Finding his voice
Raised in Raleigh, N.C., in a family that took great pride in its Confederate roots was a boy who went by the name of Teddy. So much did he yearn for his father’s affection, so determined was he to “follow in his conservative footsteps,” that as a college student, he “railed against Socialists and peaceniks” and sponsored a counter-resolution against a boycott of segregated restaurants and motels in the area.
“So who was this Armistead Maupin, Jr.?” writes the man who would become the beloved author of the groundbreaking nine-volume series “Tales of the City.” “It’s easy enough to say that he was still angling for the love of his father, because, obviously, he was. But he was twenty years old and out in the
world, and he should have known better.”
It’s with this welcome candor that Maupin, in his new memoir, “Logical Family,” opens up about his conservative past, taking readers on the unlikely journey of his transformation into a pioneering queer voice, one whose writing cast a revealing light on the lives of San Franciscans.
But first things first: It’s easy to forget that before he moved to San Francisco, Maupin served in the Navy, where he felt right at home. It was during the Vietnam War that the law school dropout’s love of writing was rekindled; he not only wrote a satirical newsletter for the USS Everglades, a destroyer, but also edited “our Mediterranean cruise book (the Navy’s version of a high school yearbook).”
Maupin’s memories are by turns touching and humorous, as when he recalls losing his virginity in 1969, “somewhere in the month between the Stonewall Rebellion and the moon landing . ... The truth is, I didn’t so much lose it as dispose of it. I was twenty-five years old, woefully late by anyone’s reckoning, a bargain bin of overripe produce rapidly approaching its sell-by date.”
Maupin also worked at a TV station managed by North Carolina’s future senator Jesse Helms, who later expressed his approval of Maupin’s knack for the written word. Though Maupin had found his calling as a writer, he maintained a double life, sneaking out to clandestine cruising areas to pacify his sexual urges, which made him feel “listless and empty, a sorry impersonator of whatever it was I was trying to be.”
Eventually, his journalistic skills were recognized beyond North Carolina, and Maupin was offered a job with the San Francisco bureau of the Associated Press in 1971. But his cross-country move was delayed because President Richard Nixon wanted to commend him at the Oval Office for his work with “a rightwing Habitat for Humanity,” an organization he had founded with other Vietnam veterans in response to the antiwar movement. “I’ve never been quite in sync with the times,” he writes.
Once he was in San Francisco, however, the city offered Maupin the complex landscape of dynamic lifestyles and exhilarating encounters he had been seeking. He left the AP and later seized on the opportunity to serialize “Tales of the City” in The San Francisco Chronicle. The popularity of the series gave him the chance to connect finally to his “true genealogy,” a tribe that not only helped him catch up with the changing times but become one of the gay revolution’s important leaders.
Maupin highlights his Hollywood friendships, which move beyond name-dropping and into poignant conversations about coming out, particularly during the fight against AIDS in the 1980s. (He is credited with being one of the first American writers to address the subject.) Among his celebrity confidants was Rock Hudson, with whom he was “buddies with occasional benefits,” and Ian McKellen, with whom he shared a love interest.
Hudson never reconciled his sexuality to his public identity the way McKellen did, but Maupin knows this struggle. “The hardest thing about confronting the past is the pinch of the overlapping parts, when you are no longer one thing and not quite the other,” he writes.
Though he expresses regret that he wasted so much energy trying to please his father, Maupin makes clear that the choices of his youth were also the necessary steps that preceded his “chance to make a difference in the world.”
Fans of “Tales of the City” will be tickled when Maupin draws lines between his characters and the people who inspired them, an expectation he sets forth in his author’s note when he declares, “I reserve the right to plagiarize myself.” But he does this sparingly. He finds more value, as will his readers, in sharing his personal struggles as a queer icon in the public eye: “How could I have guessed then that the thing I feared most in myself would one day be the source of my greatest joy, the inspiration for my life’s work.”
Toward the end of the memoir, Maupin dedicates chapters to two other special people in his story, Christopher Isherwood and Harvey Milk. Both fortified his resolve to continue on a path of literary activism. But the heart of the book comes through when Maupin’s worlds collide: His parents happen to be in town for a visit when Milk and Mayor George Moscone are assassinated. The sorrow of watching his Republican father at an emotional memorial for a great figure, a victim of homophobia, suddenly turns the narrative into a heartrending portrait of redemption.
“A day without tolerance is a day without sunshine,” Maupin writes, and “Logical Family” succeeds in reconciling the distance between his heritage and the legacy he leaves to generations of readers. Engaging and revelatory, Maupin’s memoir is a delight, punctuating a distinguished career in letters.