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Kira Cochrane on the career of
gay rights icon Armistead Maupin
Armistead Maupin uses his closet
strictly for clothes. At a pinch, shoes. Having risen to fame in
the seventies as writer of the Tales of the City series which
included both gay and straight characters Maupin has established
himself as the patron saint and elder statesman of open
homosexuality. It's a role he takes very seriously. Explaining
his perspective in an article for The Advocate in 1985 he wrote,
"What earthly good is [gay] discretion, when teenagers are
still being murdered for the crime of effeminacy? I know, I know
- you have a right to keep your private life private. Well, you
do that, my friend - but don't expect the world not to notice
what you're really saying about yourself. And about the rest of
us. The message is direct. Hiding in the closet, says Maupin, is
deeply immoral. "It creates a secret society and I think if
for instance, a Jewish person said 'well of course I have a
right to hide my Jewishness because there's a great deal of
prejudice against Jews,' we wouldn't find that entirely
commendable."
While Maupin's candid approach to
sexuality has encouraged a generation of gay people to be out
and proud, it hasn't enjoyed widespread popularity. Apart from
the predictable opprobrium of the dial-a-bigot Religious Right,
mainstream criticism swelled in the mid eighties when Maupin
outed his friend Rock Hudson. Shortly after this announcement
the film star died of AIDS. Although Hudson accepted Maupin's
move, marking his approval by sending a biographer to interview
his old cruising partner, it outraged Hollywood's inner sanctum.
Many of them must have feared the same treatment.
Throughout the controversy Maupin
retained his dignity, defending himself convincingly. He
commented that, "While I am completely sympathetic to some
poor schoolteacher in Idaho who's worried about losing his or
her job, I am not to a movie star who is making millions keeping
an illusion afloat that makes it tougher for the teacher in
Idaho.' He also credited Hudson's eviction from the closet with
a turnaround in media coverage of homosexuality. "I created
a sort of model for the press. People magazine did its first
ever civilized piece on gay life on Rock Hudson and then the
rest of the press followed suit."
Given this commitment to openness
it's difficult to imagine Maupin ever having hidden his own
sexuality. It's tantamount, really, to imagining Bill Clinton as
celibate, William Hague as hip or Jackie Collins as a Bronte
sister. The fact is though, that Maupin spent his first 25 years
performing a pretty good impression of a straight conservative
Southern boy in his home state of North Carolina. To put into
perspective just how far he went with this charade, it's worth
noting that one of his early jobs was as a news writer for
undimmed right wing icon, Senator Jesse Helms. For those who
aren't up to date on the politics of the North Carolina Senator,
Helms is one of the most vociferous opponents of gay rights in
the US. He opposed funding for AIDS research, for instance, on
the basis that: "We've got to have some common sense about
a disease transmitted by people deliberately engaging in
unnatural acts." On his view of gay people in general he
commented, "These people are intellectually dishonest in
just about everything they do or say. They start by pretending
it's just another form of love. It's sickening." The idea
of Maupin working for such a man is almost farcical. It's like
trying to imagine Peter Tatchell as Margaret Thatcher's press
secretary, except that in Maupin's case it's true.
Growing up in Raleigh, North
Carolina, Maupin said: "I always knew that gay people
existed because my father sometimes made reference to them in a
derogatory way." Given that he was aware of his own
homosexuality from the age of six, this hostility must have made
it almost impossible to feel positive about his personal
identity. It was no doubt a growing sense of inadequacy that
drove Maupin to support some stridently right wing views
including racism and other pick and mix bigotries while in his
teens. Explaining the origin of these views years later in an
interview with Jonathan Dimbleby, he said: "I knew that I
wouldn't be able to satisfy [my father] in terms of my
sexuality. I knew that there was something intrinsic to my
nature that I could not change so I worked on the things I could
affect. Namely my politics." Like many a closet homosexual
before him he spoke out against all the things that he secretly
supported. As he says now, "I think the right wing is a
very safe place to be if you're a closet case. I've always said
scratch a serious Tory and you'll find a serious homo."
Maupin's conservatism defined his
early career. Along with the Jesse Helms interlude, his CV
includes a successful stint in the Navy, whose ranks he joined
during the Vietnam war. While the USA's liberal youth staged
mass anti-war demonstrations, Maupin was speaking out in favour
of the fighting. Supporting one of the most unpopular wars in
history was another attempt to please folks in conservative
Carolina.
It would be partly as a result of
his involvement in Vietnam that Maupin noticed something of a
conflict between his political outlook and his true sexuality.
Leaving the Navy and starting work as a reporter, he was
assigned to the San Francisco bureau of Associated Press,
arriving in 1971. He found there that his conservative politics
were more than a little out of sync with the city's prevailing
mood. This became clear during his first gay encounters. Talking
about these in recent interviews he comments that, "I had
been decorated by Nixon in the White House for a project I did
to take ex-GIs back to Vietnam for a while I had a picture of me
shaking hands with Nixon and sometimes I would bring guys home
from the bars in that first year in San Francisco and they'd see
this picture on the wall, and it was as if they'd gone home with
Jeffrey Dahmer, you know. It was terrifying to them."
As Maupin settled into the city
life, his politics changed and became gradually less frightening
for his dates. By 1974 he was ready for two big breakthroughs.
On the personal front there was his own coming out. He did this
through the pages of San Francisco magazine, taking part in a
'Ten Most Eligible Bachelors' feature. This bold move announced
his sexuality to the city, although his debutante daring was
undercut by Maupin's knowledge that his parents would never see
the magazine. The other step forward was a career move. 1974 was
to be the year that Maupin began telling his Tales of the City.
The series started in a small
Marin County newspaper, which folded five weeks after the first
episode. Maupin's characters were resurrected a couple of years
later on the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle, taking off
with the public immediately. Six weeks into his stint Maupin
decided to introduce an openly gay character to the group he'd
already assembled at fictional address, 28 Barbary Lane. The
move worried his editors, but the character Michael 'Mouse'
Tolliver, a Southern boy from a repressed family, ring any
bells? was an instant hit with his readers. Mouse's introduction
signalled a new era in mainstream fiction in which gay
characters could happily mingle with the straights.
Maupin would carry on writing his
800 word daily instalments for thirteen years, creating six
best-selling compilations in the process. He has commented that
each character represented a different facet of his own nature.
"Sometimes the character that I would write about would be
dictated by my mood. If I was feeling grumpy and cynical, I'd
write about Mona. If I wanted to wax romantic, I would be
Michael for a day."
This correlation between his own
feelings and those of his characters came in particularly handy
when he decided that it was time to come out to his parents. At
the age of 31 he included an instalment in the Chronicle
consisting of Michael's letter home. Knowing that his parents
were subscribers to the paper, he crafted a beautifully written
admission, stating plainly : "Your own child is
homosexual". He continued, "Being gay has taught me
tolerance, compassion and humility. It has shown me the
limitless possibilities of living. It has given me people whose
passion and kindness and sensitivity have provided a constant
source of strength." His parents realised that the message
was for them, rather than the Tollivers. Both gradually
recovered from the shock.
Writing the series through the
eighties, Maupin brought the painful depletion of San
Francisco's gay population to the attention of a mainstream
audience, while much of the media threw a veil over the
situation. In Sure of You, the sixth novel of the series, for
instance, Mouse's lover Thack rages against the trend to assign
AIDS deaths to cancer. Speaking about "a big A-Gay' who's
recently died, and whose obituary attributes his death to liver
cancer he comments, "Fuck him. How dare he act ashamed? Who
does he think he's fooling anyway? This is why people don't give
a shit about AIDS! Because cowardly pricks like this make it
seem like it's not really happening!' With such dialogue the
series made its straight audience wake up to the enormity of the
virus sweeping their city.
Sure of You, published in 1990,
drew the Tales to a close. When asked recently if he might
reprise the series Maupin gave a pretty definite no. "Think
about it. The characters would all be 50. They'd all be
scattered in different directions." To keep fans sated
though, came the novel Maybe the Moon in 1992. The story of a
31-inch-tall, fat dwarf as described by the New York Times,
looking for love and work in Hollywood, it survived its talk
show style premise to be described as his most subtle, engaging
work yet.
It's a trick that he'll be hoping
to repeat with his latest novel, The Night Listener out in
September this year. It revolves around a fifty year old, newly
single writer - Maupin recently split with his partner of twelve
years, Terry Anderson. It sounds like another case of art
imitating life. Which, if it turns out the kind of absorbing,
sympathetic characters of the Tales series, is just fine.
For now Maupin is engaged in an
extensive book tour, taking his work and ideas to new audiences.
Given that his own life has been a game of two halves - the
first straight, Southern and repressed, the second gay, liberal
and happy - it's to be hoped that he can convince other people
to drop their masks. In The Advocate he commented, "Your
job is to accept yourself - joyfully and with no apologies - and
get on with the adventure of your life". As with his
fiction, Maupin's message of openness is equally relevant
whether you're gay, straight or some place in-between.
Armistead Maupin is appearing at
Sallis Benney Theatre on Tuesday 19 Sept, courtesy of Borders
Bookshop.
copyright New Insight 2000
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