|
Armistead Maupin
Author, The Night Listener, Maybe the Moon, and Tales of the City
In conversation with Barbara Lane, Director, Commonwealth Club Book Awards
Lane: Because you have such a wonderful voice and you've said that you write to be read aloud, I'd love to have you start with a reading from The Night Listener.
Maupin: This is basically from the reminiscing portions of the novel, where Gabriel Noone, the storyteller, looks back on his life and reflects on where he is now and how he got there.
"My mother took care of everyone, but her first-born was especially blessed. When I was as young as eight, she would bring me breakfast in bed on Saturday mornings, so I could listen to Big John and Sparky in the alpine lair of my upper bunk. My father, who complained bitterly of her "mollycoddling," had contributed to this indulgence by building a shelf near the ceiling that could hold both my shortwave radio and my vast collection of Hardy Boys books. Later, when I discovered The Big Show and its host, Miss Tallulah Bankhead, I would climb to my aerie after supper and surrender to the smoky-warm, mannish voice of a woman I worshipped as a goddess but had never actually seen.
"In Mummie's version of things I was simply her eccentric child. My brother, Billy, was the athletic, methodical one, the natural heir to my father's gift for finance, a lively, uncomplicated kid who spent hours moving marbles across the rug as if they were beads on an abacus. And Josie, by definition, was the Precious Little Girl, a role so exalted that no one could imagine a future for her beyond marriage and motherhood. Of the three children, I was the puzzlement: the one my mother dubbed Ferdinand, since, unlike the other little bulls, I preferred to sit alone in the pasture and smell the flowers. How could she not have known from the beginning? She must have suspected something when I saw Singin' in the Rain eight times at the age of ten, when I entered my homemade vegetable dyes in the junior high science fair, when I spent weeks designing a stained-glass window for my bedroom.
" 'Gabriel is just naturally creative,' Mummie would tell her friends, when Pap wasn't there to hear it. 'One day he'll write a scandalous book that will embarrass the whole family, just the way Tom Wolfe did.' My mother had grown up in Asheville when Wolfe was wrecking havoc there with Look Homeward, Angel. She recalled the way the author's family had dined out for years on their literary notoriety. Old Mrs. Wolfe had always been ready with a stock reply when asked how it felt to have her dirty laundry aired in public. Drawing herself up grandly, she would proclaim with a stoic sigh that 'Caesar had Brutus, and Jesus had Judas, and we have our Tom.' But Wolfe was permitted his indiscretion, Mummie said, because he was a genius and a true bohemian; He had run off to the North, you see, and moved in with a Jewess who was much older than he was. You couldn't get any more bohemian than that, she said with a knowing look, as if to suggest that there might be a Jewess or two in my own future.
Though she played by the rules of Charleston society, my mother herself nursed private dreams of bohemianism. Her own mother had been an ardent suffragist in England and was still known to read palms and cite the theosophy of Madame Blavatsky. So Mummie would often make references to karma and rosy circles and past lives without fully knowing what those things were, and certainly without abandoning her weekly Episcopal prayer group. But I wanted her to be Auntie Mame as much as she did, so I egged her on at every turn. We went flea marketing together and bought exotic Indian cotton bedspreads for the house. Once, in a rare display of physicality, I completely rearranged the living room to showcase more dramatically her fine collection of blue Pisgah Mountain Pottery.
"There were, though, limits to my mother's non-conformism, and I discovered them when I made friends with Rusty Ellis. Rusty, to my mind, was a perfectly prosaic kid from Minneapolis whose father had recently been transferred to an insurance company in Charleston. True, the Ellises were somewhat of the South, and their living room furniture was all Danish Modern, but I really liked knowing someone who said davenport instead of sofa, and Rusty's love of the movies was easily the equal of mine. Also like me, he had successfully made it to fourteen without learning the rules of a single sport. We spent our time together after school discussing the deeper meaning of Vertigo, or searching for the tomb of the real-life Annabel Lee, a local girl the young Edgar Allen Poe had once courted out on Sullivan's Island.
"I was already jerking off at that point, but I felt nothing like lust for Rusty; I was just extremely comfortable around him. I had stumbled by chance upon a member of my own tribe, and Mummie must have realized this long before I did. She liked Rusty just fine - for the very reasons she liked me - but two fey little fantasists was one too many for her comfort. She pulled me aside one day and suggested gently that maybe I shouldn't see so much of my friend. When I asked her why, she said that Rusty was a little effeminate - through no fault of his own, of course, but it might cause people to 'think things.' And I realized then that my secret deficiency wasn't just happening in my pants; it was part and parcel of my very being, a blazing scarlet H that could easily betray me at any moment."
Lane: This passage, obviously, and many more in The Night Listener beg the question of how much autobiography there is here.
Maupin: A great deal. The novel was, in many ways, an effort to fold in personal experiences and stories that I'd been telling my friends for years, which they said I really should do something with. For many years, I didn't have the nerve. I always felt that there was something slightly pompous or self-centered about getting strictly autobiographical. Then I got over that. I realized that the closer I got to the truth, the stronger the ring of truth would be about the novel itself. I've always done this on some level or another. I've always drawn aspects of my own life out and ascribed them to other people; it's just that this time around I chose a character that's so much like me that it would be coy to deny that it's essentially my own experience. The last time around in Maybe the Moon, my novel from 1992, the central character was a heterosexual, female, Jewish dwarf. It made the perfect disguise. I could tell the most extraordinary things about myself and never fear being discovered.
Lane: Other than your own background, your growing up, and your parents, this novel also dwells on the separation that Gabriel Noone has with his partner, Jess, which parallels your own divorce, as you call it, from your partner and still your close comrade, Terry.
Maupin: Terry's still very much part of my family, and his partner, Dennis Brown. Terry was actually the person who encouraged me to use that, knowing me so well that he realized that I could actually work through some of my feelings by putting them on paper. It was one of the toughest things I've ever had to do. Part of what made it easier was that Terry said, "I don't want to see it until you're done with it." Otherwise, he knew he'd somehow cramp my style or I'd run screaming from it immediately.
Lane: He would read other works of yours as you were writing?
Maupin: Sometimes I'd read them out loud to him, or he'd see passages, because I like to try things out on the people around me. But in this case, he said, "Just write the whole thing. Just work your way through it." The novel is about a man who is trying to work his way through that, so it was a very odd and interesting experience.
Lane: And also work his way through something that we've all - living here in San Francisco - experienced. Ten or 15 years ago, certainly 20 years ago, people who were diagnosed with AIDS had a death sentence. We no longer have that. We have the new cocktails and the protease inhibitors, and all of a sudden people are living. In some ways, it's throwing things into chaos, because there were conclusions drawn that are no longer the case. Can you expand upon that a little bit?
Maupin: This was a lot fresher a phenomenon a few years ago, but yes: During the ten years that Terry and I were together, most of the time we were in some ways emotionally preparing for his death, because he was HIV-positive and fighting it all the time. When the new cocktails came along, and it became more apparent that it wasn't going to happen, that put Terry into a place where he wanted to examine his life options. I actually use the term "cocktail divorce" in the novel. I'd like to say I coined it - maybe I should say I coined it and get away with it - just like Herb Caen didn't coin the term "beatnik." But, the point is, these things get out there in the culture, and we hear them, and writers tend to snatch them up. I'd heard that term and thought it was kind of perfect, really. I'm always a little hesitant to even talk about this, because in many ways, it wasn't my experience, even though I went through an enormous fear of losing Terry. I wasn't in the double bind that Terry was in of imagining losing his life. I remember years ago, I had a scare, I thought I had AIDS. It was 1985 and I had gastritis, basically. I'd just been through a traumatic experience with the press when Rock Hudson's diagnosis was announced, and I found myself one of the few people who was willing to talk openly and lovingly about his life, and I feel I actually ended up protecting him in that way. But, an awful lot of stuff came down on my head at that time.
Lane: "Outing" wasn't even a term back then.
Maupin: There wasn't even a term for it. Basically, what I said to the press was that he was a good guy, everybody knew he was gay, and he had nothing to be ashamed of. I think I created a kind of template with which he actually ended up dealing with the thing. He sent his biographer to me. I was basically the first person she came to, so I felt okay about it in the end, but a lot of people in the gay community, especially, felt that I had broken this rule that one person must never say that another person is gay. That's beginning to seem a little quaint, which I'm happy to see, because I've always felt that the only way around the enormous stigma and the bigotry that's been placed on homosexuality is to be matter-of-fact about it, to assume that there's nothing to be ashamed of.
Lane: You're certainly matter-of-fact about it in this book, and I want to get to that. But before we do, the other story you're telling here is the story of this 13 year old boy, Pete Lomax, who's been abused sexually and psychologically in every way one can imagine, by his parents. Not only his parents, but pedophiles across the country. I'm curious about the relationship that this has to reality, if any of this is drawn from life.
Maupin: Let me back up here a little bit and tell you a story. There is some connection with real life. This novel is fiction, but it's impossible for writers not to find moments in their lives that become so dramatic that they know they have to use them. That happened to me a number of years ago when I was sent a manuscript about such a child who'd been through a terrible experience. The manuscript was beautifully written and very moving. I was touched on so many levels; I can't even begin to describe them. I approached the editor and asked if I could contact the boy and tell him how much I loved the book. He said he thought he could arrange that through the child's adoptive mother. The child had been rescued and was basically struggling with AIDS. So I did, and a friendship began on the telephone that was really quite extraordinary. I met this person who was wise beyond his years and very funny, not depressing in the slightest. He was great company. Sometimes, two or three nights a week we'd get on the phone and just gab with each other. In the beginning, I was sort of talking down to him or editing what I had to say because I felt I was talking to essentially a child, but a closeness developed. It's not the same closeness that's in The Night Listener - I never thought of this child as my son - but we were friends. One night, suddenly tremendous doubt was cast as to whether or not this child actually existed, whether or not it was a real person or the invention of someone else. It was the strangest moment of my life - well, maybe these days it has to be the second strangest - but I suddenly felt as if I were living in a Hitchcock film. Effectively, I was, for many years, in a great mystery. The only thing I could do to work my way out of the mystery was to write a novel about it and try to create an ending for myself to see what would happen. Last year, when the novel appeared, people started coming up to me at book signings and mentioning the name of this child and telling me that they'd had similar experiences.
Lane: I'm not going to let you destroy the suspense of the book or tell us the outcome of the story, because I have a feeling that sooner or later maybe we'll know. You've mentioned Hitchcock twice, and this novel has suspense and a psychological thriller aspect to it, so tell us about your debt to Hitchcock. Vertigo is your all-time favorite.
Maupin: I'm so glad I never met him. I probably wouldn't love him as much, from everything I've read. I had such a crush on Sir Alfred when I was a kid. I watched the television show, of course, and I remember the night I saw Rear Window, at the age of ten. I don't think I realized at the time that part of what fascinated me about him was the fact that his work seems to suggest, in a kind of playful way, that there is so much more below the surface of life that we don't know about. He has humor that arises in the most extraordinary places. In the midst of the most grisly, gothic story, humor will arise. He plays with sex and death and themes that never get old. I can watch his movies for one reason or another, over and over again. For some reason, To Catch a Thief has been running a lot on cable lately, and to watch that film for an hour and a half, on the Riviera, with that sunshine and Grace Kelly, was to take a vacation from all the fear and drama of our current situation. I realize what power his work has.
Lane: It also deals quite a bit with illusion and reality, which is a theme you're working with in this book.
Maupin: Absolutely. I've always dealt with illusion and reality. I've always dealt with people who are not what they seem to be. I think a lot of that comes from being gay and having lived 25 years of my life trying to appear to be something that I was not. When you're gay, you become a sort of spy at a very early age - a spy for both sides, almost. A gay teenager can walk into a room and pretty much figure out what's on everybody's mind, because you see things that other people don't see. I think that's why a lot of artists are gay. They deal with it in that way.
Lane: To what extent do you censor yourself as you write? Is there any subject you won't address?
Maupin: I censor myself a great deal, I'm afraid, because I'm always aware of the effect I'm making. I made a real vow with myself in The Night Listener to admit the worst about myself, and that's prompted a number of people to come up to me and say, "I can't believe that you admitted that."
Lane: Like about the size of your 501 jeans?
Maupin: You scared me there for a minute, Barbara.
Lane: We'll get to that.
Maupin: Yes, like admitting that I clipped off the little leather tag on the back of my 501 jeans so you couldn't actually read what my waist was - as if that would fool somebody. I love Anne Lamott because she does this. She admits the most extraordinary things. In doing so, we draw closer to her, because we feel that she is like us, that she'll say that about herself. There's a sort of benediction that occurs when that happens.
Lane: She did a tremendous thing for new mothers when she wrote Operating Instructions.
Maupin: I'm thinking of the birth scene. I try to do that, but even as I try to do it, I realize there's a certain vanity involved in that. There's the secret hope that people will love you for being so damned honest about yourself. Even there, there's a certain amount of vanity involved. You're aware of the effect that you're making.
Lane: One of the things that you are not covert about in this book is sex. You're explicit about gay sex, I think, probably, for the first time in this novel. Now that we're here with the paperback, you've had a little bit of time to assess the reactions of people to the way you write about sex in this book. What do people think?
Maupin: My brother was madly telling everybody in my family that the scene in the truck didn't really happen. Actually, straight women seem more turned on by that scene than anybody else. That was the real revelation for me this time around. I had an awful lot of straight women telling me that they found that tremendously hot. I don't know - maybe straight women secretly hope to pick up truckers at truck stops. This is the way to do it. I don't think of that as a particularly graphic scene, but maybe it's the -
Lane: It's not only that. You talk about your main character, Gabriel, being a cuddly, kissy, mutual masturbation kind of person versus Jess, his partner.
Maupin: Oh, I see. My pathetic French vanilla existence, I think I called it.
Lane: Jess gets into the rougher aspect about gay sex once he leaves Gabriel. That's kind of opening up something that at least mainstream fiction writers are not addressing.
Maupin: Oh, I don't know. An awful lot of straight folks were down at the Folsom Street Fair this year. It's a pretty much across-the-boards thing. I think we, as a nation, have to grow up about sexuality. We all have fantasies of one form or another. I think one of the hardest things to admit in The Night Listener was just that, that I was kind of boring in the long run, not a sexual exotic. In my own head, it's the most wonderful thing in the world while it's going on. I think we all like to think that we're capable of being some great sexual animal, whether we're male or female, straight or gay. On some level, we want to be seen that way.
Lane: What is your assessment of how mainstream Hollywood currently portrays gay people and gay issues? And do you find the Broadway musical The Producers funny?
Maupin: I wrote the narration for the film The Celluloid Closet, which examined the way Hollywood handled gay people over the years; many of the points that Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman made in that movie five years ago are no longer valid, because the subject matter has been opened up dramatically. I can remember a time when I would rush off to anything that had the slightest gay content. I was so grateful to see it. Now you say how many films there are at the gay film festival this year, and I'll never see them all. I think that the subject matter has finally been made acceptable. I don't have an agenda for how we must see positive role models. I've never had that agenda. I was pissed off, like a lot of other gay people, that for years we were just clowns or killers in films. But, that's also happened to every other minority in the country. It happens to Arab-Americans, by the way. The last minority to be really badly treated by Hollywood over the last ten years has been Arab-Americans.
Lane: In line with that Hollywood question, I know that you were a champion of Ellen DeGeneres when she came out, and you applauded her for that.
Maupin: She didn't need a champion. She did alright on her own.
Lane: I have to ask this tacky, sleazy, Hollywood question because you're here. What about Anne Heche?
Maupin: What about her? What do I know? She's on a book tour.
Lane: You know what we know. It just feels really disappointing, I guess.
Maupin: I don't think gay people should consider her a traitor to the cause because she's now sleeping with a man. Everybody's all over the map, sexually. Whatever she is or wants to be at any particular time is fine. If she is crazy, as her book title suggests, I think she could have paid Ellen the courtesy of telling her that before she proposed to her. I've met both women, and Anne was perfectly charming to me. I've had nothing but nice experiences with both of them. I don't understand this ecstasy spaceship ride thing any more than anybody else does. I was on that spaceship with her. John Travolta and the rest of the Scientologists were there. I just read that Willie Brown went down and met with the Scientologists.
Lane: That was in the paper.
Maupin: What is up with Willie? Stop it. How desperate can you be for meeting a movie star? Come on.
Lane: It was Kirstie Alley, Jenna Elfman - who else was there? Maybe Willie's a Scientologist.
Maupin: Yeah, right. It's a two-word thing. The first word is "star."
Read Part II of the Conversation >>
