Even with the major advances that the LGBT community has made in the past few decades it is still not blessed with an over-abundance of its own heroes/role models. It therefore comes as no surprise that when one rises up and is blessed with an incredible innate talent to articulate how many of us feel, and is also such masterful storyteller who so succinctly captures the true spirit of our history too, then it is only seems right that he is the subject of an affectionate and flattering documentary.
Armistead Maupin was born at the end of WW2 to an aristocratic Southern family and spent his privileged childhood and college days in North Carolina. What was even more surprising we discover is that after young Maupin did a couple of spells overseas serving in the US Navy, he cut his writing teeth working for the segregationist Senator Jesse Helms who was one of the most virulent homophobes in the Senate at the time.
However in 1971 he was offered a job with the Associated Press’s San Francisco Bureau, and he never looked back. Maupin maintains that he was still a virgin until he was 26 years old, and didn’t come out of the closet until he was 30. He mischievously revealed to the filmmaker Jennifer M. Kroot that he certainly made up for lost time, and that his many sexual partners at the time included Rock Hudson.
In 1974 Maupin began what would become the celebrated Tales of the City novels that would end up telling the whole world about the going-ons of the free-spirited San Francisco which was then recognized as the nation’s gay capital. He wrote it initially as a daily serial, which for most of its life was published by the San Francisco Chronicle, and because it was so current, Maupin could use it to document everything that was happening in that part of the globe, including the onslaught of the AIDS pandemic that would decimate the the city’s LGBT community there more than anywhere else at the time.
When asked if one of many beloved characters in the Tales of The City novels was based on him, he confessed “I’ve always been all of the characters in one way or another.” Certainly he used the daily diary to tell his own story, such as the letter he penned ostensibly for the fictional Micheal Tolliver to ‘come out’ as gay to his parents, which was really aimed at Maupin’s parents whom he wanted to finally know about his sexuality. A nice touch in the film was to have the letter read out loud by several people including Olympia Dukakis and Laura Linney who had starred in the TV miniseries.
Maupin was probably one of the first people to ever write about AIDS in those days, and like any of us from that generation who survived, he still mourns the losses and shows the scars of what many of us went through. In his case, his long-term partner who was HIV+, embraced the arrival of protease inhibitors in 1996 which gave him, and others, a new lease of life which in his case meant separating from Maupin and going forward alone.
Maupin finds it easy to articulate his feelings, whether it be about his unfettered happiness with his husband who is 30 years his senior, or his more controversial stance on ‘outing’ closeted gay people which started when he went public on Rock Hudson’s sexuality as the actor’s friends refused to admit that he was dying of AIDS.
Now as a beloved senior figure in the community Maupin is still doing countless readings throughout the country (his appearance at P Town’s Bear Week has now become an annual event) and he is busy working on his memoirs that are due to be published in the Fall. He hints too that the long awaited TV series of ‘Further Tales’ may finally be made after PBS succumbed to political pressure and cancelled it years ago.
Maupin stresses that he knows that he is happy just to be alive, and that what has made him happiest is the fact that he is blessed to be surrounded by really good friends what he terms as his ‘logical family’ which for LGBT people will always supplant our biological family any day.
Labels: 2017, biography, documentary
