Armistead Maupin Has Written the Hell Out of "Tales Of the City" And Now Just Wants to Chill
Armistead Maupin Has Written the Hell Out of "Tales Of the City" And Now Just Wants to Chill
The creator of one of the most beloved serials of all time is 80, living in London with his much younger husband and has no more time or patience with...well, a lot of things. You'll see.
We are deep in summer, Caftan readers! I’m writing to you from Cherry Grove, Fire Island, where I am for a week, having arrived the day after the all-night beach bacchant that is the Pines Party because I am still recovering from my late-June Pride weekend and just didn’t have the mojo for it this year. However, I am delighted and grateful, as always, to come to this longtime queer paradise, where I’ve been coming for 30 years. There is actually an exhibit here right now, all along the boardwalk streets, of photos of queer Cherry Grovers from the 1950s, and it is so moving to see gay men and women having their private island kiki during such a repressive time. Sometimes I am truly awed and moved by the incredible continuity of queerness. Thankfully, the scene here is somewhat more racially diverse than it appeared to be in the lily-white 1950s, but the cheeky, giddy, thank-goddess-we-can-be-ourselves-here vibe feels the same.
A few quick shout-outs before the main attraction. One, if you haven’t already, check out BoyCulture, the Substack from my friend Matthew Rettenmund, who has given lots of support to Caftan and who loves every tiny crumb of gay cultural history as much as I do. It’s very good.
Two, I wanted to share this little remembrance I just wrote of Bobbi Campbell on the 40th anniversary of his death. Bobbi not only hand-made what’s believed to be the first-ever PSA poster about AIDS (in San Fran the summer of 1981, warning of “gay cancer”), he was also basically the first person to ever go public with having AIDS, which is pretty remarkable.
Three, speaking of San Fran, I am still looking for queer folks who were there in the mid-late 1970s, especially if they were politically active. Please email me at timmurphynycwriter@gmail.com if that’s you or someone you know.
Four—yes, I always ask this—if you consistently like Caftan, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription and/or at least tell some friends about it. The more living I can make from Caftan, the more Caftan I can provide. I think I’ve said before that it’d be a dream to, apart from writing novels, work on Caftan alone.
FIVE, thank you oh amazing Trevor Project founder Celeste Lecesne. Why? Because you graciously made the introductions that led to this Caftan—one I’ve been wanting to do for awhile. Yes, queens, it’s the very very very legendary ARMISTEAD MAUPIN! I fear waxing cliché by telling you the role his Tales of the City series played in hastening and jet-fueling my escape from the closet in my late-eighties, early-nineties college years. The world he created in that series, from the first installments in the San Fran Chronicle starting in 1976, was simply too full of love, joy, wit, friendship, fun, mystery, chosen family, sex…I could go on!…not to yearn to come out and create some approximation of that world for myself. The summer of 1990, I raced alongside my friend Gill to finish the series, which by then had been boxed into three books (Tales…, More Tales…, Further Tales…). We gossiped and laughed about the characters as enthusiastically as we did about people we knew, forever shushing each other to prevent spoilers if one of us was just slightly ahead of the other. I think we both finished all three books in about two weeks. We just couldn’t put them down.
But as I read and re-read Armistead’s works (some of which are non-Tales novels, and one of which is a memoir as vivid and ingratiating as the Tales tales) in preparation for this chat, I also noted how he’d evolved as a writer along the way.
As a writer myself, I have such regard for his skills. He can be interior and complex but he’s also pithy and economical. He has a tremendous sense of pacing, of occasion, of withholding, of escalation and release. Take The Days of Anna Madrigal from 2014, in which we learn even more about the origins of his beloved transgender materfamilias. That he brings virtually all of his most cherished characters together again in the final chapters (Where? I won’t say, so as not to spoil for those who haven’t read)…and that he gives Anna a literary sendoff that is so splendidly cinematic I almost heard a Spielbergian orchestra swell as I read it…I mean, the guy’s a master.
And he’s a lovely man. I don’t want to even remotely spoil this interview by sharing my thoughts about it. I’ll just say that much of it was profoundly not what I expected. But he was so casually honest. And that’s a main point I took away from our roughly two-and-a-half-hour interview: that he’s spent his life striving to be honest, or perhaps I should say to balance the southern gentility he was raised on with truly trying to live an honest life, in all the senses of that phrase.
I think he’s done it beautifully.
I will see you soon, Caftaners! Meanwhile, curl up with Mr. Maupin.
Tim: Armistead, thank you so much for talking today, especially after just having had Covid. How are you feeling?
Armistead: It took a lot out of me for six weeks. It's not my first time having it. Christopher and I both got it after a night at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern [a longtime gay venue in London], where anybody would get it—not because it's a nasty place but because it's small and crowded, with a lot of queers crammed into it.
Tim:What is a typical day like for you?
AM: We moved five years ago to a 1914 house in Clapham [south of the Thames, near Brixton].
Tim: Why did you move to London?
AM: We'd always had it in our head. Chris lived here in the 90s with a boyfriend and I've lived here on and off since my early teens because I had a cousin here. So it's always been in my consciousness. We felt like we'd done San Francisco—me for 40 years and Chris for 20. We knew and loved it well but we wanted something different.
Tim: When do you wake up?
AM: About nine. Chris usually gets up before I do, but not much earlier. He lets his dog, Zeke, a labradoodle, sleep in with me. British people don't know the name Zeke, so I always find myself that that was always the name of the guy who ran the telegraph office in the old western movies. Then I stumble downstairs and make myself some iced tea, which is a very odd thing to do in the morning for the English. It gives me my fix. Then I generally come back to the computer and look at weird things online.
Tim: Like?
AM: You name it. It's only recently that the news has kept me interested because of what's happening in the States.
Tim: But what's the weird stuff?
AM: I like comics. Matt Rife, this cute guy, is taking the world by storm.
Tim: Oh, okay. Do you like this gay comic Matteo Lane?
AM: I love him, too.
Tim: Okay, so then what do you do?
AM: You're going to make me sound so boring. I go down and cook bacon and eggs eventually. I don't eat bread. I stick to the non-carbs.
Tim: Do you ever have bread? I mean, a lot of bread is really good. I try to stick to good bread and skip the shitty bread.
AM: Occasionally it'll happen, but not often. Then I come back to my office and do email. I'm going to bore you. I'm 80 years old.
Tim: Do you field all your own email requests?
AM: Chris does that in a great way so I don't have to bother with it. Anyway, I'm often on my computer either looking at stuff online or Googling people I've just heard the names of. And we have Clapham Common, this beautiful green space bigger than anything we ever had in San Francisco where we walk the dog.
Tim: Where is Christopher throughout the day?
AM: He's usually upstairs in his office. We both have our own floor here with our own bathroom, which is really nice. We go to the theater once a week. Otherwise we'll watch TV at night. Chris is into sci-fi. I tend to like things that aren't scifi.
Tim: Have you watched this German show set in the years before Hitler called Babylon Berlin? I've been really into that lately.
AM: Oh, I love that show. It conjures Isherwood for me bigtime. I usually go to bed around eleven. I can conk right out. I'm better than Chris that way.
Tim: Do you travel much?
AM: Not much. Pretty much everything I want is here. We're going to Edinburgh next week though for Fringe [theater] festival. Earlier this year, when my book Mona of the Manor [which follows up on Tales of the City character Mona as she lives in an English manor] came out, I had public appearances.
Tim: How often do you go back to the States?
AM: I haven't been back since 2019.
Tim: Wow! Why not?
AM: Trump is one short answer. We were so repelled by what was going on, and so exhausted by it. I have dear friends in San Francisco and elsewhere I'd like to visit but I haven't yet. We went back for a weekend in Palm Springs, which was a great deal of fun and sort of like San Fran in that every old queen in the world lives there now. People are often shocked, like you, to hear that I haven't been back in so long.
Tim: Do you still have family or friends in North Carolina, where you're from, that you keep in touch with?
AM: No. It's only my brother and we divorced each other about five years ago.
Tim: Because of Trump?
AM: Partially but also personal things. You get to a point in your life where some people aren't worth it and you don't feel the need to walk that walk anymore.
Tim: So you think it's true that one of the pluses of old age is that you can finally give zero fucks?
AM: Yeah, that's absolutely true. I haven't regretted anyone I've cut out of my life. They've been really clear about how they feel about me—some of them. And when the whole world is willing to celebrate me, I'm not going to humor some relative that cringes when I walk in the room.
Tim: Nobody from your upbringing has had a sea change about being gay? I would think they would've by now, especially influenced by your success, which people often defer to. Your brother?
AM: He hasn't had a big enough one. It's not really about him. It's just that when you get to a certain age, you're just too exhausted by some people to have to play their game anymore.
Tim: How do you feel at 80?
AM: I've felt being 80 lately. I'm not as mobile as I used to be. I use a cane now, or a stick, as I prefer to call it. I went to the fanciest store in London and bought myself a stick. It's just an aid, but it helps.
Tim: Do you exercise?
AM: I have a trainer who comes a couple of times a week and walks me through things in my living room who's full of joy and jokes and queer energy. And that's very good for me, but he doesn't push me. If he did, he'd be out of here.
Tim: Christopher is a professional yogi.
AM: He's in wonderful health.
Tim: How old is he?
AM: I think he's 53.
Tim: Do you do yoga with him?
AM: [calls in other room] Chris? Honey? [to me] I don't want to get that wrong [his age]. No, I don't do yoga with him. He's shown me some things to do.
Tim: Okay. This may sound like a banal question, but what is it like living in London after 40 years in San Fran? I first went to SF in 1994 and it lived up to all my dreams of this beautiful queer bohemian Shangri-La. Then I didn't go back until 2015 and it felt completely antiseptic, all these Google worker bots getting on the Google buses. Just such boring people wearing athleisure, even though of course the city itself was still beautiful. But I was like, "Where did magical San Francisco go?"
AM: Everything I ever felt about the city I've captured on the page. So I don't need to be there now because it's teeming with evil people. [I laugh] That's a little strong, but the tech bros that live there now—that's not of interest to me.
Tim: Was there a moment when you felt the change, or was it more like the proverbial frog slowly boiling in water?
AM: More like that. It wasn't any one moment. I think having Chris around helped me a lot because we could compare our reactions. [calling into the next room again] Chris? Come here a second. Did we have a moment of revelation where San Francisco got too much for us?
Chris: [entering the room] I think the moment was really— we were questioning because it was changing so much, and we also felt that certain members of our family post-Trump became vocally homophobic. Your brother, and—
AM: But that's not about San Francisco.
Chris: No, but that's partly why we thought about leaving.
AM: San Francisco was truly bohemian, and then it no longer was.
Tim: One thing I wanted to ask you was, in your memoir, Logical Family, from 2017, you talk about growing up this really staunch, enthusiastic conservative.
When did your politics change? Was it the social milieu of San Francisco? You have a funny bit about having a photo of Nixon in your apartment in your early years in San Fran and your tricks would be horrified and revulsed by it.
AM: Yeah, it helped that liberals were so much in the majority, gay or straight, and they all thought it was horrifying that I'd once been—
Tim: So it was a kind of social pressure?
AM: No, no. It basically began with getting a dick in my mouth, having the joy of sexuality anytime I wanted it.
Tim: But how did that affect your politics?
AM: Well, if you're being honest with yourself, none of the things— I don't know what the short answer is, but a lot of things came into play. I was getting famous, for one thing, for writing this thing [the original serialized Tales of the City in the San Francisco Chronicle] that I had to write every day and express my feelings and I wanted to be like other San Franciscans. There was nothing attractive about the life I had left behind. Nothing. And it's still that way. There are still people I have to humor back in the South, and I don't want to. I think being gay rescued me basically. It made me reconsider and revamp everything.
