had Michael (the character in the book) come out to his parents, and my parents recognized very clearly what was being said. I don't tend to do that, and there was something very strange about having to say to this person I had talked to for a long time on the phone, "I don't think you're real." So I did it through the novel. I actually told him that I was about to write a novel about the two of us -- someone very like us -- and what happens when doubt was cast on the existence of the boy, the way it had been done by Newsweek. He said to me, "I'm a big boy. I know what fiction is." (Interesting phrase there, the lie alongside the truth.) "Go ahead. I'd love to see the manuscript; may I name the character?" So my imaginary boy named the imaginary boy in the novel -- supposedly after an imaginary friend of his.

Q: Did you ever meet the mother?

AM: Oh yes. When Oprah was doing her documentary on abused children and Tony took part in it -- only as a voice, mind you; they hired an actor to play the kid because Tony was too sick or too afraid of having his identity exposed. When that happened, we were invited to New York to meet Vicky (the mother) and the producer from ABC, who was doing the documentary, and I met her for the first time. She was a very pleasant, pretty, blonde, very large woman. I saw her and my first instinct was to hug her because I still wasn't sure. The woman had invited us to her apartment, and had huge blowup pictures of the kid up on the wall. I spoke to Tony afterwards, and he said. "How it was meeting Mom?" And I thought boy, I'd better answer this one carefully. Up until that point, he had always said, "Mom's a real babe." Well she was a lovely woman, but she wasn't a babe. So I said, "She's great. She was very sweet to me." And he said, "Were you surprised by how she looked?" I said, "A little bit; she was a little bit bigger than I thought she'd be." And he said, "Well, she put on all that weight when she adopted me." That's so interesting to me psychologically.

Q: When was the last time you spoke to either the mother or the son?

AM: She called me when the [draft of my book] was out. It began and ended with [drafts]. She said, "Somebody told me that you wrote a book trashing Tony." I said, "No, Vicky, I didn't trash him at all. I think it's a very loving portrait of his friendship." She said, "Oh good, I just want to make sure we didn't have to hire a lawyer." She was really sort of getting tough with me. And that was the last I heard from her.

Q: Has anyone else spoken to her of it?

AM: Well, she has a life in Lake Bluff, Illinois. She married a child psychologist. (Shocked laughter.) The editors -- David Roth, the guy that edited the original book told Terry recently in L.A. that I had done a terrible thing by stealing his story. And I approached his agent and said, "I'm just curious, in light of the recent revelations about JT LeRoy (another writer whose existence is likely a hoax) and the extraordinary parallel between the two things, if you've altered your opinions about Anthony Godby Johnson." And there was no response.

I think that a lot of people close to the story are extremely embarrassed, and I don't think they have any reason to be. All they were caught at was being compassionate.

Q: Do you think the JT LeRoy situation is more embarrassing? I mean, they had this person who was going to public events...

AM: I think it's more embarrassing because, you know, the New York Times photographer who did a spread on JT LeRoy said afterwards that it was perfectly obvious that "he" was a woman. That wasn't an effeminate boy or anything else, that was a woman. But you know, it's funny. They build such a bubble, such a mythology around the character. "Don't talk to him, he's very shy," and so forth. And we all walk very carefully around the subject of child abuse.

Q: Do you think people are too gullible?

AM: I think it's easier to be gullible now, especially with the Internet. I mean, everybody's got a horror story now. It's a shame. I think it's a widespread syndrome. Do you remember Kaycee (Nicole), the girl in the Midwest who was supposedly dying of leukemia? She had Internet buddies everywhere, and some clever bloggers got a picture of her and blew it up, and got a logo (on her clothing), and found out what high school she was from. The "mother" finally confessed that she had been doing it supposedly to bring attention to leukemia. I think it's chiefly about bringing attention to yourself. I think it's a feeling that you yourself are not worthy of sympathy or love, so you have to create someone who is.

Q: Do you think that this backstory that they create is something that really happened to them, or is it something they just make up?

AM: I don't know. That, of course, is the question that's raised in the film. That's a sympathetic way of looking at it.

Q: Given the very personal nature of this material, how difficult was it to hand it over to somebody else for the movie?

AM: I was so excited when they told me Patrick Stettner had agreed to take on the film, because I had seen The Business of Strangers, and it's just one long... how do you say mindfuck politely? I loved it, because it's just so creepy. It's about where your mind [goes], and I felt that was a perfect parallel to what's going on in The Night Listener. The notion that there aren't any villains here, but rather where our minds go and what we do with it.

Q: Now that the story has entered the world of fiction, do new aspects of the story come to you?

AM: The fiction fleshed out the truth. People came up to me at book signings, and at the time the book came out, I wasn't talking about any real-life inspiration. I was afraid that [Tony] still existed, and that I would be sitting there talking about this hoax when this one-lunged, one-legged, one-testicled boy would walk in. (She cut off the testicle, by the way, to explain why his voice wasn't changing. It lasted for so long that he was moving well into adolescence, and still sounding 13.)

In any case, people would come up to me at signings, lean very close, and whisper, "Anthony Godby Johnson." They'd just say his name to me. And I'd say, "Give me your phone number." And then we'd talk. I talked to an ex-nun, who'd arranged to bring a rabbi from Israel to convert him to Judaism because he said he wanted to convert. He was anything you needed him to be. To me, he was sort of a wisecracking secular humanist, very pro-gay, who would talk to me about homophobia and the AIDS wards. He was anything you needed him to be.

The best thing he ever did for me, and it was a great laugh, was when I was on the phone with him. He said, "Hang on, I've got another call I need to take." He came back two minutes later and said, "That was Fred," meaning Fred Rogers. And this was a time when Tales of the City had been under attack by the religious right, and PBS had dropped the sequel because of it. We had been condemned by three Southern legislatures -- one of the proudest moments of my life -- and he said, "Fred has a message for you: tell PBS to go fuck itself." I said, "Mr. Rogers does not say that!" and he said, "Oh you don't know how he talks!" [Mr. Rogers] is a Presbyterian minister, but [Tony] knew that I would think that that was just the coolest little insight.

Q: Do you ever think that this was maybe a split personality: something that she wasn't aware of?

AM: Well, she did a third voice one time, and that really freaked me out. [Tony] had always talked about a doctor that lived there, who helped to take care of him, and that way they could explain why he wasn't in a hospital. When I was told about the doctor, he was always this motorcycle-riding, tough-talking bisexual from Brooklyn. [Tony] would always tell these stories about what a great character he was. One time he said, "Jerry's here, you want to talk to him?" And Jerry came on the phone and it was a bad impersonation. It sounded like a third version of the same voice. It was very creepy.

Q: What effect to you think the experience had on you as a person? Did it make you bitter?

AM: Maybe I was grown-up enough, I don't know. I didn't feel like I'd lost my best friend, but some people did. I had to really talk some people -- mostly straight men -- down from a very bad place. They had assumed a sort of paternal relationship with him. Some of these guys aren't even willing to talk now, they're so embarrassed by it. I'm a gay man, I've lived with embarrassment. I don't feel I ever had anything to be embarrassed about. I don't understand why other people do. All I ever did was act on what I saw before me and what I thought needed to be done.

Q: Do you think this made you a less trusting person?

AM: I will be careful about who I open my life to again over the phone.

Q: How about as a professional creator of fiction, with the blur between someone who tells stories and someone who lies?

AM: That, of course, is the theme of the movie. Who's got factitious disorder here? Is it Gabriel or is it her? I know the difference, though I have to admit that I can tell anecdotes about my life, and can... refine them to a certain degree. But I do tell stories, and sometimes I think: is this the way it happened in the book, or is this the way it actually happened to me? I have to remember now.

Article published 08.07.2006.

http://www.flipsidemovies.com/armisteadmaupin.html

Anthony Godby Johnson, The Invisible Boy Part II

Thursday, August 03, 2006

Tad Friend dug deeper still. He revealed that “Vicki Johnson” was most likely Joanne Victoria Fraginals, an overweight single woman in her forties who then resided in Union City, New Jersey. She may have worked as a social worker, but there was no sign of a husband or ex-husband who fit the description of Johnson. Earlier, Michele Ingrassia had visited the pharmacy below Vicki's apartment and learned that no one there knew of Tony.
Fraginals insisted that her “son” was very real, alive, and unwell, still guarding his identity to protect him from the rogue New York cops that were out to get him. Tony's website remained online, though it became inactive shortly after Friend’s article appeared and was never updated again.

Where is Vicki now?

Sometime in the late '90s, as Friend was conducting his investigation of the Invisible Boy, Vicki Fraginals married Dr. Marc Zackheim, a psychotherapist who worked with Indiana group homes for toubled teen boys and also maintained a private practice in Illinois. If there was a "Mr. Johnson", he had divorced Vicki without ever living together, because no one Ingrassia and Friend questioned had any knowledge of him, and the P.I. hired by Olbermann described Vicki as a single mother. The Zackheims settled in Illinois. In 1999 they adopted four brothers, ages 1-6. In 2004, Dr. Zackheim was accused of sexually fondling boys in the group home where he works. He was acquitted.
Marc Zackheim now acts as the family spokesman whenever someone inquires about Tony. He has accused Maupin of inventing the hoax scenario to exploit Tony's story for his own profit. This still wouldn't explain why so many people "close" to Tony also doubt that he ever existed, nor why the same voice analysis expert who identified Osama bin Laden's voice on tape, Tom Owen, determined that the recorded voices of Vicki and "Tony" issued from the same person. Nor why "Tony" and the Zackheims still hide his identity from the world, when the threat from the pedophiles is long past (surely they'd have realized by now that Tony's not going to expose them).

Since Vicki and Mark apparently met after Tony came of age, it's possible Dr. Zackheim actually believes his wife's stories of having raised an AIDS-afflicted teenager. But that's unlikely. Dr. Z has threatened legal action against people attempting to investigate Tony's background, a threat so empty one has to wonder why he feels desperate enough to utter it. Perhaps he knows exactly how unstable his wife is, and is only trying to protect her from further humiliation.

A slim possibility remains that Tony was/is real, and his story was dramatically altered to protect his identity. He was ill as a teen, but never as close to death from AIDS as his friends were led to believe. This still leaves burning questions. Why did Tony and Vicki invent a husband/father named Johnson? Why were trusted friends denied even the briefest visits? How did an expert mistake Tony's voice for Vicki's? And why has Tony stopped being a voice in the AIDS community?

Very few of Tony's former friends cling to this hope. Many of them, like Keith Olbermann, don't speak publicy of him anymore (no one is ever eager to admit they've helped further a hoax, even unwittingly). Jack L. Godby, the AIDS counselor who wrote an introduction for A Rock and a Hard Place, is a notable exception; he still recieves phone calls and letters from Tony on occasion, and he seems to believe his "son" is real.

To this day, Vicki Zackheim claims Anthony Godby Johnson (now 28) is alive. If so, he truly is a miracle. He contracted AIDS no later than 1989, long before any of today’s AIDS drugs were introduced, yet somehow survived bouts of pneumonia; TB; a stroke; a coma; and the losses of his leg, spleen, and one testicle. Medical researchers would be knocking down his door, if they knew where to find it. Sadly, this medical and emotional miracle has gone silent. He didn’t even surface long enough to rebut The Night Listener or Tad Friend‘s “Virtual Love”. The Invisible Boy is now the Invisible Man, lost in the shadow of Vicki Zackheim, the Invisible Woman.

More "Tonys"

Since A Rock and a Hard Place, a few eerily similar (and equally mysterious) hoaxes have been perpetrated. In the late ‘90s, an online community rallied around 19-year-old Kansan Kaycee Nicole Swenson, a cancer patient. Her supporters were devastated when she died of a brain aneurysm in 2001, until a group of suspicious Metafilter friends looked into her story and discovered that Kaycee was the invention of a middle-aged mother named Debbie Swenson, who did not have cancer. Swenson feebly explained that she created Kaycee to tell the stories of real cancer patients she had known.

Then there’s the case of “J.T. LeRoy”, an HIV-positive cross-dresser who wrote darkly comic fiction about his life as a boy prostitute. Earlier this year, San Francisco musician Geoffrey Knoop finally confessed - under pressure from suspicious reporters - that J.T. was the invention of his 40-year-old girlfriend, Laura Albert. He/she was played in public by Albert or by Knoop’s younger sister, Savannah, sporting dark sunglasses and blonde wigs.

Scarcely a week after the James Frey and J.T. LeRoy scandals erupted, Navajo author Nasdijj was unmasked as well. Nasdijj had written three acclaimed memoirs: In The Blood Flows Like a River Through My Dreams (2000), he described the life and death of his adopted son, “Tommy Nothing Fancy", who suffered severe Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. Geronimo’s Bones (2004) was about his own childhood on the reservation and in migrant-worker camps. The Dog and the Boy are Sleeping (2003) was about the life and death of his second adopted son, an AIDS-afflicted 12-year-old boy named Awee, and the difficulties of obtaining adequate AIDS care on the reservation. Other Navajos had their doubts about Nasdiij, but that didn’t stop the New York Times and other prestigious publications from giving him rave reviews. Then reporter Matthew Fleischer of the LA Times revealed that Nasdijj was really Tim Barrus, a middle-class white man from New Jersey whose first career - as an author of gay erotica - had failed. Barrus isn’t Native, wasn't raised by migrant workers, and never adopted children.

[Correction: Barrus and his wife, who divorced sometime in the '70s, adopted and briefly cared for a boy reportedly suffering from autism. He survived to adulthood. For more information from and about Mr. Barrus, read the comments at the end of this post.]

Commenting on the James Frey/J.T. LeRoy scandals, Armistead Maupin told ABC News, "I assumed the publishing industry would be embarrassed. But the problem is that the publishing industry salivates a little too hard over the Jerry Springeresque stories."
Update: The Boy in the Photos Has Been Identified
Thanks to ABC's 20/20, which aired a story on the questions surrounding "Tony" around the time the film The Night Listener was released, the little boy in the photos sent to Maupin and others has been identified. A New Jersey woman namd Cary Riecken, watching the program, recognized him as Steve Tarabokija, a grade-school classmate of her son at Sacred Heart Grade School in North Bergen, New Jersey. (Two other viewers recognized him, as well.) Cary Riecken and the Tarabokija family appeared on a 20/20 update on January 12, 2007.
Vickie Fraginals was Steve's 4th-grade teacher at Sacred Heart, rememberd as a very involved teacher who threw herself into activities like school plays and frequently took photos of her students. Cary Riecken characterized her as a woman who craved attention and pity.
Steve, now a 26-year-old traffic engineer, was completely unaware of the Tony controversy and Vickie's use of his photos. He recalls her as one of the "nicest" grammer-school teachers he had, but his family feels Mrs. Zackheim owes him an apology.
In lieu of an explanation, the Zackheims' lawyer sent a 140-page document to 20/20, with sworn statements from the Zackheims and three other people who claim to have met Tony in person. The document didn't address the photos at all.
The blurry image of "Tony" on the front cover of A Rock and a Hard Place was also a photo of Steve Tarabokija.

http://swallowingthecamel.blogspot.com/2006/08/tad-friend-dug-deeper-still.html

Anthony Godby Johnson, The Invisible Boy Part I

Thursday, August 03, 2006
Anthony Godby Johnson, The Invisible Boy

Part I: A Boy Wonder

Tony Johnson was a Republican’s dreamchild: A kid who excelled effortlessly in school, never accepted handouts, and was determined to better himself, despite having a childhood that would’ve made Dickens blanch. What follows is Anthony Godby Johnson’s story as he told it in his 1993 memoir, A Rock and a Hard Place:One Boy's Triumphant Story, and as experienced by some of the literary luminaries he befriended.

By his twelfth birthday, Tony had already been to hell and back. Born to outwardly average parents in New York City sometime in 1978, he was brutally beaten and pimped out to his policeman father’s friends on a routine basis from the age of four. He was deliberately deprived of food, a proper bed, and even minimal affection. By rights, Tony should have suffered psychological disturbance that would make Harry Harlow’s monkeys look as calm as Buddhist monks, but Tony had the fortune to be an infinitely old soul with a blazing intellect. He mothered himself with episodes of Mr. Rogers and huge quantities of aspirin, and took such solace in study that he was enrolled in a Brooklyn school for gifted children. Even a spell of suicidal depression at age 11 couldn’t keep him down, for he found unexpected salvation in the form of a suicide-hotline worker. The man, Johnson (a pseudonym), immediately dispatched a social worker named Vicki to rescue Tony. Finally freed from the pedophile ring in 1989, the boy was diagnosed with several serious ailments, including untreated syphilis that had had reached such an advanced stage it had caused permanent damage to his lungs. He would spend most of his teen years in and out of hospital, always on the verge of death.

Tony was not destined to become the sum of his setbacks, but a magnetic force. People of all ages were drawn to his humor, his resiliency, his astonishing strength of character. In many ways he was a typical teenager, swearing like a sea captain and talking baseball and girls, yet he radiated the inner peace of a lama… or perhaps of his heroes, Mr. Rogers and Kermit the Frog. The miraculous touched every corner of his life, even spreading to those around him. The man who talked him out of committing suicide, Mr. Johnson, was so taken with Tony that he called him his son, and traveled to meet him. The man instantly fell in love with Tony and his new mom, Vicki. Vicki and Johnson married and adopted Tony, relocating to a town in the Midwest where the New York pedophiles couldn’t find them.

Tony flourished. Despite continual bouts of pneumonia that required lung-draining, an inexplicable stroke that left him temporarily paralyzed, and a coma, Tony graduated from high school at fourteen with the help of private tutors. Good colleges courted him. Then he tested positive for the AIDS virus, sending his new family into a tailspin.

The Make-a-Wish Foundation supplied 14-year-old Tony with a computer so he could begin writing his life story; not the story of his near-destruction at the hands of his parents and their buddies, but the story of his salvation, and the blooming of love and compassion that followed. Vickie, Johnson, and a coterie of new friends relentlessly encouraged Tony to fulfill his destiny. To do that, he would need some mentors. One of them was AIDS counselor Jack L. Godby, a gay black man from Arkansas who got to know Tony through correspondence and phone conversations. Godby formed such a close bond with Tony that Godby became "Pops" (Johnson was "Dad"). Tony collected several such "moms" and "dads", as though overcompensating for the loss of his own family.

Tony was drawn to the stories of other survivors, writers like Paul Monette and Armistead Maupin, who had both been touched by AIDS. (Maupin had lost friends and lovers to AIDS, and Monette had been diagnosed in 1991.) At thirteen, Tony was such a devoted fan of Monette, he had traded sports magazines for copies of his novels Love Alone and Borrowed Time during one of his many hospital stays. He raptly listened to radio installments of Maupin’s Tales of the City, the bittersweet sexual adventures of a group of gays and lesbians in seventies/eighties San Francisco. Though he was a typically girl-crazy teenager, Tony was extremely sympathetic to the persecution suffered by gays and lesbians.
Vickie encouraged her son to write to some of his heroes, and he did. He penned fan letters to Mr. Rogers, Monette and Maupin, Mickey Mantle, Tom Robbins, Bob Paris, and Jermaine Jackson, and Keith Olbermann, among others. He cultivated correspondence with most of these heroes, but others developed an even stronger bond with the boy through marathon phone conversations. These worldly older men were invariably charmed and awed by Tony’s disarming combination of childlike simplicity (he still loved coloring books), wisdom, and grit.
Monette, Maupin, and Mr. Rogers all provided blurbs for A Rock and a Hard Place: One Boy's Triumphant Story. Maupin wrote, “I want to be like this young man when I grow up.” Monette and Jack Godby provided introductions for the book, Fred Rogers the afterword. Crown Publishers released the book in 1993, when Tony was just fifteen years old. He wasn't expected to live long.

Armistead Maupin became more closely involved with Tony than any of the boy's other mentors soon after his editor, David Groff of Crown Publishers, sent him a copy of Tony’s manuscript for perusal. A warm but unfawning phone call from Tony reinforced his impression that this boy had a unique voice. Maupin became one of the many adults to phone Tony at his new home in the Midwest to offer him ongoing support and encouragement. Like the others, he discovered that Tony, laid up in bed most the time and too weak to do anything that other 14-year-olds do, gave far more than he took. He could relate to adults on an entirely mature level, and he radiated humor and strength. In a string of late-night phone conversations that were often interrupted by Tony’s violent fits of coughing, the celebrated gay author and the tough-talking, scrappy teenager formed such a tight bond that Maupin tentatively began referring to Tony as his son. Tony called him Dad.

In his fourteenth and fifteenth years, Tony lost a leg and a testicle to AIDS and contracted TB. Death seemed so imminent that his loved ones secretly lived in fear of it, but Tony focused only on living. By all accounts, he rarely (if ever) slid into depression or self-pity. Everyone connected to him took courage fom this precocious strength, and when it was published, A Rock and a Hard Place deeply affected readers across the U.S., from clinical social workers to grade-school teachers. Vickie set up a website, Tony’s World, through which her son could update fans on his condition and post articles on child abuse issues. His story was a wake-up call to all adults: Horrific child abuse does happen, and it happens right around the corner from where you live. But love can help ease the hurt, bring trampled children to their feet.

Suspicions

Vickie Johnson was Tony’s primary caregiver while Mr. Johnson worked, and she protected him fiercely. The family’s real identity was concealed to prevent his former abusers from locating him, since most of them had not even been investigated for molestation. Everyone who knew Tony through phone conversations, including Maupin and Monette, were eager to meet Tony. He was open to the idea, and so was Vicki, but due to his health and the safety concerns, face-to-face meetings never took place. Maupin once made it all the way to the Midwest only to be told that Tony was too sick to receive visitors, and Maupin told ABC News the same thing happened to a rabbi who traveled from Israel to see Tony. Finally, Vicki Johnson politely insisted that phone friends refrain from stopping by. Tony was lurching from one medical crisis to the next, always on the precipice of death, and any excitement could undo him. Vicki even began to change her phone number frequently, presumably to prevent Tony’s fans from interrupting his recovery with continuous calls. Gradually, Tony's friends began to wonder why no one had personally met with Tony, not even his editors at Crown Publishers in New York nor his agent, Ron Bernstien. Anthony Godby Johnson was the Invisible Boy, always a phone call away but forever out of reach.

Before the end of 1993, suspicions were cropping up in the literary world. Armistaud Maupin’s partner, Terry Anderson, was positive Tony and Vicki Johnson were the same person: Tony was embarrassed by his feminine voice, explaining he hadn’t gone through all the changes of puberty due to his illness. After his aborted visit to the Johnson household, Maupin had his suspicions, too.
Keith Olbermann had been so moved by A Rock and a Hard Place that he contacted Tony, and quickly become supporter and "brother" to the boy. They were collaborating on a book about baseball when Olbermann's doubts surfaced. He also had phone chats with Vicki and one of Tony's doctors, and gradually noticed that all three voices sounded extremely similar. Also, there were never any background conversations or noises when the three people were supposedly in the same room. The private investigator he hired to check into Vicki and Tony's story found that Vicki lived with her two overweight daughters... but no son. (Maupin recently appeared on Olbermann's show to discuss Tony: video here). Olbermann had given a thousand dollars to Vicki to help her pay for "black market" medication Tony desperately needed, and according to Maupin she solicitated donations from other supporters, too.
One reader discovered that none of the schools in Brooklyn matched the description of the gifted students' school that Tony attended.
Ron Bernstein, Tony's agent, had almost struck a deal with HBO to make a film about Tony when Vicki declared that no one from HBO would be allowed to see Tony in his person, causing the deal to collapse. This incident stirred the first serious doubts in Bernstein's mind.
Keith Olbermann was working on a book about baseball with Tony when his doubts surfaced. He reportedly hired a private investigator to look into the matter, and the evidence he provided convinced Olbermann that Tony was a figment of someone's imagination.
Gay author John Preston openly declared A Rock and a Hard Place a hoax.
Newsweek reporter Michele Ingrassia was the first person to investigate Tony’s background thoroughly. She interviewed his editor at Crown, his publicist, some of his penpals, the Make-a-Wish worker who arranged for Tony to receive his computer, and the head of an HIV/AIDS group who was in contact with Tony and Vickie. None of these people had ever laid eyes on Tony. Ingrassia next tried to find any record of a NYC policeman and his wife being convicted in 1989 or the early '90s of the sexual abuse of their son, and found nothing. Her story on Tony was titled “The Author Nobody’s Seen”.
The article should have ended there, but Ingrassia waded into very slanderous speculation by hinting that Paul Monette had invented Tony in a misguided effort to raise AIDS awareness. This idea was picked up by other media outlets, then quietly dropped when supporting evidence failed to surface.

No one fitting the description of the man known as Johnson was ever located, and Vicki Johnson was quick to verbally attack anyone who questioned her adopted son’s motives, much less his existence. Monette didn’t enter the fray, but it was clear he still believed in the truth of Tony and his story.

To everyone’s astonishment, Tony continued to survive and thrive. In 1994, just sixteen years old, he penned a regular column for a Hawaiian AIDS publication and maintained Tony’s World. In 1997, his story was told in the ABC documentary About Us: The Dignity of Children, hosted by Oprah Winfrey. An actor portrayed the younger Tony, and his voice and identity were disguised. Strangely, reports surfaced that Tony was living with the documentary’s producer, Lesley Karsten, as her “son”.

At the end of a painful period of reflection and investigation, Maupin wrote a thinly fictionalized account of his experience with the Invisible Boy, The Night Listener. He had been talking to Tony for over six years at this point, and though he had never confronted Tony or Vicki about his suspicions for fear that he could be wrong, the time had come to deal with his nagging inner voice. Maupin told Tony and Vicki that he was writing the novel. Amazingly, Tony accepted this with quiet grace. "I'm a big boy," he told his friend. "I know the difference between fact and fiction." Maupin even asked Vicki to name the boy character in the book, and she chose “Pete”. Vicki became “Donna”.
After the novel came out, however, Maupin received an angry call from Vicki. She was incensed that he had "trashed" Tony, and never spoke to him again.

The novel’s publication in 2000 sparked fresh interest in the mystery of the Invisible Boy, leading journalist Tad Friend to investigate. His story, "Virtual Love", appeared in the November 22, 2001 issue of The New Yorker. Like Ingrassia, Friend concluded that no one but Vicki Johnson was willing to admit seeing Tony Johnson with her own eyes, though Maupin and perhaps other friends had received snapshots of an adorable preteen boy with light-brown hair, big brown (or green) eyes, and a radiant smile. This boy remained unidentified for many years.

http://swallowingthecamel.blogspot.com/2006/08/boy-wonder-tony-johnson-was.html

Armistead Maupin on Charlie Rose

Originally aired Friday, November 24, 2000

Armistead Maupin

Armistead Maupin is a gay icon. He is best known for Tales of the City which became a television mini-series. His new novel is The Night Listener and it is about a writer who reads his work on the air as a radio serial.

Details or Transcript:

The writer of the popular Tales of the City series, Armistead Maupin, talks to Michael Cathcart about his new book, The Night Listener

Michael Cathcart: Is gay lit an empowering category for Armistead Maupin?
Armistead Maupin: I'm very happy to have been honest about my sexuality all these years. But it never meant that I was trying to narrow my audience or that I was just writing for some people or about some people. I've always had a broad canvas in terms of what I try to cover in my writing.

MC: The Night Listener is a story told by a man called Gabriel Noone. Can you tell us about him?
AM: He's a radio story-teller, and he has a rather wide listenership around the country. He's just broken up with his partner of many years, so he's in a state of abject misery. He's been sent the manuscript to a forthcoming book by a publisher in New York. The book that he's sent is by a 13-year-old author in the Mid-West who's had this horrific childhood, in which he was basically sold into prostitution by his parents. But the book is so funny and brave and well-written that Gabriel decides he wants to contact this boy and tell him what a beautiful job he's done. And he does, he discovers that the boy has been listening to his radio show for a year or so and has started to see the storyteller as a father figure. These two unlikely people begin a friendship on the telephone, in which they're able to unload some of their secrets, especially matters of the heart. And out of that grows a mystery, that I don't want to talk about too much, because it gives something away... But I've always wanted to write a mystery story about the way the heart works, and that's what The Night Listener is - the closest I could get to that.

MC: You and Gabriel Noone, your narrator, have points of overlap. You don't seem uncomfortable with the fact that people want to identify the book with you.

AM: I'm not uncomfortable with it, but I want people to understand what I've done, which is to take myself and the people I love, and cast us in a sort of mystery story. I attempted to make it emotionally autobiographical, to tap into real things in my life, in order to give it resonance. But I've played fast and loose with the facts - it's not the way things happened.

MC: I can't help noting that Gabriel Noone is one touch of the space bar from being Gabriel No one. Are you tantalised by this postmodern fascination with the "death of the author"?

AM: I like playing with my readers in that regard. I know people are curious about me, and I like to be able to feed out bits and pieces. At the same time, if I wanted to write a memoir, I would be writing a memoir. I play with all sorts of ideas in The Night Listener, in terms of my own lore - there's a character in the book who was actually born in Tales of the City. These are just the games I like to play - I can't work that into any postmodern speculation about where the author has gone. I feel connected with my readers in a big way. I don't feel it's the text talking; it's me talking. I didn't realise for many years, but I actually write to be read aloud. Every paragraph of my work has to do with the cadences of my own speaking voice, what would most naturally come out of my own mouth. The audio version of this that I read is as much fun for me as the novel itself, especially given the fact that the narrator is a radio story-teller, so it becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophesy.

MC: When you're sitting there at the word processor, are you actually mouthing the words as you go?
AM: Absolutely. I speak them out loud. It's quite a process - it's so slow for me. I get maybe two pages a day done on a very good day because I don't like to move from one paragraph to the next until I'm certain that I've got the music of it right - the flow of it.

MC: That suggests that your work belongs on the radio more than it does on the telly...
AM: Certainly, in The Night Listener, the nature of the mystery is all about the nature of voices - the way in which voices seduce us and cause our imagination to expand. It's a fascinating thing - radio makes the imagination reach outwards. You watch television and you're basically staring at a box. Radio allows the expansion of thought in a very dramatic way. And it also seduces in ways that television does not. Anyone who's ever ridden in a car late at night and listened to - say, you - on the radio, knows what the experience is: the intimacy, the way we connect with another voice. It's a very intimate bond. And I was fascinated by the way in which that would impact upon the central mystery of The Night Listener.

MC: Do you undertake, in some sense, to be vulnerable, to be honest about yourself...?
AM: I think that's an old habit. When I came out of the closet in a public way in my writing and in person, I felt a certain exhilaration about that. The more vulnerable I make myself, the more I tell the hard truths about myself, the closer it brings me to readers. People relate to it when you tell those kind of truths about yourself. They actually feel closer to you. So in some ways, it's a self-serving act to make yourself vulnerable because people give you credit for that in some ways...

I think it's why readers read and writers write. We want some proof that somebody else does it too. I've made a career out of trying to be honest about myself in whatever way is necessary, and it can be hard sometimes, but the payoff is enormous in the long run.

MC: In some ways, this is a novel about belief and having the courage to believe, but it's also a warning against gullability. Are you exploring the line between foolishness and belief?
AM: Somebody calls it the line between truth and self-delusion. I think that's very true. I think it's inherent in my personality that I want to believe and the more outlandish the story I'm told, the more I want to embrace it. And a lot of us are that way. Sometimes, someone else's story captures your imagination to such a degree that you feel as if you're a participant in their lives, and that can be very seductive. The interesting thing about The Night Listener is that a number of people have contacted me on the road. Rosie O'Donnell, the talk show host, called me to say that she had had a similar experience with someone who had excited her imagination in that kind of way. And I think there's a particular kind of personality - people who want to help out, who can make themselves vulnerable by believing when they shouldn't. I'm not sorry I do that, but it is a warning to myself.

This is an edited transcript of Michael Cathcart's interview with Armistead Maupin on Arts Today, Radio National, 10am

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/atoday/stories/s202687.htm

Memoir of an absolute fabulist

Memoir of an absolute fabulist
Article from: The Scotsman
Article date: September 20, 2000
Author: Gina Arnold


San Francisco is a city well known for its eccentricities, but the latest one may take the cake. On the morning before local author Armistead Maupin left for a tour of Britain to promote his new book, The Night Listener, the local newspaper announced that, in honour of slain city supervisor Harvey Milk the city is going to cause a large pink cloud of steam to hover over the corner of Castro and Market Streets. Permanently.

That corner happens to be the centre of the gay district - a region which Maupin himself has celebrated and made famous via his six-book Tales of the City series and when told about the big pink cloud, his reaction was appropriately quizzical.

"Oh my goodness," he exclaimed, laughing hugely. "Are you sure? Well, I'm just going to have to move some place where a big black cloud is hovering over the neighbourhood."

Maupin's astonishment is far from feigned, but the truth is, there is something pink cloudy about the rosy vision of San Francisco he has propounded over the years. His books have achieved that rarest of statures, world acclaim, having remained in print for the past two decades.

Three Channel 4 series have been made of the books (the third instalment comes out in early 2001) but, most important of all, Maupin's view of his adopted home - witty and trenchant, sometimes unabashedly sentimental, but never smug or self-serving - has come to colour the city's perception of itself.

In short, along with a handful of other writers and newspapermen - Jack London and Mark Twain in particular - his light, dry, authorial voice has defined the city's quirky, free-spirited, and frankly homosexual ethos ever since he began publishing it as a daily fictional serial story, Tales of the City, in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1976.

His voice is gentle, courtly, and still touched with the southern accent, as Maupin grew up not in California, but in Raleigh, North Carolina, where his patrician - and very right-wing - father rubbed elbows with the local gentry.

After a stint in Vietnam, and later as a fledgling TV reporter, Maupin moved to San Francisco, where he began writing the soon-to- be smash serial that celebrated (among other things) the free and easy gay lifestyle of the Castro District.

Tales chronicled the lives of a group of twentysomething characters and their mysterious landlady, Anna Madrigal, with whom they live in a cosy apartment building on the north side of the city. The protagonist of his latest book, The Night Listener, however, lives in a more western neighbourhood called Woodside.

It is, oddly enough, the same neighbourhood that Maupin himself lives in. His name is Gabriel Noone and he is a 54-year-old gay man who grew up in the deep south, did a stint in Vietnam, worked in TV journalism, and made his name in the 1970s with a serial that celebrated gay life - albeit one that appeared on radio, rather than in the newspaper. "I am," says Noone at the start of the book, " a fabulist by trade ... I've spent years looting my life for fiction."

The sentence inspires one obvious question: is Gabriel Noone a thinly-veiled Armistead Maupin, and if so, how much dirt is in here?

"Well, I'm just not going to tell you," says Maupin. "No, I'm not trying to be coy, but my best material has always arisen from my reactions to actual experiences. On the other hand, I like to manipulate the circumstances and characters to make sense of them - real life is haphazard and tedious and often contradictory.

"But you step into really uncertain territory when you start trying to unravel the two things. You'll forgive me if I don't tell you quite how I do it.

"I'll say this much," he adds, referring to several plot points in the book. "I did break up with my partner four years ago, I do have an aristocratic southern past, and an 85-year-old father who still practices law and hobnobs with Jesse Helms."

And then he relents a little more. "Gabriel is closer to me than any character I've written about so far. I have to cop to that because the physical characteristics are so close - he's an older, greyer me. But that said, Tales' Michael's sensibility was influenced by mine, and so was Maryann's.

"And Cadence Roth," - the main character in his last novel, Maybe the Moon - "was a 31in tall female Jewish dwarf, but a lot of what was on my mind at the time I said through her.
"She was just a really good disguise."

So what part of The Night Listener is fiction? "I do make some things up out of whole cloth," adds Maupin.

"I just spoke to my sister, who runs a bed and breakfast in New Zealand, and she'd just spent an hour on the phone reassuring my brother that I hadn't had sex in the cab of a truck in a snowstorm."

He laughs, delighted. "Of course in many ways I wish I had!"

Another way Maupin differs from Noone, he adds, is that "I am considerably more confident about my writing abilities than Gabriel is.

"But confidence isn't an interesting thing to explore. Insecurity is something audiences can relate to, and for that reason, I tend to say my worst things first."

For that reason Noone, who is suffering from writers' block in the novel, says he feels, "as if I'd broken into the Temple of Literature through some unlocked basement window".

Maupin denies feeling that way - although one can't help but wonder if he has suffered from the malady in question since The Night Listener is his first book in eight years.

He says he has spent the interim working on the mini-series version of Tales, (starring Laura Linney and Olympia Dukakis) and writing a libretto for an opera.

"I'm not a compulsive worker," he shrugs. "Also, I like to have a long period of letting my life fill up, so I can tap into it for ideas."

The problem with that literary tactic, Maupin admits, is that so often life imitates fiction.
For example, in the novel, there is a strand pertaining to the importance of radio broadcasting. Via his nightly radio show, Noone's voice becomes the vehicle for the sickly thirteen-year-old Pete to come to terms with life's tragedies.

Just before Maupin finished the book, his - "what do you call it?" he wonders aloud, "former significant other? Business partner? Friend? Ex-lover?" - Terry Anderson came up with the idea of marketing The Night Listener online, as the first spoken word serial available on the web via streaming audio.

This month each chapter, read aloud by the author, became available for direct downloading on Salon.com. For the technophobes among us (and Maupin would count himself in that group) the hardcover version of the book is in shops now. Because the book involves a main character whose job is to read his stories aloud, it is perfect for such a project. But Maupin insists it is merely fortuitous; indeed, the book was almost done before the streaming technology for such a co-presentation was even ready.

"But that kind of stuff happens to me all the time," he says. "Like when I first invented the character Anna Madrigal, who was supposed to be real evocative of Mrs Miniver, I only discovered her name was an anagram for what she was when a reader alerted me to it, well into the story.

"And I didn't intend for D'or to be a white woman dying her skin black until someone wrote in and told me that she just seemed like a white character trying to be black. I was really hurt by that until I realised I could just go with it."

For those in the know, one character from Tales plays a central role in The Night Listener. And Milk - he of pink cloud fame - is also mentioned, as are many other San Francisco luminaries and touchstones.

The Night Listener is an updating of the San Francisco zeitgeist - although the two main things that dominate SF life right now, the profusion of dot.com businesses and the soaring price of property, are not mentioned herein.

Instead, the novel concerns the effect of AIDS, not just on those who've contracted it, but on those who haven't.

In some ways The Night Listener is scientifically up to the minute. In it, Noone's live-in lover has had AIDS for years, but protease inhibitors have eradicated the virus from his body, a circumstance that alters each man's attitude towards each other, their relationship, and even towards life itself.

The Night Listener reads like a memoir, and it certainly must be in parts, but it is also - like Tales before it - a real page turner, a plot-driven, perfectly-paced mystery of sorts, permeated by Maupin's patented light touch.

He is, as he himself says, "kind of like a comedian who can't use all his best material for fear of losing the audience".

That's why reading aloud, on his many book tours, is one of this favourite things. "Bliss," he calls it, "at least when it's in front of a live audience."

But reading aloud a nine-hour book - which took seven days in a recording studio - was a more gruelling task.

Was he embarrassed to read the sex scenes aloud? Maupin roars with laughter again. "In a single word: Yes," he shouts. "I kept wondering if the engineer could see me blushing behind the panel. And when I heard it read back all I could think was, 'thank God my mom's been dead for years.'

"But then, I've been afflicted by a perennial mild embarrassment my entire life. Sometimes," he adds, sighing, "I think I've deliberately put myself into situations to get past that - because I really believe we should be proud of who we are and what we do. If we aren't, we shouldn't be doing them."

Gina Arnold. "Memoir of an absolute fabulist." The Scotsman. Scotsman Publications. 2000. HighBeam Research. 13 Dec. 2008