Armistead Maupin
It was 1974 when young gay journalist Armistead Maupin, who’d recently moved from the buttoned-up American South to liberal San Francisco, started writing Tales of the City – a fictional newspaper serial in the style of Charles Dickens, but with considerably more sex, drugs and dancing-in-your-underpants contests.
Popular thought it was, Armistead couldn’t have predicted that his colourful stories about the lives and loves of his fellow San Franciscans would eventually spawn novels, musicals and, from 1993, TV adaptations. Most British people came to Tales of the City through Channel 4’s ground-breaking miniseries about the residents of 28 Barbary Lane – including earnest newcomer Mary Ann Singleton and her gay best friend, Michael ‘Mouse’ Tolliver – who live under the wise and watchful eye of transgender landlady Mrs Madrigal in the Californian city where, as Armistead puts it, ‘the Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name almost never shuts up’.
‘I was the Mary Ann of that story, so I mocked her innocence but celebrated her ability to take on new challenges,’ says the 75-year-old, who’s currently on a UK tour. ‘People naturally thought I was Michael, and I used some of my own experiences, but I would not have been the guy who joined the jockey shorts dance contest! I was far too timid and not that well-built.’
Beneath Tales of the City’s feelgood humour lay a serious message: that we should all be, and be with, whoever we want – the very opposite of what the author had been taught during his ultra-conservative upbringing in North Carolina.
A sensitive boy who adored antiques and putting on shows, Armistead always knew he was gay. The clues were there, had his ‘racist, homophobic’ father chosen to see them, in the yarns his son carefully dyed and the phallic cacti he bought. But nothing was said, and Armistead was too afraid to speak out.
‘Every queer person I know has had some version of this story,’ he says. ‘They couldn’t explain who they were to the people that were supposed to love them. And as a child, what I was feeling was classed as a criminal act, a mental illness and a sin, all at once. So it was a long climb out of that pit.’
At school he shone at storytelling. His teacher took to reading his work out loud, ‘and she paid way too much attention to me in class, to the annoyance of all the other kids. I already knew I was a good storyteller because I could engage my friends around the campfire, and had a marvellous time doing it.’
Yet bowing to his lawyer father’s wishes, he set aside his writing ambitions and went to law school, ‘where it became blazingly clear that I was bored s***less by all things legal.’ By then the Vietnam War was underway, and where better to hide his ‘unmanly’ side than in the US Navy?
It was, essentially, a desk job. ‘I didn’t have to shoot or be shot at, so that helped, but I wrote melodramatic letters home to my parents; I was trying to make my father happy by making myself look like a merry warrior,’ he admits.
‘But it was a wonderfully exotic place where I built friendships with men from all over the country and of different races, which was a new experience for me, having grown up where we were so violently segregated.’ Yet even then, strangled by his reactionary background, he took those friendships no further.
Back in the States Armistead became a reporter, and won a job with a press agency in San Francisco where, having finally lost his virginity aged 25, he could at last be ‘celebratory, not apologetic, about who I was.’
Telling his parents was another matter. In a moment of clarity, he realised he could use Tales of the City to finally came out to them via Michael’s poignant ‘Letter to Mama’. Now iconic in its own right, the letter has since been set to music and read at public events by everyone from Stephen Fry to Ian McKellen.
‘It’s not the bad people you worry about when you’re gay, it’s the good people, whose love you have and think you might lose,’ he says. ‘I’d hoped for a response but I didn’t get one. Largely I wanted my mother to know that this was not the worst thing that had ever happened to me. This, in fact, was the best thing that had ever happened to me, because it made me someone special.’ By the end of their lives, his parents had grudgingly accepted who he was: ‘My mother was even trying to fix me up with her orderly as she was dying.’
It’s been all-change for Armistead this year. After nearly two decades, a third series of Tales of the City launched on Netflix in the summer, with Laura Linney returning as Mary Ann, and the stately Olympia Dukakis, now in her late 80s, as Mrs Madrigal. This time, Armistead gave permission to depart from his storylines, ‘and that wasn’t easy, but they came through with flying colours. It was exhilarating to watch new scenes and think “Oh, that’s exactly what they would do!”’
He’s also moved to the UK with his husband of 12 years, photographer Christopher Turner, and insists that doesn’t miss San Francisco. ‘It’s in my heart always, but I’m loving the sheer romance of London.
‘My mother had the old-timey vision of gay men as ending up lonely and desperate, and when I was first trying to tell her that I was happy, she said “Well of course you are now, when you’re young and randy, but what will it be like when you’re old?” Well, I can answer that: you’ll have a lovely husband, a house, a dog, and a life. Which is what I have.’
:: An Evening with Armistead Maupin runs at various locations until November 11. See faneproductions.com.
Telling tales
The writer is working on a novel about Tales in the City’s bisexual bohemian Mona Ramsey, but it’s taking a while. ‘I’ve become a perfectionist and a procrastinator, which is a deadly combination.’
Actress Laura Linney, who plays Mary Ann in the TV series, has become a close friend; she gave her son the middle name Armistead.
He famously outed his former lover, Hollywood legend Rock Hudson, but has no regrets. ‘It meant a whole new dialogue could open about AIDS, and the people whose suffering had been ignored.’
Armistead is half English on his mother’s side, and his adored grandmother was a Suffragist. ‘She spoke before the Houses of Parliament on rights for women 100 years ago, and toured the country speaking, so I'm feeling very connected to her as I tour.’
An edited version of this interview appeared in Waitrose Weekend on September 26th 2019. (c) Waitrose