Like the tendrils of year-round fog that cling to the Golden Gate Bridge in his adopted home of San Francisco, history has a funny way of swirling around Tales of the City author Armistead Maupin.
As a young navy man and Vietnam veteran, he met with not-yet disgraced President Nixon in the Oval Office, appearing briefly on the scandalously bugged Watergate tapes. When I call Maupin at home, I remark how staggering the circles in which he has moved are. “I was in a lot of situations that now, looking back on them, were moments in history,” he chuckles.
After a protracted period in the closet - for fear of offending his staunchly homophobic and deeply racist father back home in Raleigh, North Carolina - Maupin finally lost his virginity aged 25. Again, history had a hand in things. He picked up a man in a Charleston beachside beat on the site of a Confederate monument marking the spot where the Civil War broke out.
It was the summer of 1969, somewhere in between the Stonewall riots and the moon landing, and, as Maupin details in his at-times jaw-dropping, always good-humoured memoir Logical Family, he didn’t look back. Decamping to San Fran soon after, he recalls the sexual freedom he embraced in the beats, bars and sex clubs. “I was in the first generation that was instantly joyful,” he says, noting, “AIDS hadn’t come along yet and so it was an amazing thing to discover and to laugh at myself, thinking this is the thing that I repressed for 25 years of my life?”
The book also recounts how an already stressful reunion with his dying mother is tragically overshadowed by the assassination of Harvey Milk, the first gay man to be elected into public office in the US, and who regularly shared a stage with Maupin at queer rights events.
Then there’s his fascinating connection to closeted Hollywood leading man Rock Hudson. Hooking up with him, Maupin was so in awe he couldn’t rise to the occasion, apparently a common occurrence for a kindly Hudson. Logical Family also recounts a particularly cute moment as Hudson - holding court with a gaggle of gay men in a cafe - reads aloud from the daily San Francisco Chronicle column that would later form the basis of Maupin’s best-selling and much-loved queer books Tales of the City, about the colourful residents of 28 Barbary Lane.
Hudson himself makes a cameo in that series, though his name is redacted. Logical Family returns to his story at a time when the tabloids were circling over the mystery illness that forced the Giant star to quit Dynasty. Maupin was the centre of some controversy when, interviewed by the San Francisco Chronicle he refused to lie, effectively outing Hudson as both gay and HIV-positive.
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Though the move attracted a huge amount of criticism, Maupin says he has no regrets, pointing to the 35,000-plus letters of support Hudson received at hospital. “I knew that it would make a difference and it did,” he insists. “Beyond all of that, I wanted to make a difference for my gay brothers who were dying right and left and being rejected by their families. Suddenly here was this heartthrob, this American hero, and they could see that he was gay. I still get shit about it, but I knew what I was doing and why, and it had nothing to do with gossip, it was all about wanting to open the window and let the air come in.”
Maupin’s disappointed there are still so few out actors in Hollywood. “It delivers the message that there’s something to be ashamed of here. That’s why Ian McKellen is not only my dear friend, but also my greatest hero, because he did that early on and he’s shown by the example of his own life what a great thing it is to live honestly.”
Writing HIV into Tales was a trial for Maupin. He was the first author to feature the death of a character from an AIDS-related illness in 1984’s Babycakes, as Michael ‘Mouse’ Tolliver loses his ex Doctor Jon Fielding. “I had to introduce this monstrous subject in what was basically a comedic work, but I looked around at friends of mine who were dying and thought, ‘they’re using humour right now to get through this,’ and that emboldened me to do it myself,” Maupin says.
One of Logical Family’s most moving sections reveals he initially drew the series to a close with 1989’s Sure of You because he could not face doing the same with Mouse. He only returned to it many years later thanks to his friendship with fellow celebrated queer author Christopher Isherwood. “I wanted to write a story like Christopher’s A Single Man, where I dwell on the life of a middle-aged gay man and I thought I could make him HIV-positive and a survivor. And then I realised I had such a man in my canon. It was Michael.”
Logical Family sings with these moments, its little heartaches amongst the chuckles. Estranged from his homophobic brother, the memoir’s title refers directly to the advice Maupin offers all queer people about finding the family who love them for who they are. “You should get impatient with the notion that you have to put up with biological family members who are working to subvert your rights,” he says.
Proud to be seen as a gay elder, he remains optimistic about the future. “I think we’re in a much better place than when I began writing, despite all the efforts of right wingers around the world, simply because we are more visible and there are good people out there who know who we are, who love us and will fight for us. I am proud to have been a part of that fight over the last 40 years.”
