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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: Let's talk for a minute about Tales of the City, because one of the things for people who became acquainted with it from the Chronicle or the television show was this whole concept of making families of your friends. It's something that a lot of us do on the West Coast, because many of us come from somewhere else and have left behind families or awful childhood memories. I'm just kind of flashing forward to the recent tragic events of September 11. To me, immediately my family, my friends here became people I had to touch and hug and kiss.
Maupin: I was actually in New York on September 11, about 14 blocks away. I opened up my curtains at the SoHo Grand Hotel that morning. It must have been 60 seconds after the first plane hit. The Trade towers were perfectly framed in my window. My first thought was to call Terry and hook up. It was 5:30 in the morning in San Francisco. I said, "You will not believe what I'm looking at outside my window." I turned on the television set, and the image on the set was identical to what I was seeing outside the window. I thought, oh my God, they are the same two buildings in the foreground. I was computing the distance. I stayed on the phone with Terry for an hour and a half, I guess. First of all, I was hearing that the bridges were being closed and that there was no way out of New York. There was a moment there when I thought that Armageddon had begun, as did the rest of the world. All I wanted was to hear the voices of the people I love. Nothing has ever been clearer to me. In some ways, that was an extraordinarily beautiful thing. I went to New York to participate in the memorial service for my editor, Robert Jones. Russell Banks, and Oscar Hijuelos, and Francine Prose and a number of authors he edited were there. We adored this guy. He was a wonderful man. We'd had a very wrenching time the day before. My publicist at Harper Collins asked if I'd like to leave early in the morning. I'm so glad I'm a lazy son-of-a-bitch and said no, I'd like to sleep in. But, I was there, going through that Rolodex. At the last minute, I thought, maybe I should bring my phone book along. After I hung up with Terry, I found people in New York that I loved and cared about. I asked Terry to get in touch with them. Nothing was more important. It was an extraordinary thing to see. I feel so much for the people in New York. In some ways, we are removed. The people in New York have that smoke blowing by their houses.
Lane: You, as a human being then, had a very emotional reaction, as we all did. I'm curious, as there's been quite a bit written since that event about the effect on artists, poets, painters. I can't help but think that certainly people who are writing - writing has a longer gestation period. I imagine that it might affect you profoundly as a writer.
Maupin: I think it will. It may just move me deeper into what I've always done. I asked myself several times, what is it you'd do differently? I feel really blessed because my work has been about love and connection and compassion and family - all of the things that are giving me strength right now, the only things that are giving me strength. I think it was H. G. Welles who said something to the effect of, "Every age is the same. It's only love that makes any of them bearable." I've thought about that so much recently. The strange thing was to move out of the narcissistic "what has happened to me" thing, because for some reason I was given this view of it, into understanding that it had happened to everyone. There was comfort in that, too - the notion that we're all carrying this discomfort and pain and fear right now. I'll see some old woman on the street, still trying to get her groceries back to her house, and think, she's living with that, too. She's got a million other trials in her life.
Lane: How does your work play in Peoria or Terre Haute, Indiana? Did those PBS stations air Tales of the City?
Maupin: Most of them did, except in the predictable places like Oklahoma and South Carolina, where they were officially condemned by the legislatures. It's so funny now, when you think about everything that's come in its wake, between Sex and the City and Will and Grace. PBS made a huge, huge mistake in rejecting the second series, and they know it. They were afraid of losing funding. They actually got bomb threats in Chattanooga, Tennessee. They evacuated the PBS station over this little story about people who were forming a family, precisely because I treated gay people the way I treated the other characters. I hear from people, still, who tell me that the series made a difference in their lives at just the right time. That makes me feel good. There is very little difference between Terre Haute and San Francisco these days. The American people have grown up a great deal and are far more sophisticated than they are given credit for by the government, which continues to suggest that there is something wrong with gays and lesbians serving in the military, or the religious institutions that condemn people who are loving parts of extended families just like the one at 28 Barbary Lane. When I created that scenario 25 years ago, there were a lot of people who said that this was the most Pollyanna-ish version of the world imaginable. How in the world could straight people and gay people all get along and live in the same place with their transsexual landlady? What a preposterous vision. But it has in fact come true. I'm very proud of that, and I think that's why it survives. The books are very popular in France right now.
Lane: And they've been quite popular in England for some time.
Maupin: I think it comes to a culture just as the culture is ready to embrace that concept. You'd think that the French would be much more - but they're not. They have this private "we do not care what you do in your bedroom" kind of thing, but they still had a "don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses" concept. The idea of a community was abhorrent to them, the sense of there being some sort of identity around it.
Lane: I've read that you refer to the Castro of today as a theme park for homos.
Maupin: That's in the novel, actually. It's slightly tongue-in-cheek, but not entirely.
Lane: How different is it? Is the San Francisco of the '70s and '80s really a lifetime ago for you, when you look back?
Maupin: Well, in some ways I have to look back at myself and pinch myself and realize I've grown old in the process. Some things don't change. There's a certain similarity. The cute boys on the street are cute boys on the street. They've looked that way for 25 years. The culture has become much more commercial. I do get annoyed. I had a guy, the other day, who came up to me. He was very upset because there's some plan to bring the "F" streetcar, which comes from Fisherman's Wharf, into the Castro. He said, "Don't you realize that this is going to destroy everything? It's going to bring straight people into the Castro. This is the spiritual center of our community." We're standing there in front of a store that has a "make your own dildo" kit and "tidy butt rectal douche." I thought, this is the spiritual center of our community? A lot of folks are upset that the Pottery Barn has come to the Castro. They think that straight people will come. It's this big, ugly mainstream thing. I have to explain to them patiently that in most American cities, the Pottery Barn is the gayest place in town.
Lane: Good cruising. Back to our real, biographical -
Maupin: You don't want to talk about "tidy butt rectal douche" anymore?
Lane: I'm happy to. What else can we say?
Maupin: Garrison Keillor could do an ad for that, couldn't he? I was thinking about that rutabaga pie thing he does.
Lane: So, back to our real families for a moment, because I want to talk about one really important part of The Night Listener that we haven't addressed yet, which is the relationship of the main character to his father. There's a wonderful, touching scene where he's with his father at the hospital bed. There's been a lot of difficulty that these two have had in their lives. I've read that your own relationship with your father changed as a result of this novel.
Maupin: I think he realized in the boldest way possible that I loved him, even though I took him to task for just about everything. He told me, for instance, about his fond memories about coming on his minesweeper into a harbor in the South Pacific, where the admiral put up a billboard that said "kill the bastards, kill the bastards, kill the yellow bastards." When I wasn't able to celebrate this as an act of American patriotism with him, he got very cross with me. I actually recreated the conversation with him in the novel. The wonderful thing that came out of that was that I got a letter from a man who said, "I must be one of your very few readers who's actually seen that billboard." He said, "I was with the fleet in the South Pacific when we sailed into Tulagi Harbor, and I remember that day and how glad we were to finally be somewhere safe where we could jump into the water. There were thousands of sailors stripping naked and jumping into the bay. They brought in beer for us. It was warm and exploding when we opened it. It was many, many years before I could admit to myself that I enjoyed the sight of those naked sailors far more than I enjoyed the beer." That touched me hugely. I actually shared that story with my father, just to let him know that there was a gay man serving with him in the South Pacific.
Lane: Did your father marry one of your high school classmates?
Maupin: Yes, he did. They came to my reading in Raleigh, when I read from The Night Listener. Somebody in the audience stood up and asked if I would mind going through my typical day. I went through the whole writer's story of what time you get up in the morning and how long you work. I said that sometimes I go to the gym and walk the dog, and in the evenings I'll smoke a joint. I said that sometimes this helps me relax and is inspirational. There was this silence, and then my father said, "Sit down and shut up."
Lane: So, he's still shockable.
Maupin: Well, he was being pretty hammy when he did that, because it put the spotlight back on him.
Lane: An audience member asks, is Armistead Maupin your pen name? Of course, it's your father's name.
Maupin: To his great embarrassment, we share the same name.
Lane: Is the jeopardy story true in the book?
Maupin: I spent years waiting, as most sons do, for a parent to recognize what you've done and praise you for it and say, "Good work." I didn't hear a peep out of my father when we won the Peabody award for Tales. None of the landmarks in my career have made a damn bit of difference. One night, he was sitting there eating Triscuits and cheddar cheese and watching Jeopardy! when my name appeared in blue and white on the screen, and Alex Trebek said the question. I was the answer. Nothing has ever impressed him like that.
Lane: Did he call you right away?
Maupin: Oh, yeah. It was a very exciting moment for him.
Lane: So, when he said that he'd seen you on Jeopardy! did you think that maybe you'd been on it and forgotten?
Maupin: No, that's just the character in the novel.
Lane: That's a tribute.
Maupin: I must say, he's been extraordinary. How much can I give away here? His life is seriously threatened, by the way, at the outcome of the novel. He called me up after the novel was finished and said, "Of course I had to finish the goddamn thing to see whether I was alive at the end or not."
Lane: How old is your father?
Maupin: He's 86. He had a recent medical scare that put him in the hospital. In The Night Listener, the character has an African-American nurse that he has a playful, if somewhat patriarchal, relationship with and who tolerates him. When he had this medical emergency in the hospital, afterwards I called up to see how he was doing. He said, "Goddamn, it was scariest thing that's ever happened. I thought your novel was coming to life. There was even a little nigger gal there waiting on me." My stepmother was on the line, and she said, "That would be the doctor." There is justice in the universe.
Lane: Would the Chronicle or any other daily newspaper publish Tales of the City today?
Maupin: Phil Bronstein wants me to. We've talked about it. I'm not being coy here. The last thing I'd want is to have that daily deadline. It would be a killer. I'm so much of a perfectionist. But, yeah, I don't see why they wouldn't.
Lane: There is a serial running currently.
Maupin: I've been mystified for years as to why more people haven't done it. It's a wonderful way to get your name out there and be noticed by an audience before you actually have a publisher.
Lane: It ran for 11 years, didn't it?
Maupin: Off and on, yeah.
Lane: I know you have very fond feelings about the television cast of Tales of the City and have stayed in touch and stayed friendly with Olympia Dukakis. I think you told me earlier you'd gone to the Oscars with Laura Linney.
Maupin: Yeah, that was great fun. We were two wide-eyed kids for an evening. It was so much fun, too.
Lane: Was it her first time, too?
Maupin: Oh, yeah. She made me wait in the other room at the suite while she tried on the Valentino. She came out and looked like Grace Kelly. She was so beautiful, and we had the best time. I remember when she was making that movie, You Can Count on Me, and she called and said, "You would not believe it, but I demanded that we have at least a makeup room for the actors. We don't even have that." They were filming in this little town in upstate New York. She said, "I'm sitting here in a chicken coop, and there is chicken shit hanging over a chicken wire over my head." When we were in the limo on the way to the Oscars, I reminded her that that's how this had started. It was great, because she had so many people - Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones would come up to her and tell her how great she was. We had a ball. I was trying to think what it reminded me of at the end. We were all in a limo and were a little bit drunk, and we were dressed up. It was like a prom. It had a prommy feeling to it.
Lane: You have to sit there for a long time, don't you?
Maupin: You do. You sit there for a very long time, but the company's not exactly boring.
Lane: Do they really put those people in your seats when you get up to go to the bathroom?
Maupin: They do. They have seat fillers. The minute you get up to go to the toilet, some person who looks like a high-class prostitute comes and sits in your seat. They really dress up for it.
Lane: How do you feel about the ghettoization of gay literature?
Maupin: It's not for me. I've been very proud of the fact that I've always been writing for everybody and about everybody. I've always thought that the revolutionary, radical aspect of my work was that I insisted that I be treated like everybody else. When I brought gay characters into Tales of the City, I was doing it in such a matter-of-fact way that I challenged anybody to question their right to be there. I did this in a mainstream place, 25 years ago. Over the years, I've fought the tendency to put a naked man on the cover to cue in the audience that this is gay literature. I've always wanted to write for the world-at-large. I think I've succeeded in doing that. I don't think it makes me any less loyal to the cause, as it were. I look at it as being a greater contribution. I think that young writers who come along today and are gay and want to write about a gay subject matter, assuming that this is a little world that you go off and join, are doing a great disservice to themselves. Those of us who did this 25 years ago were basically paving the way for others to make it a natural, ordinary thing to do. Just write your damn novel and put it out there, and if you speak to human hearts, they'll find you.
Lane: Michael Chabon tells an interesting story about when he wrote his first novel.
Maupin: He was mistaken for gay.
Lane: Newsweek had a big story, and he said it was great. "I was getting so much attention. People were calling. They were really nice people."
Maupin: He said to me - we actually shared a plane ride a few months ago - that he loved the way it expanded his audience. There's a funny connection. Terry Anderson, my ex and still family member who's in the audience here, was the manager at A Different Light at the time. There was this confusion that suddenly arose. Michael was in this article in Newsweek about the new breed of young, gay writers. Terry - I don't know how he got word of the fact that he wasn't gay - but he called up and asked the publishers, "This guy is coming. Is he actually gay?" They said, "Hang on a minute." Afterwards we laughed about it, because it must be the first time in the history of the world that somebody's - for years, people tried to hide that. Now, it's like, "Well, would it be okay if I weren't gay?"
Lane: But there are a lot of writers - I'm thinking of Michael Cunningham, for example - who have totally transcended that and are writing things that everybody is reading.
Maupin: It's a model that you set up for yourself. Michael did this the same way I did it, by including a wide panoply of characters. Even people who just write about gay characters, which is just fine in and of itself, don't need to join this tiny little world in order to do that anymore. It went from being something that was shunned completely by publishers. I remember when Tales of the City first came out. My editor at Harper Collins was really very hesitant about saying that there was gay subject matter in the book. I said, "Look, this is what makes a difference. You should point this out." They were really hesitant. Now, there's a whole business reason, a whole marketing niche thing that's been worked out, and it's the easiest way in the world to get consigned to oblivion. There's absolutely nothing revolutionary nowadays about declaring yourself a gay writer and being in that tiny little club. I say this as someone who gets very cross with people who hide their homosexuality. I've been more impatient with that than anybody I can think of. I was outing people before there was a name for it. The whole point about being matter-of-fact about homosexuality is to join the world and let it expand your universe, not narrow it. If you leave your little small town, either literally or metaphorically, and join another little small town, life's not getting better.
Lane: An audience member wants to know if you'd care to comment on adaptations of The Night Listener that are in progress or in your imagination.
Maupin: Well, Terry tells me that he has the whole thing mapped out in his head. I can't even say that I can do that. The trick of The Night Listener is that the mystery of it is accomplished in a novel in a way that would be difficult in a film - not impossible, but difficult, because it's all about voices. It would make a damn good radio play. In fact, I think Terry's got some ideas in the works with the BBC over that. That's what you would have to surmount, because you don't know whom you're talking to part of the time. I've actually been approached by several actors who've wanted to take on the role, but I won't name them out of courtesy to them, should it not happen. I'd like to see it happen. I think it would make a very interesting movie.
Lane: It would be tricky, but it could be really effective.
Maupin: It would really take a filmmaker who has a vision of it and who can weave the past and the present together and make it about the way in which writers' imaginations get them in trouble. I rented The Fourth Man the other day, which is a Paul Verhoeven film that he made in Holland before he came to Hollywood and got trashy with Joe Eszterhas. I highly recommend it. It's an extraordinary thriller, and it's about a man who's a writer who's gay, and who is constantly morbidly fixating on what might happen. He doesn't know whether these are actually visions of the future or his own imagination. It's a very powerful and interesting film.
Lane: You mentioned to me earlier that while you were in New York for the horrible events of September 11, one good thing was that you got to see your good friend, Ian McKellen, which comes to mind because we're talking about actors and outing. He had some really interesting British takes on this event.
Maupin: He basically rescued me. I was there for three nights, trying to get out. Every time I booked something, they evacuated either the train station or the airport. It was getting scarier and scarier. I couldn't dial out of the hotel. Ian called, and he said, "Darling, come uptown. It's much nicer up here." He was right. It was much nicer up there. It was like going from Kansas into Oz. It was very odd. Suddenly, the streets were full of traffic and bustling people. It was one of strangest transitions I've ever made, because we were well below the area where traffic was no longer allowed down, and there was soot all over everything. Ian said to come to the theater. So, I went to the Broadhurst Theater and sat, in the afternoon in this empty theater, with the director, who's Ian's ex and a close friend, Sean Mathias. I watched Ian and Helen Mirren and David Strathairn onstage in that goofing-around stage where they're blocking something. Watching these great actors concentrate on their art in this time of terror, sadness, and fear was an extraordinarily comforting thing. When he realized how shaken I was, Ian said, "You've really taken this quite hard, haven't you?" I said, "Ian." He said, "You don't understand. I slept under a steel plate until I was four years old." I realized that even the British have a different view of this than Americans do. We have lived in this state of feeling safe about our homeland, and most of the rest of the world has not had that luxury.
Return to Part I of the Conversation >>
