USA TODAY (Arlington, VA)
November 20, 1989
Author: RAY MUNGO(c) Gannett News Service
Armistead Maupin's "Tales of the City" first appeared in serial form in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1976, and were an immediate sensation. Maupin's fictional characters were quintessential San Franciscans - gay, bisexual, straight, hip, yuppie, smart, stoned. Their lives reflected the social trends of the city by the Bay.
His readers embraced the zany denizens of 28 Barbary Lane, led by the marijuana-growing landlady, Mrs. Madrigal, as real friends and neighbors. When a character took ill or was in danger, the Chronicle switchboard lit up with concerned callers.
Five earlier books have followed the adventures of Maupin's diverse flock. This sixth novel, "Sure of You," has been announced as the final installment in the series, and is the first that has never appeared in newspaper form. Just as San Francisco has changed from 1976 to today, from the era of unbridled sensuality to the age of AIDS, Maupin's "Tales" have evolved from whimsy and dada to death and AZT.
As a result, "Sure of You" is a more serious book than the earlier ones. It's a quietly understated small masterpiece of modern consciousness, dialogue and concern. It doesn't have as many laughs, and it may even move you to tears.
Mary Ann Singleton has become the most popular TV talk show host in San Francisco as the story continues; she is married to Brian Hawkins, co-owner of the Plant Parenthood nursery, and their 5-year-old daughter Shawna is precocious and appealing. But when old flame Burke Andrew, now a New York television producer, re-enters her life and offers her a syndicated national show, she has to decide between family and career.
Mary Ann confides, as ever, in her gay friend Michael Tolliver, who's also her husband's business partner. Michael is HIV-positive and carries a beeper that tells him when to take his pills. He counts his T-cells while waiting for the first symptoms of the dread disease. "Most people thought you got this thing and died. In truth, you got this thing and waited," Michael says. He lives with gay activist Thack Sweeny, and they practice safe sex.
Russell Rand and his wife, Chloe, are a public model of wedded bliss, but the groom, a top fashion designer, is in the closet. Dear old Mrs. Madrigal winds up on the island of Lesbos in Greece, courted by a handsome widower. Her daughter Mona Ramsey visits, finds love in the birthplace of Sappho and the person of Susan Futterman of Oakland. The chapters set in Greece are full of radiant beauty and cheer and the humor of American reaction to Greek culture.
But the return to San Francisco brings inevitable immersion in the plague. Michael wonders if a new zit could be Kaposi's sarcoma. Mary Ann ponders the value of success at the price of divorce. Even Shawna has grown up fast.
The devil-may-care, wacky spirit and plot development of "Tales of the City" is greatly subdued in "Sure of You." Maupin has given us instead a slice of life as it really is in San Francisco today. While this may be the last of the "Tales of the City," it's surely not the last we can expect to hear from Maupin, an impressive talent.
(Ray Mungo, the author of "Famous Long Ago," is at work on a sequel, "How Many Roads." He wrote this review for USA TODAY.)Copyright 1989, 2009 Gannett Co., Inc. All rights reserved.
Record Number: 118876
Monday, November 20, 1989
For 15 Years, He's Told Tales of San Francisco
Article from: The Boston Globe
Article date: November 20, 1989
Author: Richard Dyer, Globe Staff
'He was brown-haired and brown-eyed, mustachioed," writes Armistead Maupin of one of the principal characters in his novel-sequence, "Tales of the City," which has just come to a close with a sixth installment, "Sure of You."
"The mischief and sweetness in his expression," Maupin continues, "would have betrayed him as gay at a PTA meeting in Lynchburg, Virginia."
Maupin wasn't writing about himself when he described Michael Tolliver. And then, again, he was -- he says that he is most of the characters in the sextet, but maybe especially DeDe Halcyon, a lesbian who has a debutante past to live down. Maupin, after all, used to work for Jesse Helms. But when the novelist was in town a while back to give a reading to benefit the AIDS Action Committee, Michael Tolliver was just who he looked like, to the life, and his conversation was full of mischief and sweetness.
Maupin's sequence began in 1974 as a newspaper serial, "Tales of the City," which appeared first in the San Francisco Chronicle and, later, in the Examiner. The tales appeared five days a week in 800-word sequences, and it wasn't long before Maupin's lovable, horny and bewildered characters and their serio-comic sexual and sociological predicaments had won the hearts of a million and half readers.
"People took the characters as real," Maupin says, "and I felt a little like a ventriloquist whose dummy had struck up an independent conversation with the audience. I was only the proprietor of the characters in the story."
Macondray Lane, which was the model for the fictional Barbary Lane, where the characters live, laugh, worry and love, began to attract a steady stream of tourists climbing its now-famous wooden stairs. When someone in the tales fell ill, flowers arrived at the newspaper; people taking out personal ads wrote that they were looking for "a Jon Fielding type"; Maupin received what he calls "bushels of Christian hate mail" in response to the story's celebration of human sexuality in all its variety.
Maupin's original agenda was to produce a series of vignettes depicting famous San Francisco settings and institutions and characteristic local lifestyles. In a way, the tales are also a kind of diary, and all the way through there are things you'd have to have been there to remember. On the very first page of the first book the heroine Mary Ann Singleton arrives in San Francisco from Cleveland, notes that her mood ring is blue, and decides to stay.
"Six weeks into the first series," Maupin says, "I ran out of settings and I ran out of lifestyles. The characters began to interact and a story started happening, and it turned into a 15-year adventure. The first tales were written by a 32-year-old innocent full of adolescent yearning, someone just beginning to discover personal freedom, sex and romance. I winged it a day at a time -- coming out is a journey, not a single act. As the books progressed, I learned more and more about the power of love, friendship, compassion."
Over the years the plots of the tales become increasingly elaborate, following the patterns of 19th-century serial fiction and the old movies that Maupin loves. But Maupin never loses his direction, and his delight in the human comedy never flags. But the tone becomes more and more serious as the writer's life turns him into an activist. In the fourth book, "Babycakes," we learn that a particularly popular character has died of AIDS.
"People wrote to me that I was spoiling their light morning entertainment, but I had to report on life as I saw it, and this is what I was experiencing. In 1982 I lost a friend to AIDS, so I was brutally aware of it early on, and I wanted other people to feel the same sense of loss that I did. The only way I could do it was to take away a character they loved. At the time I liked that character a lot myself, but today when I look at the books I find him insufferable -- his death was the death of a certain romantic ideal that I had."
That romantic ideal was probably one function of Maupin's Southern upbringing -- something the writer is not sentimental about. Born in Washington, D.C., and brought up in Raleigh, N.C., Maupin says he is "amazed" at the person he used to be. "I have a picture of myself shaking hands with Richard Nixon, but it is no longer up on the wall." He grew up as a "tight-assed little Republican kid, an Eagle Scout, a campus conservative at Chapel Hill. Jesse Helms was a friend of my dad's, and I worked for him at WRL television. He nominated me for an award that I won -- Anita Bryant had won the same prize two years before!"
Maupin volunteered to serve in Vietnam and he did. "I thought going to Vietnam would be the easiest way to overcome my doubts about myself and my sexuality. It didn't turn out that way. Friends referred to my Lawrence of Arabia complex, which was more accurate than they knew."
After Vietnam, the Associated Press offered Maupin a job in San Francisco. "I packed my life into my Opel G.T. and drove across the country to California. In five years I held about 10 jobs. As a reporter for the AP I wrote about peace marches and covered the Angela Davis trial. I sold silk, I was a mailboy, I worked for the San Francisco Opera. I was never close to music, but I loved all the delicious, petty intrigues and diva dramas; my office was dish central. In those days a career was secondary to me; what I did really didn't matter -- I just loved the experience of everything."
In 1975 Maupin proposed a serial novel to the Chronicle. He was given five months to develop "Tales of the City" -- by the end of that time he was supposed to have 30 episodes ready, six weeks' worth. "It was exactly six weeks into the series that the first controversial material began to appear -- once the story was going and people were reading it, I began to have some leverage. The paper was expecting a horrified reaction to all the gay characters and situations but it simply didn't happen."
Nevertheless, over the years a lot of energy went into Maupin's battles against the Byzantine censorship imposed by the newspaper on what had become one of its most popular features. "By the time of 'More Tales of the City' in 1977, the managing editors were sweating; they thought I had pushed the limit. 'You've got everything but cannibalism in there,' they thought -- and they were absolutely right! One of the editors kept a chart in his office with columns of the heterosexual and gay characters, and no more than 30 percent of the cast was supposed to be gay because they thought that was roughly the percentage of the gay population in San Francisco. So I had one of my society matron characters fall in love with a Great Dane, which I insisted the editor put in the heterosexual column, and he got rid of the chart after that!"
Although the tales are not directly autobiographical, the books depict places Maupin has been, experiences he has sought out, situations he has investigated. Sometimes Maupin's life and his tales intersected in unexpected ways. Michael Tolliver writes a coming-out letter to his parents, which became Maupin's own coming-out letter when his parents read it in the paper. "It may have been the easiest episode in the whole series to write because I had been composing it for years in my head. If you love someone, it is hard not to tell them the truth about who you are. I have a typical family. My father told me he could accept it but it was really killing my mother; my mother said it was really killing my father. Eventually they came around."
Maupin recognizes that all but one of the principal characters of the series reflect aspects, or "fragments," of his own personality. "One person represents the more cynical side of me; another, like Michael Tolliver, represents the romantic. One of them is the sexual gadabout I used to be and he turns into the completely domestic creature you see before you today. The landlady, Mrs. Madrigal, on the other hand, isn't me at all, but the person I aspire to be. She's the only one who comes from outside myself -- her spirit is that of my grandmother, who was the biggest influence on me in my childhood. She was a suffragette in England, a vegetarian, theosophist, palm reader -- everything Shirley MacLaine does now, she did then. She was a generous loving spirit, and I simply appropriated that. Her spirit is what rescued me in the long run; she was the explainer and the forgiver."
In a way Mrs. Madrigal is who Maupin himself became when the tales turned him into a public figure -- he has been a spokesperson, an educator, a reconciler. His reading at the Brattle Theater was punctuated by cheering and laughter, and during the question period more than one speaker began by expressing thanks to Maupin; he has written books that mean something to people, books they read over and over again. The public role is one that Maupin welcomes. "I don't believe in preaching to the choir; we need to go out and get ourselves heard. I'd just like people to recognize the humanity of others in a way that goes beyond their external differences; everyone feels the same emotions. This is a subversive idea that is very seldom reflected in modern fiction, something that doesn't get said enough. And I think that's the reason people embrace these books."
The final volume, "Sure of You," which entered the best-seller list last week, represents both a summing up and a change. "It's the only book that was not serialized first. There is far less zany plotting, and I can pursue character and emotion, what makes these people the way they are."
In some ways "Sure of You" is the darkest of the books because the '80s are darker than the '70s were -- Michael Tolliver is going through the trials of HIV infection, T-cell counts, AZT and waiting for the other shoe to drop. But in some ways it also is the warmest of the books because of how quietly, nobly and supportively people are responding to new challenges in their lives. One aspect of the book has already been controversial -- one of the best-loved characters has not risen to this challenge; she sells out, betrays her friends, repudiates all she has experienced and learned. "Some people say they were surprised; others have said, 'I knew she was a bitch from the beginning.' There are some people whose ambition is so strong that they can scuttle whatever character they have left; we don't always turn out the way we should." Disarmingly, Maupin adds something to this thought. "Maybe I wrote this as a cautionary tale for myself."
"Sure of You" is definitely the end of the series, Maupin says. "It seemed a good time to stop -- I was afraid of getting stale. The characters had matured along with me, and it was time to kick them out of the nest, and let them fly on their own."
They won't be quite "on their own" in their next incarnation, which will be six two-hour television films made by the producers of "My Beautiful Laundrette." "Television and the movies have been interested all along, but then someone would always say, 'We just love these stories, but we have this slight problem with all those gay and lesbian characters . . .' These producers will film the stories in San Francisco with an American cast and according to British standards of honesty. They have a wonderful sense of period and the time is right for a '70s comedy -- we are ready to laugh at Qiana shirts."
Maupin will supervise the television films. He is also involved in a musical-in-development called "Heart's Desire" that will try out at the Cleveland Playhouse next fall with Patti Lupone in the principal role. There also is a new novel he wants to write -- and doesn't want to talk about.
He says he lives "an extremely domestic life" with gay activist Terry Anderson in San Francisco -- "and no longer with hundreds of characters from 'Tales of the City.' We've rented a penthouse in the Mission District with a deck garden. We stay home and watch movies and TV. Neither of us loves to cook but both of us do it. Our best friend is a single father with a 7-year-old son. All the kid things in 'Sure of You' are directly lifted from our experience of this precocious 7-year-old. We live in an extended family. Life is not that far off from the one on Barbary Lane."
Richard Dyer, Globe Staff. "FOR 15 YEARS, HE'S TOLD TALES OF SAN FRANCISCO." The Boston Globe. New York Times Company NY, NJ, DC, MA, TX & Intl Addresses. 1989. HighBeam Research. 13 Dec. 2008.
Article date: November 20, 1989
Author: Richard Dyer, Globe Staff
'He was brown-haired and brown-eyed, mustachioed," writes Armistead Maupin of one of the principal characters in his novel-sequence, "Tales of the City," which has just come to a close with a sixth installment, "Sure of You."
"The mischief and sweetness in his expression," Maupin continues, "would have betrayed him as gay at a PTA meeting in Lynchburg, Virginia."
Maupin wasn't writing about himself when he described Michael Tolliver. And then, again, he was -- he says that he is most of the characters in the sextet, but maybe especially DeDe Halcyon, a lesbian who has a debutante past to live down. Maupin, after all, used to work for Jesse Helms. But when the novelist was in town a while back to give a reading to benefit the AIDS Action Committee, Michael Tolliver was just who he looked like, to the life, and his conversation was full of mischief and sweetness.
Maupin's sequence began in 1974 as a newspaper serial, "Tales of the City," which appeared first in the San Francisco Chronicle and, later, in the Examiner. The tales appeared five days a week in 800-word sequences, and it wasn't long before Maupin's lovable, horny and bewildered characters and their serio-comic sexual and sociological predicaments had won the hearts of a million and half readers.
"People took the characters as real," Maupin says, "and I felt a little like a ventriloquist whose dummy had struck up an independent conversation with the audience. I was only the proprietor of the characters in the story."
Macondray Lane, which was the model for the fictional Barbary Lane, where the characters live, laugh, worry and love, began to attract a steady stream of tourists climbing its now-famous wooden stairs. When someone in the tales fell ill, flowers arrived at the newspaper; people taking out personal ads wrote that they were looking for "a Jon Fielding type"; Maupin received what he calls "bushels of Christian hate mail" in response to the story's celebration of human sexuality in all its variety.
Maupin's original agenda was to produce a series of vignettes depicting famous San Francisco settings and institutions and characteristic local lifestyles. In a way, the tales are also a kind of diary, and all the way through there are things you'd have to have been there to remember. On the very first page of the first book the heroine Mary Ann Singleton arrives in San Francisco from Cleveland, notes that her mood ring is blue, and decides to stay.
"Six weeks into the first series," Maupin says, "I ran out of settings and I ran out of lifestyles. The characters began to interact and a story started happening, and it turned into a 15-year adventure. The first tales were written by a 32-year-old innocent full of adolescent yearning, someone just beginning to discover personal freedom, sex and romance. I winged it a day at a time -- coming out is a journey, not a single act. As the books progressed, I learned more and more about the power of love, friendship, compassion."
Over the years the plots of the tales become increasingly elaborate, following the patterns of 19th-century serial fiction and the old movies that Maupin loves. But Maupin never loses his direction, and his delight in the human comedy never flags. But the tone becomes more and more serious as the writer's life turns him into an activist. In the fourth book, "Babycakes," we learn that a particularly popular character has died of AIDS.
"People wrote to me that I was spoiling their light morning entertainment, but I had to report on life as I saw it, and this is what I was experiencing. In 1982 I lost a friend to AIDS, so I was brutally aware of it early on, and I wanted other people to feel the same sense of loss that I did. The only way I could do it was to take away a character they loved. At the time I liked that character a lot myself, but today when I look at the books I find him insufferable -- his death was the death of a certain romantic ideal that I had."
That romantic ideal was probably one function of Maupin's Southern upbringing -- something the writer is not sentimental about. Born in Washington, D.C., and brought up in Raleigh, N.C., Maupin says he is "amazed" at the person he used to be. "I have a picture of myself shaking hands with Richard Nixon, but it is no longer up on the wall." He grew up as a "tight-assed little Republican kid, an Eagle Scout, a campus conservative at Chapel Hill. Jesse Helms was a friend of my dad's, and I worked for him at WRL television. He nominated me for an award that I won -- Anita Bryant had won the same prize two years before!"
Maupin volunteered to serve in Vietnam and he did. "I thought going to Vietnam would be the easiest way to overcome my doubts about myself and my sexuality. It didn't turn out that way. Friends referred to my Lawrence of Arabia complex, which was more accurate than they knew."
After Vietnam, the Associated Press offered Maupin a job in San Francisco. "I packed my life into my Opel G.T. and drove across the country to California. In five years I held about 10 jobs. As a reporter for the AP I wrote about peace marches and covered the Angela Davis trial. I sold silk, I was a mailboy, I worked for the San Francisco Opera. I was never close to music, but I loved all the delicious, petty intrigues and diva dramas; my office was dish central. In those days a career was secondary to me; what I did really didn't matter -- I just loved the experience of everything."
In 1975 Maupin proposed a serial novel to the Chronicle. He was given five months to develop "Tales of the City" -- by the end of that time he was supposed to have 30 episodes ready, six weeks' worth. "It was exactly six weeks into the series that the first controversial material began to appear -- once the story was going and people were reading it, I began to have some leverage. The paper was expecting a horrified reaction to all the gay characters and situations but it simply didn't happen."
Nevertheless, over the years a lot of energy went into Maupin's battles against the Byzantine censorship imposed by the newspaper on what had become one of its most popular features. "By the time of 'More Tales of the City' in 1977, the managing editors were sweating; they thought I had pushed the limit. 'You've got everything but cannibalism in there,' they thought -- and they were absolutely right! One of the editors kept a chart in his office with columns of the heterosexual and gay characters, and no more than 30 percent of the cast was supposed to be gay because they thought that was roughly the percentage of the gay population in San Francisco. So I had one of my society matron characters fall in love with a Great Dane, which I insisted the editor put in the heterosexual column, and he got rid of the chart after that!"
Although the tales are not directly autobiographical, the books depict places Maupin has been, experiences he has sought out, situations he has investigated. Sometimes Maupin's life and his tales intersected in unexpected ways. Michael Tolliver writes a coming-out letter to his parents, which became Maupin's own coming-out letter when his parents read it in the paper. "It may have been the easiest episode in the whole series to write because I had been composing it for years in my head. If you love someone, it is hard not to tell them the truth about who you are. I have a typical family. My father told me he could accept it but it was really killing my mother; my mother said it was really killing my father. Eventually they came around."
Maupin recognizes that all but one of the principal characters of the series reflect aspects, or "fragments," of his own personality. "One person represents the more cynical side of me; another, like Michael Tolliver, represents the romantic. One of them is the sexual gadabout I used to be and he turns into the completely domestic creature you see before you today. The landlady, Mrs. Madrigal, on the other hand, isn't me at all, but the person I aspire to be. She's the only one who comes from outside myself -- her spirit is that of my grandmother, who was the biggest influence on me in my childhood. She was a suffragette in England, a vegetarian, theosophist, palm reader -- everything Shirley MacLaine does now, she did then. She was a generous loving spirit, and I simply appropriated that. Her spirit is what rescued me in the long run; she was the explainer and the forgiver."
In a way Mrs. Madrigal is who Maupin himself became when the tales turned him into a public figure -- he has been a spokesperson, an educator, a reconciler. His reading at the Brattle Theater was punctuated by cheering and laughter, and during the question period more than one speaker began by expressing thanks to Maupin; he has written books that mean something to people, books they read over and over again. The public role is one that Maupin welcomes. "I don't believe in preaching to the choir; we need to go out and get ourselves heard. I'd just like people to recognize the humanity of others in a way that goes beyond their external differences; everyone feels the same emotions. This is a subversive idea that is very seldom reflected in modern fiction, something that doesn't get said enough. And I think that's the reason people embrace these books."
The final volume, "Sure of You," which entered the best-seller list last week, represents both a summing up and a change. "It's the only book that was not serialized first. There is far less zany plotting, and I can pursue character and emotion, what makes these people the way they are."
In some ways "Sure of You" is the darkest of the books because the '80s are darker than the '70s were -- Michael Tolliver is going through the trials of HIV infection, T-cell counts, AZT and waiting for the other shoe to drop. But in some ways it also is the warmest of the books because of how quietly, nobly and supportively people are responding to new challenges in their lives. One aspect of the book has already been controversial -- one of the best-loved characters has not risen to this challenge; she sells out, betrays her friends, repudiates all she has experienced and learned. "Some people say they were surprised; others have said, 'I knew she was a bitch from the beginning.' There are some people whose ambition is so strong that they can scuttle whatever character they have left; we don't always turn out the way we should." Disarmingly, Maupin adds something to this thought. "Maybe I wrote this as a cautionary tale for myself."
"Sure of You" is definitely the end of the series, Maupin says. "It seemed a good time to stop -- I was afraid of getting stale. The characters had matured along with me, and it was time to kick them out of the nest, and let them fly on their own."
They won't be quite "on their own" in their next incarnation, which will be six two-hour television films made by the producers of "My Beautiful Laundrette." "Television and the movies have been interested all along, but then someone would always say, 'We just love these stories, but we have this slight problem with all those gay and lesbian characters . . .' These producers will film the stories in San Francisco with an American cast and according to British standards of honesty. They have a wonderful sense of period and the time is right for a '70s comedy -- we are ready to laugh at Qiana shirts."
Maupin will supervise the television films. He is also involved in a musical-in-development called "Heart's Desire" that will try out at the Cleveland Playhouse next fall with Patti Lupone in the principal role. There also is a new novel he wants to write -- and doesn't want to talk about.
He says he lives "an extremely domestic life" with gay activist Terry Anderson in San Francisco -- "and no longer with hundreds of characters from 'Tales of the City.' We've rented a penthouse in the Mission District with a deck garden. We stay home and watch movies and TV. Neither of us loves to cook but both of us do it. Our best friend is a single father with a 7-year-old son. All the kid things in 'Sure of You' are directly lifted from our experience of this precocious 7-year-old. We live in an extended family. Life is not that far off from the one on Barbary Lane."
Richard Dyer, Globe Staff. "FOR 15 YEARS, HE'S TOLD TALES OF SAN FRANCISCO." The Boston Globe. New York Times Company NY, NJ, DC, MA, TX & Intl Addresses. 1989. HighBeam Research. 13 Dec. 2008
Sunday, November 12, 1989
Maupin's `Tales' series finally hits the big time
Fans mourn end of San Francisco story begun in '76
Author: Maureen Harrington, DENVER POST
11/12/1989
An agitated lady approached Armistead Maupin at Category
Six bookstore in Denver last week to ask the author of "Tales of the City," "I'm straight, is that OK?"
"I told her that was fine, as far as I knew," said Maupin. "And then she burst into tears. I felt terrible. Evidently she really loved `Tales of the City' and this is the last of those books I'll write. She said she'll miss all of the characters."
That teary fan has a lot of company. Maupin's series chronicling the adventures and misadventures of a group of straight, gay, black, white, Asian, young and old San Franciscans has had an enormous following in both the original newspaper form (carried in the San Francisco Chronicle) and softcover collections.
After 12 years, Armistead Maupin has finally made it into hardback and onto The List.
Maupin's "Tales of the City" series has been running since 1976. But this final edition, "Sure of You," came out in hardback, deep lavender in color. With it Maupin has, he jokes, "made it to the big time at last." Even The New York Times' best seller list has opened its hoary arms to the final "Tales," which is No. 15 this week.
Maupin is excited about hitting The List, but even that institution tickles his funny bone.
"Not too long ago a reporter from The New York Times called me and said that they had heard rumors that there was a singles scene at the Safeway in the Marina." His Southern drawl deepens just slightly. "I told the esteemed reporter that that `scene' was the starting point of my newspaper and book series nearly 12 years ago."
"It was time to go on and do something else," said this Southerner with country club gentility and wicked humor. "But then the earthquake happened and I was out on the road promoting this book and I thought: What would everyone from `Tales' be doing? How would they respond to this?"
But he's going to let it rest.
Maupin is busy getting his next project on the road: a dramatic collaboration hopefully bound for Broadway.
"Glen Roven, a wonderful composer, asked four very different short story writers to contribute to this project. He felt that he could capitalize on the short story boom going on in America. He wrote a score for each `playlet' and is mounting it first at Vassar and then we're going to debut in Cleveland.
"Just my luck. I've been making fun of Cleveland in `Tales' for years and now I have to go there and face the music."
Maupin's short story is based on a real life incident. A number of years ago, his sister had visited San Francisco, depressed about a love affair only to find her brother madly in love.
"It's about a straight sister and gay brother and how it is that they deal with love," said Maupin.
"Terry, my lover, insisted that his part be written as Asian in the story," said Maupin. "It's a great idea and added another important aspect of San Francisco to the plot."
Having finished the short story and the adaptation for the play, Maupin is turning, with some trepidation, to a novel.
"Lillian Hellman once said that writing the first book isn't hard, the second one is. I think of this novel as my second book and the collection of `Tales' as the first. So, I'm not talking too much about it in case it all goes up in smoke."
And the characters from "Tales of the City" have ridden into the sunset.
Author: Maureen Harrington, DENVER POST
11/12/1989
An agitated lady approached Armistead Maupin at Category
Six bookstore in Denver last week to ask the author of "Tales of the City," "I'm straight, is that OK?"
"I told her that was fine, as far as I knew," said Maupin. "And then she burst into tears. I felt terrible. Evidently she really loved `Tales of the City' and this is the last of those books I'll write. She said she'll miss all of the characters."
That teary fan has a lot of company. Maupin's series chronicling the adventures and misadventures of a group of straight, gay, black, white, Asian, young and old San Franciscans has had an enormous following in both the original newspaper form (carried in the San Francisco Chronicle) and softcover collections.
After 12 years, Armistead Maupin has finally made it into hardback and onto The List.
Maupin's "Tales of the City" series has been running since 1976. But this final edition, "Sure of You," came out in hardback, deep lavender in color. With it Maupin has, he jokes, "made it to the big time at last." Even The New York Times' best seller list has opened its hoary arms to the final "Tales," which is No. 15 this week.
Maupin is excited about hitting The List, but even that institution tickles his funny bone.
"Not too long ago a reporter from The New York Times called me and said that they had heard rumors that there was a singles scene at the Safeway in the Marina." His Southern drawl deepens just slightly. "I told the esteemed reporter that that `scene' was the starting point of my newspaper and book series nearly 12 years ago."
"It was time to go on and do something else," said this Southerner with country club gentility and wicked humor. "But then the earthquake happened and I was out on the road promoting this book and I thought: What would everyone from `Tales' be doing? How would they respond to this?"
But he's going to let it rest.
Maupin is busy getting his next project on the road: a dramatic collaboration hopefully bound for Broadway.
"Glen Roven, a wonderful composer, asked four very different short story writers to contribute to this project. He felt that he could capitalize on the short story boom going on in America. He wrote a score for each `playlet' and is mounting it first at Vassar and then we're going to debut in Cleveland.
"Just my luck. I've been making fun of Cleveland in `Tales' for years and now I have to go there and face the music."
Maupin's short story is based on a real life incident. A number of years ago, his sister had visited San Francisco, depressed about a love affair only to find her brother madly in love.
"It's about a straight sister and gay brother and how it is that they deal with love," said Maupin.
"Terry, my lover, insisted that his part be written as Asian in the story," said Maupin. "It's a great idea and added another important aspect of San Francisco to the plot."
Having finished the short story and the adaptation for the play, Maupin is turning, with some trepidation, to a novel.
"Lillian Hellman once said that writing the first book isn't hard, the second one is. I think of this novel as my second book and the collection of `Tales' as the first. So, I'm not talking too much about it in case it all goes up in smoke."
And the characters from "Tales of the City" have ridden into the sunset.
Wednesday, June 1, 1988
Growing up Gay in Old Raleigh
This article was written by Armistead in June of 1988 for The Independent, a free weekly newspaper in Raleigh, North Carolina. Armistead and Terry went to Raleigh to march in their first annual gay pride march.
Growing up Gay in Old Raleigh
By Armistead Maupin
When I was a teen-ager in Raleigh my friend Clark told me I could get a girl horny by putting cigarette ashes in her Coca-Cola. "You just flick them in," he explained on a camping trip to Confederate Dam. (It's gone now, gobbled up by the Beltline.) "Wait till she goes to the john, and give it a flick or two. She'll be all over you, man. I swear."
From my standpoint, there were three drawbacks to this scheme:
1. The taletell taste.
2. The fact that I didn't smoke.
3. The fact that I wasn't attracted to girls.
Clark didn't know about that third thing, of course, because he was my best buddy, and I didn't want to disappoint him. He had a generous, exuberant heart and he saw himself as my mentor in the Ways of Women So l listened and nodded and leered brutishly in all the right places, and kept it up all the way through college, where Clark became increasingly concerned about my virginal state.
"I'm saving it," I told him.
"Saving it? You're crazy. For what?"
"Marriage."
"Oh, sure."
Glancing down at my Weejuns, I tried to look cavalier but conscientious. I don't believe in premarital sex."
"Shit, man, I don't, I believe you! With all the woman around hereÉ"
"WellÉ"
"Sex is great," he laughed "And you're a fool."
I remained a fool, too I didn't go to bed with anyone until I was 26.
Feeling "funny"
I think about my friend Clark every time Jesse Helms gets all het up safe-sex literature and the ways in which it might help to "promote" homosexuality, if sexuality could be promoted, Clark would have made a straight boy out of me back in 1962! Lord knows he tried hard enough.
I don't know what made me gay, but I can safely assure Senator Helms that it wasn't a pamphlet or illustration or even one of those dirty movies he takes such delight in being disgusted by. As far as I'm concerned, I came into this world gay, and l shall leave that way, God willing, and no amount of "promotion" will alter my fundamental nature.
I knew this when I was 14 and thought I the only person like me in Raleigh. True, my parents were friends with a bachelor professor who taught at State and bred day lilies behind the Y, but he wasn't really "that way" -as my mother used to put it -he was "just sissy."
Some perfectly normal Southern men those mannerisms, she said, because they were raised by large households of women (mothers, aunts, maids, and the like) and this tended to make them effeminate. But that didn't mean they were "funny." So many of them were married after all.
The only gay person I knew about for sure was a math teacher I had at Braughton who was arrested for Crimes Against Nature. One day he was teaching class and the next he wasn't, and, his mystified pupils learned why the following day on the obituary page of The News and Observer (the man wasn't dead, mind you, but the implication was that he might as well be.) Since his transgression at a state park, I felt almost certain that a Crime Against Nature had something to do with defacing trees. A classmate set me straight.
Well not straight enough, obviously, but I got the; message anyway: My feelings about other boys were not only unnatural and disgusting; they were punishable by law, I was in deep trouble.
When would it begin to show? I wondered. When would my voice crack, my hips start swiveling? How long could I reasonably delay before people got suspicious and called me a Fairy Nice Fellow (a euphemism my father employed for some of my mother's fellow actors at the Raleigh Little Theatre)? What if I just remained a debonair bachelor like Bob Cummings on "Love That Bob"? Would anyone be fooled?
My father, as it happened, was compiling a family history at the time, a Herculean feat of research in which he held forth on a variety of topics, including the worldly fate of Maupin Men throughout history. Looking to it for guidance, I found this:
"They are lawyers and doctors, planters and merchants generals and privates...If you go far enough back into the dim past, there appears to be a small amount of royal blood -and there most certainly is the blood of at least two pirates... One thing is certain, and that I is wherever one of these men met success, there was a self-effacing and goodly lady at his side."
So there I had it. There were no bachelors in my family-no successful ones, at any rate. Even the pirates had goodly ladies on board, which, once I'd thought about it a while, was certainly not my idea of how to run a pirate ship.
Firing the first shot
Four years later, when I enrolled at Chapel Hill, I learned to muffle my sex drive with extracurricular overachievement. I was the token conservative in Student Legislature (this being the '60s, after all) and wrote a column for The Daily Tar Heel, which strove to be a jaunty mixture of Art Buchwald and William F. Buckley, Jr. I went out with girls, but they were all just buddies, so my sacred virginity was never really at risk.
Then I moved on to UNC law school, imagining myself as my father had imagined me - a trusted junior partner in his Raleigh firm. This vision began to collapse, however, as tort piled upon dreary tort and I learned the literal meaning of "bored to distraction." At the end of my freshman year, after being elected president of the class, I took one look at the single question on my Equity exam and hitchhiked home to Raleigh. I can still remember how good it felt to walk out.
By this time the Vietnam War was raging full force, so I applied for Naval Officers Candidate School to avoid being drafted as a field soldier. I was accepted, but I had to wait five months before beginning my training in Newport. In the interim, I took a job as a reporter at WRAL-TV, a station then under the executive management of Jesse Helms, a longtime friend of my family.
Jesse saw me as a kind of protege, I think, and I was a willing pupil. Conservatism appealed to me at the time not only because it was the creed of my family, but because it claimed to champion the rights of the individual, And I was feeling more individual by the minute.
One day, when the station sent me to interview the imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, I came back with some footage which stopped Jesse cold. I had asked the I.W. what he thought of the recent marriage of Dean Rusk's daughter to a black man. He had replied, rather calmly, that it didn't surprise him at all, because the Secretary of State was a woolly liberal and a practicing homosexual.
Jesse was horrified. He himself didn't care much for Rusk, but this was nothing short of libelous-even for a liberal-and the station simply couldn't run it. Homosexuality, he told me, was the most heinous sin a man could commit. I nodded dutifully and kept my mouth shut.
When I finally acted on my feelings, I was a boot ensign stationed on a destroyer tender in Charleston. My partner in this awkward adventure was a man I met one night on The Battery - the very spot where the first shots of the Civil War were fired. (Even at the time, this felt curiously appropriate, for my great-great grandfather had been a Confederate general, and my father flew - and still flies - the Rebel flag in his den.)
As romantic escapades go, this one wasn't that much to speak of, but I think of it now as the moment when I finally became human. Reporting for duty the next day, I felt so utterly relieved, so completely transformed by the experience that I feared it might show somehow Ñ like a "Scarlet H" on my forehead.
No one even noticed.
Telling the truth
After a tour of duty in Vietnam and a stint as a reporter in Charleston, I was offered a position with the Associated Press in San Francisco. Having seen the city on my way home from Vietnam, I had already been struck by its physical beauty, but the word of mouth was even better. "You'll have a wonderful time," a friend whispered as I left Charleston. "They have gay bars there." To which I replied somewhat primly: "Oh, I would never go in one of those." Of course, I was in one of those the night I arrived.
I also found something else in San Francisco: a climate of tolerance which I had never experienced in the South. My first good friend was a 30ish straight woman with a husband and two kids. We were so close that I hated the idea of deceiving her, so one night I downed three mai tais after work and steeled myself to tell Jan the awful truth.
When I arrived at her house, I must have looked so unhinged that she hurried the children off to bed and plopped me down on the living room sofa. "Babycakes," she said, "what in the world is the matter?" I hemmed and hawed for a while, then looked at her dolefully and said: "I'm homosexual."
Jan blinked at me once or twice, then knelt in front of me and took both my hands in hers. "Big fucking deal," she said, smiling.
From that moment on I resolved make those three little words my answer whenever someone questioned my right to exist. Bit by bit, I began to construct a life for myself which was based on shared honesty and personal freedom individualist ideal I had looked for in conservatism but never found.
There were wonderful side effects, too. As my heart grew and prospered my imagination took flight and I discovered my calling as a storyteller. Drawing on my own life for color and content, I created a daily, fictional serial for the San Francisco Chronicle which has so far been collected into five novels with an international following.
It was through that serial - Tales of the City - I finally "came out" to my parents in 1977. Using the voice of a fictional character (who is writing to his own parents), I explained it the gentlest way I knew that I was happy being gay, that it had made me a wiser, stronger man, that it was no one's "fault," and that I loved them more than ever. "Please don't feel you have to answer this right away," I wrote. "It's enough for me to know that I no longer have to lie to the people who taught me to value the truth."
My father, who had been following the serial on a regular basis, received this news with some consternation, though he told me later that he had suspected as much from my earlier stories. ("I wondered," he said dryly, "how an Eagle Scout knew such things.") When the dust settled, his old cavalier spirit took charge and he began bragging to selected friends that he had "Three fine children - one of each."
My mother, it seems, had known I was gay for years, and had made herself an expert on the subject by sneaking into the stacks of the Olivia Raney Library. My revelation drew us closer than ever, I think, and it got to the point where her only concern was finding me a suitable partner.
Several years later, after a brave bout with cancer, my mother died at the university hospital in Chapel Hill. She spent her last day on earth trying to fix me up with her orderly.
Fighting back
Every story needs a happy ending, so here is one my mother would like: I'm 44 now and no longer a bachelor, having settled down in San Francisco with Terry Anderson, a Southern boy I met during a speaking engagement in Atlanta. I'm a committed homebody but I travel extensively on behalf of gay rights.
I might have bowed out of this effort years ago if it weren't for the fact that I still remember how much it hurt to be 14 and feel utterly alone in the world. There are kids like that everywhere suffering more than I did, because it once unmentionable Crime Against Nature has a name and a face to it now.
Four or five years go I returned to Raleigh public appearance on behalf of the North Carolina Human Rights Fund. The event was held at a gay bar called Glenwood Park, next door to the Five Points theatre where I had watched Roy Rogers movies as a child.
The men and women who showed up that night ran the gamut of Southern humankind. There were journalists and lawyers, working mothers, construction workers and closeted scions of "Old Raleigh" families. Some of the older people regaled me with personal ancestors "I knew your mother," one of them told me warmly. Another had taught me Sunday School at Christ Church. Still another had been a friend of my family's genial, wise-cracking pediatrician - a lesbian. it turned out. I was flabbergasted. Where had these folk's been all my life? Why had I not noticed at the time?
The question is rhetorical, of course. Fading into the woodwork is a lesson most gay people learn remarkably early in life. The twin issues of acceptance and survival reach us to mask our true natures even from those who might be our friends. The result is often a life of laborious "discretion," all endless cycle of apology and deceit.
I was past 30 myself before I discovered the simple way out of this mess: If you don't want to be told on, tell on yourself first. The best way to take charge of your life is to abandon your secrets.
Some of the people at the bar that night had already figured this out. Others, sadly, never would, forever indentured to a system which has trained them to be ashamed, to toe the line, to lower their voices - even there - when they spoke the word "gay" in public.
Since then, I understand, the social climate has changed dramatically in North Carolina. Faced with virulent anti-gay attacks from Jesse Helms and others (as well as increasing of outright brutality and murder) lesbian and gay men here have begun to fight back with a determination that is unequaled in America.
In the past two years the state has seen the formation of activist groups in Asheville, Greensboro and the Triangle area. Gay organizations are in the works in Charlotte and Winston-Salem, and a new state coalition convened for the first, time several months ago. Perhaps the most heartening news to me was that Raleigh, the hometown I share with Jesse Helms, has followed the lead of Chapel Hill and adopted an ordinance prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation.
It's appropriate, then, that this June 25 Raleigh will be the site of the annual North Carolina Lesbian & Gay Pride march. Terry and I will be present for that event, making our way down Hillsborough Street, to the monument my great-grandmother erected "To Our Confederate Dead." We are doing this because we know the world won't change until gay people become visible and proud. We are doing it because we have our own dead to honor now, and their blood is on the hands of the indifferent.
When I was in college the scourge of integration was Jesse Helms' main obsession, the commie-stooge demon he railed against nightly on WRAL-TV Then, lo and behold, the times changed on ol' Jesse, leaving him one less minority group to kick around in public. I suspect he feels a certain embarrassment now about those early racist editorials.
Is it too much to hope that he'll live long enough to experience the same discomfort about his current vendetta against "sexual deviates?" Gay people, after all, are part of his constituency, too. They can be bullied and insulted just so long before taking him to task for his ignorance.
© 1988 Armistead Maupin. © 1999-2001 Literary Bent LLC. All rights reserved.
Growing up Gay in Old Raleigh
By Armistead Maupin
When I was a teen-ager in Raleigh my friend Clark told me I could get a girl horny by putting cigarette ashes in her Coca-Cola. "You just flick them in," he explained on a camping trip to Confederate Dam. (It's gone now, gobbled up by the Beltline.) "Wait till she goes to the john, and give it a flick or two. She'll be all over you, man. I swear."
From my standpoint, there were three drawbacks to this scheme:
1. The taletell taste.
2. The fact that I didn't smoke.
3. The fact that I wasn't attracted to girls.
Clark didn't know about that third thing, of course, because he was my best buddy, and I didn't want to disappoint him. He had a generous, exuberant heart and he saw himself as my mentor in the Ways of Women So l listened and nodded and leered brutishly in all the right places, and kept it up all the way through college, where Clark became increasingly concerned about my virginal state.
"I'm saving it," I told him.
"Saving it? You're crazy. For what?"
"Marriage."
"Oh, sure."
Glancing down at my Weejuns, I tried to look cavalier but conscientious. I don't believe in premarital sex."
"Shit, man, I don't, I believe you! With all the woman around hereÉ"
"WellÉ"
"Sex is great," he laughed "And you're a fool."
I remained a fool, too I didn't go to bed with anyone until I was 26.
Feeling "funny"
I think about my friend Clark every time Jesse Helms gets all het up safe-sex literature and the ways in which it might help to "promote" homosexuality, if sexuality could be promoted, Clark would have made a straight boy out of me back in 1962! Lord knows he tried hard enough.
I don't know what made me gay, but I can safely assure Senator Helms that it wasn't a pamphlet or illustration or even one of those dirty movies he takes such delight in being disgusted by. As far as I'm concerned, I came into this world gay, and l shall leave that way, God willing, and no amount of "promotion" will alter my fundamental nature.
I knew this when I was 14 and thought I the only person like me in Raleigh. True, my parents were friends with a bachelor professor who taught at State and bred day lilies behind the Y, but he wasn't really "that way" -as my mother used to put it -he was "just sissy."
Some perfectly normal Southern men those mannerisms, she said, because they were raised by large households of women (mothers, aunts, maids, and the like) and this tended to make them effeminate. But that didn't mean they were "funny." So many of them were married after all.
The only gay person I knew about for sure was a math teacher I had at Braughton who was arrested for Crimes Against Nature. One day he was teaching class and the next he wasn't, and, his mystified pupils learned why the following day on the obituary page of The News and Observer (the man wasn't dead, mind you, but the implication was that he might as well be.) Since his transgression at a state park, I felt almost certain that a Crime Against Nature had something to do with defacing trees. A classmate set me straight.
Well not straight enough, obviously, but I got the; message anyway: My feelings about other boys were not only unnatural and disgusting; they were punishable by law, I was in deep trouble.
When would it begin to show? I wondered. When would my voice crack, my hips start swiveling? How long could I reasonably delay before people got suspicious and called me a Fairy Nice Fellow (a euphemism my father employed for some of my mother's fellow actors at the Raleigh Little Theatre)? What if I just remained a debonair bachelor like Bob Cummings on "Love That Bob"? Would anyone be fooled?
My father, as it happened, was compiling a family history at the time, a Herculean feat of research in which he held forth on a variety of topics, including the worldly fate of Maupin Men throughout history. Looking to it for guidance, I found this:
"They are lawyers and doctors, planters and merchants generals and privates...If you go far enough back into the dim past, there appears to be a small amount of royal blood -and there most certainly is the blood of at least two pirates... One thing is certain, and that I is wherever one of these men met success, there was a self-effacing and goodly lady at his side."
So there I had it. There were no bachelors in my family-no successful ones, at any rate. Even the pirates had goodly ladies on board, which, once I'd thought about it a while, was certainly not my idea of how to run a pirate ship.
Firing the first shot
Four years later, when I enrolled at Chapel Hill, I learned to muffle my sex drive with extracurricular overachievement. I was the token conservative in Student Legislature (this being the '60s, after all) and wrote a column for The Daily Tar Heel, which strove to be a jaunty mixture of Art Buchwald and William F. Buckley, Jr. I went out with girls, but they were all just buddies, so my sacred virginity was never really at risk.
Then I moved on to UNC law school, imagining myself as my father had imagined me - a trusted junior partner in his Raleigh firm. This vision began to collapse, however, as tort piled upon dreary tort and I learned the literal meaning of "bored to distraction." At the end of my freshman year, after being elected president of the class, I took one look at the single question on my Equity exam and hitchhiked home to Raleigh. I can still remember how good it felt to walk out.
By this time the Vietnam War was raging full force, so I applied for Naval Officers Candidate School to avoid being drafted as a field soldier. I was accepted, but I had to wait five months before beginning my training in Newport. In the interim, I took a job as a reporter at WRAL-TV, a station then under the executive management of Jesse Helms, a longtime friend of my family.
Jesse saw me as a kind of protege, I think, and I was a willing pupil. Conservatism appealed to me at the time not only because it was the creed of my family, but because it claimed to champion the rights of the individual, And I was feeling more individual by the minute.
One day, when the station sent me to interview the imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, I came back with some footage which stopped Jesse cold. I had asked the I.W. what he thought of the recent marriage of Dean Rusk's daughter to a black man. He had replied, rather calmly, that it didn't surprise him at all, because the Secretary of State was a woolly liberal and a practicing homosexual.
Jesse was horrified. He himself didn't care much for Rusk, but this was nothing short of libelous-even for a liberal-and the station simply couldn't run it. Homosexuality, he told me, was the most heinous sin a man could commit. I nodded dutifully and kept my mouth shut.
When I finally acted on my feelings, I was a boot ensign stationed on a destroyer tender in Charleston. My partner in this awkward adventure was a man I met one night on The Battery - the very spot where the first shots of the Civil War were fired. (Even at the time, this felt curiously appropriate, for my great-great grandfather had been a Confederate general, and my father flew - and still flies - the Rebel flag in his den.)
As romantic escapades go, this one wasn't that much to speak of, but I think of it now as the moment when I finally became human. Reporting for duty the next day, I felt so utterly relieved, so completely transformed by the experience that I feared it might show somehow Ñ like a "Scarlet H" on my forehead.
No one even noticed.
Telling the truth
After a tour of duty in Vietnam and a stint as a reporter in Charleston, I was offered a position with the Associated Press in San Francisco. Having seen the city on my way home from Vietnam, I had already been struck by its physical beauty, but the word of mouth was even better. "You'll have a wonderful time," a friend whispered as I left Charleston. "They have gay bars there." To which I replied somewhat primly: "Oh, I would never go in one of those." Of course, I was in one of those the night I arrived.
I also found something else in San Francisco: a climate of tolerance which I had never experienced in the South. My first good friend was a 30ish straight woman with a husband and two kids. We were so close that I hated the idea of deceiving her, so one night I downed three mai tais after work and steeled myself to tell Jan the awful truth.
When I arrived at her house, I must have looked so unhinged that she hurried the children off to bed and plopped me down on the living room sofa. "Babycakes," she said, "what in the world is the matter?" I hemmed and hawed for a while, then looked at her dolefully and said: "I'm homosexual."
Jan blinked at me once or twice, then knelt in front of me and took both my hands in hers. "Big fucking deal," she said, smiling.
From that moment on I resolved make those three little words my answer whenever someone questioned my right to exist. Bit by bit, I began to construct a life for myself which was based on shared honesty and personal freedom individualist ideal I had looked for in conservatism but never found.
There were wonderful side effects, too. As my heart grew and prospered my imagination took flight and I discovered my calling as a storyteller. Drawing on my own life for color and content, I created a daily, fictional serial for the San Francisco Chronicle which has so far been collected into five novels with an international following.
It was through that serial - Tales of the City - I finally "came out" to my parents in 1977. Using the voice of a fictional character (who is writing to his own parents), I explained it the gentlest way I knew that I was happy being gay, that it had made me a wiser, stronger man, that it was no one's "fault," and that I loved them more than ever. "Please don't feel you have to answer this right away," I wrote. "It's enough for me to know that I no longer have to lie to the people who taught me to value the truth."
My father, who had been following the serial on a regular basis, received this news with some consternation, though he told me later that he had suspected as much from my earlier stories. ("I wondered," he said dryly, "how an Eagle Scout knew such things.") When the dust settled, his old cavalier spirit took charge and he began bragging to selected friends that he had "Three fine children - one of each."
My mother, it seems, had known I was gay for years, and had made herself an expert on the subject by sneaking into the stacks of the Olivia Raney Library. My revelation drew us closer than ever, I think, and it got to the point where her only concern was finding me a suitable partner.
Several years later, after a brave bout with cancer, my mother died at the university hospital in Chapel Hill. She spent her last day on earth trying to fix me up with her orderly.
Fighting back
Every story needs a happy ending, so here is one my mother would like: I'm 44 now and no longer a bachelor, having settled down in San Francisco with Terry Anderson, a Southern boy I met during a speaking engagement in Atlanta. I'm a committed homebody but I travel extensively on behalf of gay rights.
I might have bowed out of this effort years ago if it weren't for the fact that I still remember how much it hurt to be 14 and feel utterly alone in the world. There are kids like that everywhere suffering more than I did, because it once unmentionable Crime Against Nature has a name and a face to it now.
Four or five years go I returned to Raleigh public appearance on behalf of the North Carolina Human Rights Fund. The event was held at a gay bar called Glenwood Park, next door to the Five Points theatre where I had watched Roy Rogers movies as a child.
The men and women who showed up that night ran the gamut of Southern humankind. There were journalists and lawyers, working mothers, construction workers and closeted scions of "Old Raleigh" families. Some of the older people regaled me with personal ancestors "I knew your mother," one of them told me warmly. Another had taught me Sunday School at Christ Church. Still another had been a friend of my family's genial, wise-cracking pediatrician - a lesbian. it turned out. I was flabbergasted. Where had these folk's been all my life? Why had I not noticed at the time?
The question is rhetorical, of course. Fading into the woodwork is a lesson most gay people learn remarkably early in life. The twin issues of acceptance and survival reach us to mask our true natures even from those who might be our friends. The result is often a life of laborious "discretion," all endless cycle of apology and deceit.
I was past 30 myself before I discovered the simple way out of this mess: If you don't want to be told on, tell on yourself first. The best way to take charge of your life is to abandon your secrets.
Some of the people at the bar that night had already figured this out. Others, sadly, never would, forever indentured to a system which has trained them to be ashamed, to toe the line, to lower their voices - even there - when they spoke the word "gay" in public.
Since then, I understand, the social climate has changed dramatically in North Carolina. Faced with virulent anti-gay attacks from Jesse Helms and others (as well as increasing of outright brutality and murder) lesbian and gay men here have begun to fight back with a determination that is unequaled in America.
In the past two years the state has seen the formation of activist groups in Asheville, Greensboro and the Triangle area. Gay organizations are in the works in Charlotte and Winston-Salem, and a new state coalition convened for the first, time several months ago. Perhaps the most heartening news to me was that Raleigh, the hometown I share with Jesse Helms, has followed the lead of Chapel Hill and adopted an ordinance prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation.
It's appropriate, then, that this June 25 Raleigh will be the site of the annual North Carolina Lesbian & Gay Pride march. Terry and I will be present for that event, making our way down Hillsborough Street, to the monument my great-grandmother erected "To Our Confederate Dead." We are doing this because we know the world won't change until gay people become visible and proud. We are doing it because we have our own dead to honor now, and their blood is on the hands of the indifferent.
When I was in college the scourge of integration was Jesse Helms' main obsession, the commie-stooge demon he railed against nightly on WRAL-TV Then, lo and behold, the times changed on ol' Jesse, leaving him one less minority group to kick around in public. I suspect he feels a certain embarrassment now about those early racist editorials.
Is it too much to hope that he'll live long enough to experience the same discomfort about his current vendetta against "sexual deviates?" Gay people, after all, are part of his constituency, too. They can be bullied and insulted just so long before taking him to task for his ignorance.
© 1988 Armistead Maupin. © 1999-2001 Literary Bent LLC. All rights reserved.
Wednesday, June 3, 1987
"Significant Others" Interview
Fictional writer Armistead Maupin talks about his latest novel, The Significant Others, and his ability to do his best work when he is under pressure. Armistead writes about homosexuals to a general audience with hopes that people will better understand each other. He also discusses what it was like growing up in Raleigh, North Carolina and his experience with the AIDS crisis.
Listen to the Armistead Maupin interview with Don Swaim, 1987, RealAudio
http://wiredforbooks.org/armisteadmaupin/
Listen to the Armistead Maupin interview with Don Swaim, 1987, RealAudio
http://wiredforbooks.org/armisteadmaupin/
Wednesday, December 3, 1986
Author chronicles gay life // Witty Armistead Maupin mines rich vein of homosexual humor
Article from: Chicago Sun-Times
Article date: December 3, 1986
Author: Stephanie Mansfield
WASHINGTON He was 13 when he first knew he was gay, and a virgin until the age of 26. He went to Vietnam as a naval officer, served as an aide to Adm. Elmo Zumwalt and won the Medal of Freedom for his volunteer work in Southeast Asia.
Now he's 42, tall and handsome and getting famous as a writer and gay personality. Armistead Maupin - author of the ribald, terminally hip Tales of the City series, who's been compared to Dickens and featured as one of Rock Hudson's San Francisco sexual tour guides in Sara Davidson's best-selling Rock Hudson: His Story - crosses his legs and smiles enigmatically.
Yes, he says, being a gay humorist these days makes him feel a little like Henny Youngman playing Auschwitz.
"In many ways, AIDS has had for gay civil rights the same effect the Holocaust had for Jewish people," he says. The deadly virus - which has, so far, struck down 20 of Maupin's friends and acquaintances - also has affected his work. "It's made it darker and more reflective in a lot of ways. Before, I could go with pure humor, and now I have to show the way humor arises out of tragedy - and that's a tougher job to do. But it does arise."
His stories - which first appeared as serials in the San Francisco Chronicle and later were released in book form - are rich and sentimental, peppered with a cast of gays, straights, bents and outrageous San Franciscans of all descriptions.
There's DeDe Halcyon Days, a debutante turned lesbian, and Mary Ann Singleton, mother of half-Chinese twins. There are gays converging on the Bohemian Grove, the A-Gays, the B-Gays, the National Gay Rodeo. And in More Tales of the City, Maupin introduces the first gay nursing home.
Disgusted by the trappings of modern homosexuality - the requisite T-shirts, shorts and Land's End socks - one character in Further Tales of the City grouses, "There's gotta be another way to be queer."
Says the author: "One of the most maddening things about being a gay humorist is that you're essentially drawing on one of the greatest strengths of gay life, and that is this wonderful, rich, self-deprecating humor that gay people indulge in, and often when that's translated to the world at large, it's used against gay people in a way."
But the humor (his version of Queen Elizabeth dining at Trader Vic's, for example) also has universal appeal.
"What can I say?" Maupin says, laughing. "I'm a human being trapped in a faggot's body."
His series first appeared in the Chronicle in 1976. Last spring, he was lured away to the San Francisco Examiner, where his "Significant Others" column appears five days a week. His work now fills four Harper & Row paperback volumes (sales of 50,000 each) and Home Box Office owns rights for a proposed film.
Much in demand as a spokesman and master of ceremonies, Maupin is a strange sort of celebrity.
"Gay people have been invisible for so long," he explains, "that the sheer novelty of seeing someone who is gay and simply willing to talk about it quietly and humorously has thrust a lot of people into positions of visibility."
But is America ready for gay personalities?
"You got 'em already, honey," he laughs.
"Armistead Maupin has a byline so famous (possibly infamous) in San Francisco that it seems almost silly to have to explain him to the rest of us mortals who live elsewhere," wrote gossip maven Liz Smith. But largely because of the Rock Hudson best seller, Maupin's name is getting somewhat more widely known these days.
He declines to talk about his personal relationship with the movie star who died of AIDS last year. But in 1978, according to Davidson's book, Maupin took Hudson on a sight-seeing tour of San Francisco's trendy clubs, including the Club Fugazi, where a revue Maupin had co-authored, "Beach Blanket Babylon," was playing. The group moved on to the I-Beam, a gay disco, and to the Black and Blue, where a motorcycle hangs from the ceiling.
Davidson wrote:
"A pile of naked arms, legs, backs and wriggling behinds. Armistead and Rock stood against the wall, watching, and Rock thought it was funny. Armistead remembers thinking, `How ironic. I'm standing with the man who was the sex symbol of the world for two decades, and nobody's paying any attention to him. We could walk through this place like two women - completely invisible.' Armistead leaned over and pinched Rock playfully.
" `Is that you?' Rock said.
" `Yes.'
" `Just checking.' "
`It was a real martyr's death," Maupin says of Hudson's battle with AIDS and the resulting publicity. "It made an enormous difference to lots of gay people. Frankly, he wasn't a very socially conscious person in life. In many ways, he ran from his own nature, which made me very sad. But, by God, he made up for it in the last few months of his life. Because he did know what was happening. He knew that that book was going to be the whole truth. I know he was enormously shocked when he found out America had taken him to their bosom and said, `We love you anyway.' It was a point I had tried to make to him 10 years ago."
Although the gay community kept Rock Hudson's homosexuality out of the mainstream press, Maupin wrote about an unidentified "matinee idol" in his 1982 Further Tales of the City. The paunchy star entertained dozens of handsome young men and threw pool parties that lasted for days. "There were so many Speedos hung out to dry," Maupin wrote, "that the Danny Thomases called to ask why we were flying signal flags."
"Shabby genteel" is how Maupin describes his Raleigh, N.C., background. "We had money, but Sherman took it." His great-great-grandfather was a Confederate general who fought at Antietam. Armistead is the oldest of three children. He has one brother and one sister. "My father says he has one of each."
His father, a successful lawyer, is supportive of his son's activist status in the gay community. His mother died in 1979. "We came to terms with it before she died," Maupin says. "She tried to fix me up with her orderly on her deathbed."
He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and finished one year of law school before enlisting in the Navy. He was conservative, and social.
After his tour of duty, which included squiring Zumwalt's wife on Saigon shopping trips, Maupin went back to Southeast Asia on a volunteer basis to build houses for refugees. "It was a stunt by the Nixon administration to draw attention away from the Vietnam Veterans Against the War." (Maupin even sat in the presidential box during the 1972 Inaugural Youth Concert.)
He began his career as a reporter in Charleston, S.C., and wound up with the Associated Press in San Francisco, becoming the darling of the liberal media establishment, which was delighted with his irreverent view of gay liberation.
Maupin describes the 1970s as a heady, decadent decade.
"Most gay men are not permitted a true sexual adolescence in the way straight boys are," he explains. "So straight boys go out and make an ass out of themselves from the ages of 15 to 25. Many gay men don't have any sexual experience at all until they're well into their 20s. It (the '70s) was a lot of people, trying to link up very fast, and not knowing what was required. Sex is a hell of a lot of fun. It can take your mind off anything, including the pursuit of a lover."
Tragically, the decade will be most remembered as the one that spawned the AIDS epidemic. Yes, he says, he is worried. "Every gay man I know, as soon as he has a cold that lasts just a little bit too long, wonders.
"You've got a clock ticking. A sort of incubation clock and you figure `if I completely altered my sexual behavior four years ago' - as I did when one of my dearest friends died, then you might be safe.
The AIDS virus also has served an educational function, Maupin says. "It's sex and death all rolled into one package and it scares the hell out of people," he says. "But homosexuality is not a neighborhood in San Francisco. It's the husband who leaves his wife once a month and goes to a rest stop out on the highway in Virginia."
Maupin has nursed dying friends and knows firsthand the debilitating physical and emotional toll the disease has taken on the gay community. "My father, being the upright old conservative that he is, told me the whole time I was growing up that you never really saw true nobility until you lived through a war. For one reason or another, I never experienced that in Vietnam. But I think I know what he means now. When you watch people tested, you see where the goodness lies."
But while Maupin is a believer in "safe sex," he is not about to suggest monogamy for homosexuals. "Sex is a wonderful God-given thing and to a certain degree this epidemic has desexualized a lot of people, and I'm fighting against that as hard as I'm fighting against the disease."
His own behavior probably would have changed anyway, he says, even without the risk of AIDS. It's called growing up. He shares his apartment with one man now, and says it's love. "It's great. I called him when I got into the hotel last night. Five years ago, I would have been thinking, `Where's the local bathhouse?' "
And yes, he says, he still serves as an unofficial San Francisco tour guide.
"An interesting thing, whether you're straight or gay, is to have a friend from out of town show up and go out immediately and hit the bars and be perfect sluts for three days and at the end of it all, go up to the San Franciscan and say, `This place is just too decadent. I could never live here.' " Thinking about it, Maupin chuckles to himself.
Stephanie Mansfield. "Author chronicles gay life // Witty Armistead Maupin mines rich vein of homosexual humor." Chicago Sun-Times. Chicago Sun Times. 1986.
Article date: December 3, 1986
Author: Stephanie Mansfield
WASHINGTON He was 13 when he first knew he was gay, and a virgin until the age of 26. He went to Vietnam as a naval officer, served as an aide to Adm. Elmo Zumwalt and won the Medal of Freedom for his volunteer work in Southeast Asia.
Now he's 42, tall and handsome and getting famous as a writer and gay personality. Armistead Maupin - author of the ribald, terminally hip Tales of the City series, who's been compared to Dickens and featured as one of Rock Hudson's San Francisco sexual tour guides in Sara Davidson's best-selling Rock Hudson: His Story - crosses his legs and smiles enigmatically.
Yes, he says, being a gay humorist these days makes him feel a little like Henny Youngman playing Auschwitz.
"In many ways, AIDS has had for gay civil rights the same effect the Holocaust had for Jewish people," he says. The deadly virus - which has, so far, struck down 20 of Maupin's friends and acquaintances - also has affected his work. "It's made it darker and more reflective in a lot of ways. Before, I could go with pure humor, and now I have to show the way humor arises out of tragedy - and that's a tougher job to do. But it does arise."
His stories - which first appeared as serials in the San Francisco Chronicle and later were released in book form - are rich and sentimental, peppered with a cast of gays, straights, bents and outrageous San Franciscans of all descriptions.
There's DeDe Halcyon Days, a debutante turned lesbian, and Mary Ann Singleton, mother of half-Chinese twins. There are gays converging on the Bohemian Grove, the A-Gays, the B-Gays, the National Gay Rodeo. And in More Tales of the City, Maupin introduces the first gay nursing home.
Disgusted by the trappings of modern homosexuality - the requisite T-shirts, shorts and Land's End socks - one character in Further Tales of the City grouses, "There's gotta be another way to be queer."
Says the author: "One of the most maddening things about being a gay humorist is that you're essentially drawing on one of the greatest strengths of gay life, and that is this wonderful, rich, self-deprecating humor that gay people indulge in, and often when that's translated to the world at large, it's used against gay people in a way."
But the humor (his version of Queen Elizabeth dining at Trader Vic's, for example) also has universal appeal.
"What can I say?" Maupin says, laughing. "I'm a human being trapped in a faggot's body."
His series first appeared in the Chronicle in 1976. Last spring, he was lured away to the San Francisco Examiner, where his "Significant Others" column appears five days a week. His work now fills four Harper & Row paperback volumes (sales of 50,000 each) and Home Box Office owns rights for a proposed film.
Much in demand as a spokesman and master of ceremonies, Maupin is a strange sort of celebrity.
"Gay people have been invisible for so long," he explains, "that the sheer novelty of seeing someone who is gay and simply willing to talk about it quietly and humorously has thrust a lot of people into positions of visibility."
But is America ready for gay personalities?
"You got 'em already, honey," he laughs.
"Armistead Maupin has a byline so famous (possibly infamous) in San Francisco that it seems almost silly to have to explain him to the rest of us mortals who live elsewhere," wrote gossip maven Liz Smith. But largely because of the Rock Hudson best seller, Maupin's name is getting somewhat more widely known these days.
He declines to talk about his personal relationship with the movie star who died of AIDS last year. But in 1978, according to Davidson's book, Maupin took Hudson on a sight-seeing tour of San Francisco's trendy clubs, including the Club Fugazi, where a revue Maupin had co-authored, "Beach Blanket Babylon," was playing. The group moved on to the I-Beam, a gay disco, and to the Black and Blue, where a motorcycle hangs from the ceiling.
Davidson wrote:
"A pile of naked arms, legs, backs and wriggling behinds. Armistead and Rock stood against the wall, watching, and Rock thought it was funny. Armistead remembers thinking, `How ironic. I'm standing with the man who was the sex symbol of the world for two decades, and nobody's paying any attention to him. We could walk through this place like two women - completely invisible.' Armistead leaned over and pinched Rock playfully.
" `Is that you?' Rock said.
" `Yes.'
" `Just checking.' "
`It was a real martyr's death," Maupin says of Hudson's battle with AIDS and the resulting publicity. "It made an enormous difference to lots of gay people. Frankly, he wasn't a very socially conscious person in life. In many ways, he ran from his own nature, which made me very sad. But, by God, he made up for it in the last few months of his life. Because he did know what was happening. He knew that that book was going to be the whole truth. I know he was enormously shocked when he found out America had taken him to their bosom and said, `We love you anyway.' It was a point I had tried to make to him 10 years ago."
Although the gay community kept Rock Hudson's homosexuality out of the mainstream press, Maupin wrote about an unidentified "matinee idol" in his 1982 Further Tales of the City. The paunchy star entertained dozens of handsome young men and threw pool parties that lasted for days. "There were so many Speedos hung out to dry," Maupin wrote, "that the Danny Thomases called to ask why we were flying signal flags."
"Shabby genteel" is how Maupin describes his Raleigh, N.C., background. "We had money, but Sherman took it." His great-great-grandfather was a Confederate general who fought at Antietam. Armistead is the oldest of three children. He has one brother and one sister. "My father says he has one of each."
His father, a successful lawyer, is supportive of his son's activist status in the gay community. His mother died in 1979. "We came to terms with it before she died," Maupin says. "She tried to fix me up with her orderly on her deathbed."
He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and finished one year of law school before enlisting in the Navy. He was conservative, and social.
After his tour of duty, which included squiring Zumwalt's wife on Saigon shopping trips, Maupin went back to Southeast Asia on a volunteer basis to build houses for refugees. "It was a stunt by the Nixon administration to draw attention away from the Vietnam Veterans Against the War." (Maupin even sat in the presidential box during the 1972 Inaugural Youth Concert.)
He began his career as a reporter in Charleston, S.C., and wound up with the Associated Press in San Francisco, becoming the darling of the liberal media establishment, which was delighted with his irreverent view of gay liberation.
Maupin describes the 1970s as a heady, decadent decade.
"Most gay men are not permitted a true sexual adolescence in the way straight boys are," he explains. "So straight boys go out and make an ass out of themselves from the ages of 15 to 25. Many gay men don't have any sexual experience at all until they're well into their 20s. It (the '70s) was a lot of people, trying to link up very fast, and not knowing what was required. Sex is a hell of a lot of fun. It can take your mind off anything, including the pursuit of a lover."
Tragically, the decade will be most remembered as the one that spawned the AIDS epidemic. Yes, he says, he is worried. "Every gay man I know, as soon as he has a cold that lasts just a little bit too long, wonders.
"You've got a clock ticking. A sort of incubation clock and you figure `if I completely altered my sexual behavior four years ago' - as I did when one of my dearest friends died, then you might be safe.
The AIDS virus also has served an educational function, Maupin says. "It's sex and death all rolled into one package and it scares the hell out of people," he says. "But homosexuality is not a neighborhood in San Francisco. It's the husband who leaves his wife once a month and goes to a rest stop out on the highway in Virginia."
Maupin has nursed dying friends and knows firsthand the debilitating physical and emotional toll the disease has taken on the gay community. "My father, being the upright old conservative that he is, told me the whole time I was growing up that you never really saw true nobility until you lived through a war. For one reason or another, I never experienced that in Vietnam. But I think I know what he means now. When you watch people tested, you see where the goodness lies."
But while Maupin is a believer in "safe sex," he is not about to suggest monogamy for homosexuals. "Sex is a wonderful God-given thing and to a certain degree this epidemic has desexualized a lot of people, and I'm fighting against that as hard as I'm fighting against the disease."
His own behavior probably would have changed anyway, he says, even without the risk of AIDS. It's called growing up. He shares his apartment with one man now, and says it's love. "It's great. I called him when I got into the hotel last night. Five years ago, I would have been thinking, `Where's the local bathhouse?' "
And yes, he says, he still serves as an unofficial San Francisco tour guide.
"An interesting thing, whether you're straight or gay, is to have a friend from out of town show up and go out immediately and hit the bars and be perfect sluts for three days and at the end of it all, go up to the San Franciscan and say, `This place is just too decadent. I could never live here.' " Thinking about it, Maupin chuckles to himself.
Stephanie Mansfield. "Author chronicles gay life // Witty Armistead Maupin mines rich vein of homosexual humor." Chicago Sun-Times. Chicago Sun Times. 1986.
Tuesday, July 2, 1985
"The First Couple: Don Bachardy and Christopher Isherwood"
"The First Couple: Don Bachardy and Christopher Isherwood"
by Armistead Maupin
The Village Voice Volume 30, Number 16 2 July 1985
Just as much as his literary fame, Christopher Isherwood's personal candor qualifies him splendidly for his unsolicited role as Hero Emeritus of the modern gay movement. The 80-year-old author of The Berlin Stories, which became the basis for Cabaret, writes of his homosexuality with remarkable matter-of-factness in his 1976 autobiography, Christopher and His Kind. His 1964 novel, A Single Man, more pertinent now than ever, chronicles a day in the life of a gay man whose lover has unexpectedly died.
Isherwood's lover of 32 years is Don Bachardy, a Los Angeles native who met the English-born author when he was 18 and Isherwood was 48. Long respected as an artist, Bachardy was thrust into the spotlight two years ago when his state-commissioned portrait of former Governor Jerry Brown was vilified by members of the California General Assembly.
I have known Chris and Don since 1978, when we met at an Oscar Night party in Hollywood. For this interview I talked to them at their hillside home overlooking Santa Monica Canyon and the Pacific.
So you first met Don on the beach?
Christopher Isherwood: Yes, right down the cliff here. A whole bunch of people used to go down there. Naturally, we put our towels where the nice-looking boys were and one thing led to another. Don was young and full of life and he was a perfect darling. It was just as simple as that. You know, when you feel that the right person has come along, then all that's required is a certain sassiness.
You told me once that you felt you had entered the gay rights fray too late, that you wished you'd gotten involved earlier. In what way?
CI: Well, I never really felt, myself, that I was leading the charge, or taking the role of some kind of leader. Never for one moment. On the other hand, I never denied that I was queer. During all those years in Hollywood I just took it for granted that they knew what I was doing. I suppose it was a kind of arrogance.
When were you first aware you were gay? What are your earliest memories of feeling homosexual?
CI: Very early. I suppose those boys in Germany.
What about you, Don? Your first sexual experience?
Don Bachardy: I really hadn't had very much experience before I met Chris, nothing romantic or of very much interest. I never really identified with people my own age. The great liberation for me was finding somebody old enough, I suppose.
How did you feel when you first met Chris? What was your first reaction?
DB: He was just fun. I'd never met anybody like him, and he was so easy to be with. I was delighted. In fact, wasn't it I who proposed to you?
CI: That's not the kind of thing you ask a gentleman. You remember.
Chris, your long-term friendship with Wystan Auden is a matter of record. Did you begin that as lovers?
CI: We had lots of sex, but there wasn't a romance at all.
What we call a fuck buddy these days.
CI: A fuck buddy, yes, that's what we were. It would have been unthinkable under the circumstances if we hadn't at least tried. It was an enormous convenience because, quite aside from everything else, it was somebody to screw. We both lived very imprudent lives in the sense that we were always fussing around with rough trade and so on. But with Auden there was a very deep friendship, as we had gotten to know each other so early. And then I discovered that he was one of our major poets, which he proceeded to start being at quite an early age.
And you went on to California while he stayed in New York. Do you observe any differences in the way the two coasts handle homosexuality?
DB: I do think New York is an interesting place to be because I feel it's much more a battlefield than here. You're confronted with the really violent forces of opposition. I do think the queers who live there are more conscious of the enemy, and in a way that makes it more exciting. There are more people dying of AIDS, too. And there's more disapproval; it gets into print and people take stands much more openly than they do here.
Do you personally know anybody who has AIDS?
DB: Certain of our friends have died of it. That Black nude in the studio-he died about a month ago, a beautiful, charming, funny, nice man. His friend is a brilliant journalist who lives in Venice, and they were having sex just last November. He must be very worried.
CI: What one should be, of course, is very well informed on the subject, which I don't feel I am. I don't feel I know nearly enough about the AIDS situation. But these younger men who find they have it-some absolutely awful pressures begin to assert themselves. They're told by their relatives that it's a sort of punishment, that it's dreadful and it's God's will and all that kind of thing. And I think they have to get very tough with themselves and really decide which side they're on. You know, fuck God's will. God's will must be circumvented, if that's what it is.
Do you still encounter the closet mentality? It seems that we have a situation today where gay people who are famous and in the closet are forced to coexist openly with those who are open about it.
DB: And they feel awkward and it makes them almost resentful of their queer friends who have been identified. We're in that situation. Two very good friends of ours really don't like gay liberation-they don't want to be liberated; they liked it better before. Their attitude toward the two of us coming out in print was one of total dismay. When one of them was told that I'd given an interview to the Advocate-in fact they put my picture on the cover-he said, "Oh, no." He thought I'd made a disastrous career move. And who knows, he may be proved right. (Laughs)
CI: Well, we have to look at the example of David Hockney. He never made any bones about it.
DB: I must say he was outspoken at a time when I thought it precarious. Ten or twelve years ago he was taking some boy magazines back to England from here, and their customs seized the magazines. Now all David was out was maybe twenty or thirty dollars that he spent on the magazines, but he went to court and challenged them. He said he used the magazines for his work, and of course it got top billing in the newspapers. And David won the case.
There must have been some serious tongue-clucking, Don, when you and Chris became a couple in Hollywood.
DB: Well, I felt sufficiently protected because I was always in the company of Chris. I think it was much more difficult for him. I mean, I was just regarded as a sort of child prostitute.
CI: You were never snubbed in public.
DB: Joseph Cotten once said within earshot that he deplored the company of these "half-men," referring to me. And I always felt the injustice was that, by that definition, Chris was every bit as much a half-man as I, and yet, because of his age and literary distinction, all the disapproval was leveled at me. But even on that occasion with Joseph Cotten, for instance, Louis Jourdan's wife came to my defense. She made it clear that she disapproved of that kind of baiting.
Chris involved you in his religious studies with Swami Prabhavananda about that time, didn't he?
DB: Yes, and at the time, I wasn't aware of what was at stake. I'm stunned, really, by the frankness of his behavior. Taking me up to Vedanta Place was much more daring than taking me to David Selznick's. And it wasn't Prabhavananda; it was the congregation, wondering why he didn't take a "moral" stand.
I've seen the pictures; you looked fourteen when you were eighteen.
DB: This was in the early '50s; that was a time of maximum discretion. It was a sort of demonstration of your innate arrogance.
Chris, did you and Tennessee Williams go to bed with each other?
CI: Yes, but that was actually neither here nor there.
I'm sorry to hear that. (Laughs)
CI: It was not a big deal; we just found each other very sympathetic, and we went to bed together two or three times, I imagine. In his autobiography, you know, he wrote very handsomely about me and in fact said flat out that it almost came to a romance.
DB: And Chris looked-I mean, I think it was the time of your greatest beauty.
CI: (Laughs)
DB: Chris at 40 was just a knockout.
Did you ever feel the pressure to get married, Chris?
CI: No, not really.
DB: Only from Erika Mann. (General laughter)
DB: I always felt it was so ingenious of Chris to wiggle out of that and to get poor Wystan to do it instead.
CI: Well, she wanted to get another nationality, and the Nazis had her on their top list; they were out to get her. She needed to marry somebody who was above suspicion.
Did you talk Auden into it, or did she?
DB: I think Wystan accepted immediately.
CI: Oh, yes. It was very characteristic of him; he liked taking bold attitudes, and there were a few by-products, of course. They got the unceasing gratitude of Thomas Mann and the entire family. It was considered a great, liberal stroke, a sort of anti-Hitler gesture. The Manns themselves were very remarkable liberal preachers, and they would never have objected to the fact that Auden was homosexual or anything of the kind.
DB: Well, they could hardly object since Erika was a lesbian.
Do either of you ever receive any anti-gay taunts?
DB: Oh, sure, . . . and the beach is a battleground between the fags and the surfers. It's been a fag beach since I can remember, and long before that-certainly since the mid-'40s. The surfers were a very late development, and they started claiming the beach as their own. So quite often when I'm just running by myself on the beach, a group of young kids will yell out "faggot" or something. I always wonder how they know. (Laughs).
Chris, where did you come up with the idea for the man who lost his lover in A Single Man? Was that simply your own creation, or was it based on someone you knew?
CI: It was an obvious idea, you know, the widower who doesn't present himself as one-that's what it amounted to. No, I was never in that situation myself.
DB: I always suspected he was imagining what it would be like if we split up because I remember that period was a very rough time for us, and I was making a lot of waves. I was being very difficult and very tiresome.
How were you being tiresome?
DB: Just by being very dissatisfied. I was approaching thirty, and thirty for me was the toughest age of all. I started suffering from it around twenty-eight, and I didn't really get over it until about thirty-two. And since then, every birthday has been a breeze. My forties were the best time of my life.
I feel a little audacious asking this one, but when you met, and you put your relationship together, was there an understanding that you could have affairs on the side? It's what every gay couple has to deal with.
DB: We didn't discuss it very much, but my attitude was that I had a certain priority to have experience because Chris had had all of his before I knew him, and he owed me that freedom. However unfair it may have seemed to Chris, that was my attitude.
Did it seem unfair, Chris? Did you balk at that?
CI: I don't think so. Did I balk?
DB: No, you behaved very well. You didn't encourage me to see people on the side, but you behaved fairly well about it. But if he thought there was any danger of my getting involved with anybody, he made it clear that he didn't like the idea, which is really what I wanted. It was a way of testing his love.
CI: It's terrible, though; it's so French, that thing of not being jealous.
DB: Well, if one isn't jealous, one is indifferent, I think. Chris occasionally had his own feelings, and I was tolerant, but just up to a point.
You hadn't, after all, had Berlin.
CI: Those goddamned boys, all stealing.
DB: But whatever it was, it was certainly experience with a capital E, and that's what I wanted. And that's why I went off to London for a year and went to school. Chris came over and stayed with me for the summer, but I had to do it; I had to have some sort of independence.
Chris, why do you lie in the back seat when Don is driving?
CI: Because I believe I'm the only person who's fit to be on the road at all; therefore, I prefer to just miss it when other people drive.
DB: For years, it was one of the real bones between us, Chris's objection to my driving. Years ago we used to have to drive our own cars to the same destination to avoid the fights. I can't even remember now whose idea it was, but one of us decided that Chris should not only sit in the back seat, but that he should lie down so he couldn't see what I was doing. And once we discovered that, it was bliss.
Today I was trying to think who there is of Chris's generation who has never made any bones about being gay, and there simply is no one. With the loss of Williams and Truman Capote, that's it. For years, Chris, Capote, and Williams were sort of the three graces of the older generation.
DB: What about Gore Vidal? It's funny, he's never really declared himself, has he?
No, he hasn't. He's deliberately fuzzy about it.
CI: I think that's partly because of his political aspirations. As a matter of fact, his friend Howard Austin is a model mate. Howard is absolutely devoted to Gore. And he to Howard.
DB: They've been together longer than we have.
Have they really?
CI: Oh, yes, at least a year or two longer. At one period, you know, when Howard was having some health problems, Gore was really concerned. They really care for each other.
He dedicated his best book to you, or at least what a lot of people consider to be his best book, Myra Breckinridge.
DB: And Chris dedicated his best book to him, A Single Man.
CI: Yes, that's right.
DB: Which was a tough mouthful for Truman to swallow.
Do you mean that Capote felt that it should have been dedicated to him?
DB: I remember he referred to it in a sort of joking way.
Don, your success in the last three or four years must be very satisfying, since you had a period where you were the cute boy who lived with the great man.
DB: Yes, and I've always said that if I had choices, I would much rather have my success later in life than early. When youÕre young you can put with all sorts of rebuffs and failure because you still have your youth and vitality. A little success is very encouraging in middle age.
Do you and Chris sleep in the same bed?
DB: We always have. And not only in the same bed, but really, you know, intertwined.
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