Maupin delves into untold tales of life
Author looks back in memoir and film, but forward to unfinished story of city
Mama,” It may begins be the most the missive famous from coming Michael out letter “Mouse” ever Tolliver, written. the “Dear gay hero of Armistead Maupin’s nine-volume San Francisco novel sequence, “Tales of the City.” The letter goes on to recount the price of staying silent — “revulsion, shame” and the fear of revealing something “as basic to my nature as the color of my eyes” — and the “limitless possibilities of living” that emerge when the closet door opens. A touchstone of liberation for untold numbers of readers when it was first published in The Chronicle’s serialized “Tales” 40 years ago, Michael’s letter home has gone on renewing itself over the years. It was dramatized in the 1993 PBS “Tales of the City” miniseries, set to music as both an oratorio-style song and a musical theater number and passionately read aloud to audiences by the actor Ian McKellen among many others. Now, as one of the most cherished writers in San Francisco history delves into his own life in a searchingly confessional new memoir and documentary film, Maupin’s “Dear Mama” letter takes on a
deeply personal new resonance. Knowing that his own North Carolina parents would recognize the fictional letter as a real one addressed to them, the author recounts in his justpublished memoir, “Logical Family,” Maupin waited weeks for a response. When it finally came, his father tersely scolded his son for upsetting his mother, who was dying of cancer. There wasn’t a word about the wrenching content of the letter.
Both in “Logical Family” and director Jennifer Kroot’s “The Untold Tales of Armistead Maupin,” the personal excavations run deep. Maupin reflects on growing up in a conservative household in Raleigh, N.C.; discusses his own fumbling, late-to-the-party first sexual experiences; recalls his stint in the Navy in Vietnam; grapples with the family legacy of a grandfather’s suicide; and recalls the winding journalistic path, from Charleston, S.C., to Marin County’s Pacific Sun to his career-forging years at The Chronicle.
Well-told anecdotes, some already known and some new to even committed Maupinites, pepper the story. Maupin once worked for Jesse Helms. He shook hands at the White House with Richard Nixon, who joked with him about the pretty girls in Southeast Asia. He was a friend and then some of Rock Hudson and took heat for the role he played in outing the Hollywood sex symbol as a gay man. In 1993, Maupin made a speech about AIDS heroes to 50,000 people in Yankee Stadium.
Maupin, as he told an audience at the Roxie Theatre after a recent screening of “Untold Tales,” was in New York on Sept. 11, 2001. He opened the curtains on his downtown hotel windows and watched the first plane and then the second hit the World Trade Center towers. Pausing for a moment, he referenced the Woody Allen movie about a man who keeps popping up at historic events: “I’ve always had a kind of ‘Zeligy’ existence.”
At 73, Maupin has arrived at a certain retrospective perch in his life. Sporting suspenders over a plaid shirt and tucked into the corner of a couch in the snug front living room of the Castro District flat he shares with his husband, photographer Christopher Turner, and their room-filling gray Labradoodle, Philo, the writer was by turns droll, nostalgic and bracingly blunt.
Asked about the neighborhood where he has spent much of his adult life, Maupin replied, “I think the Castro is more interesting today with straight couples with strollers and gay couples with strollers, and the occasional lonely old dude cruising somebody. That’s a lot more fun than the rows of denim legs you’d see on Castro Street for years.” As for the city’s long tradition of bohemianism, he had a sure-fire image ready: “There are still people making an effort, but it often involves flying in a frozen lobster from Maine to your Burning Man camp.”
Maupin, who is “kind and self-deprecating” yet “doesn’t suffer fools lightly,” according to his longtime friend Judd Winick, never forgets where people stood or stand on the issues.
“The equivocation of certain liberals has driven me crazy for years,” said Maupin, recalling Dianne Feinstein’s “too much too soon” response to then-Mayor Gavin Newsom’s 2004 same-sex marriage action and President Clinton’s “atrociously named ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ ” policy.
While his home state of North Carolina has been a proving ground for social conservatism, with its ill-fated bathroom bill and other measures, Maupin takes a long-lens view of Trump times.
“The rights of LGBT people are taken away and put back and taken away again,” he said. “It’s like being a long-tailed cat in a roomful of rocking chairs. We’re used to expecting the worst from the fundamentalist South. They know how to conceal the ugliest parts of their beliefs in order to be accepted. I think that’s why they latched onto this guy (Trump) because ‘Dammit, he says what’s on his mind.’ They took the lowest bones he threw them and ran with it.”
For close friends David Sheff and his wife, Karen Barbour, Maupin was the natural choice to be godfather to the couple’s three children, one of whom tellingly misconstrued the name Armistead as “Honest Ed.” Said Sheff, Maupin “modeled the values we hope our kids would learn: kindness, acceptance, political consciousness and unconditional love.”
“He’s a wonderful sweet man and a big romantic,” said Turner, Maupin’s partner of 13 years, husband of 10 and 28 years his junior. “It’s the only relationship I’ve never questioned for a moment.”
When “Tales of the City” caught fire, as Maupin said he had a premonition it would, other offers followed. He spent three months in Los Angeles researching a never-to-be serial (working title: “Matinee Idylls”) set there and in San Francisco. Maupin tends to see the bright side of any situation. He lived at the Chateau Marmont, breakfasted at Schwab’s and eyed Richard Gere sunning himself at the hotel pool in a lime-green Speedo. “It doesn’t get any better than that,” said Maupin with a Cheshire cat grin.
The final volume of “Tales,” “The Days of Anna Madrigal,” was published in 2014. But if a planned Netflix series goes forward, the story hasn’t ended. Set in the present day, the eight- to 10-part “Tales” will feature miniseries stars Olympia Dukakis as the now 90year-old Anna and Laura Linney as a 53-year-old Mary Ann Singleton returning to San Francisco with what Maupin teases as “a big secret she needs to share with someone.”
As executive producer, Maupin is not the primary writer of the new show. But he’s got a keen eye trained on the 2017 details and values he wants to see represented. They include much more racial diversity than the original, a trans character played by a trans actor and references to a tech-transformed city. Living back at 28 Barbary Lane on Russian Hill, said Maupin, “Mrs. Madrigal is now sitting on some very valuable real estate” that was just a charming place to live back in the 1970s.
Maupin may have turned his gaze backward in “Logical Family” and the “Untold Tales” film. But he’s fully engaged in the here-and-now and what’s to come.
“I never want to be the grumpy old guy who says things were so much better when I was younger. San Francisco is a great place to be right now. And I’ll feel even better when Mark Leno is our mayor.”
As for another sign of the times, Maupin noted that “Mission Street at night looks like the Marina used to look like at night. I find that a little disturbing,” he said, then broke into one of his ebullient laughs. “But I do love eating in the Mission now. There’s one great place after another.”