Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

by Christopher Bram

  The fourth novel to appear in 1978 received less press than the others, but Tales of the City didn’t look important when it first came out. It was a paperback original from Harper and Row with a cover that suggested a book of comic strips—which in a way it was: a series of humor columns from the San Francisco Chronicle by an unknown writer named Armistead Maupin. There were few reviews and many returns. Yet Tales became a sleeper hit and ultimately the most successful novel of the four.

  As his full name should indicate, Armistead Jones Maupin Jr. was from the South. He was born in 1944 in Washington, D.C., while his father was an officer in the navy. After the war, the family settled in Raleigh, North Carolina, where the father became a lawyer. A friend nicknamed the parents “John Wayne and Auntie Mame,” yet Maupin’s mother was a repressed Mame. Maupin lived an anxiously normal adolescence that included the Boy Scouts and Boys State, a political boot camp for honor students run by the American Legion. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and became more involved in politics—conservative politics—working for a local TV commentator named Jesse Helms. He started law school, intending to work in his father’s firm; but he hated law and dropped out to join the navy, attending officer candidates school just as his father had.

  Maupin had been attracted to men since he turned twelve but he denied the desire, kept it hidden. He did not have his first sexual experience until he was an ensign stationed in Charleston. He picked up a man at the Battery one evening while dressed in his civvies and took him back to his apartment. It was summer 1969, the summer of Stonewall, but Maupin didn’t hear of the riots until years later. He began to cruise the Battery regularly and enjoyed himself, but when his superior officer was transferred to Vietnam, Maupin applied to go with him. The Vietnam War was the most important event in his world at the time; he didn’t want to miss it. He spent an entire year over there, doing jobs that ranged from serving as a protocol officer in Saigon, where he took visiting dignitaries shopping, to being the navy liaison officer in a small army camp on the Cambodian border, supervising patrol boats like the one in Apocalypse Now.

  He saw San Francisco briefly in 1970 when he was discharged from the navy, but he did not stay. He returned to Vietnam as a civilian working for the Nixon administration, building homes for Vietnamese soldiers in a campaign to win hearts and minds. When he came back to the States, he was invited to the White House to meet Richard Nixon. Maupin and his colleagues spent an uncomfortable half hour trying to make small talk with the beleaguered president. It was the week of Nixon’s second inauguration and the Watergate scandal had not yet fully broken. Years later Maupin still owned a photo of his younger self shaking hands with Nixon, but he kept it in his bathroom.

  A reporter who had met Maupin overseas recommended him for a job with the Associated Press. He accepted and the AP sent him to San Francisco. It was either that or Buffalo.

  The city of Howl had gone through many changes since the days of Allen Ginsberg. The working-class bohemia of beatniks and poets continued into the Sixties, until the Summer of Love of 1967 flooded the run-down Haight-Ashbury district with would-be hippies. Most went back home, but many stayed and moved into other neighborhoods, including the Castro. People set up communes revolving around sex, drugs, and music; the city of poets became the city of the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and the drag troupe, the Cockettes. Many of the newcomers were gay and lesbian. Harvey Milk came from New York at this time and began to run for public office. Alongside the new counterculture city existed older cities of working-class Irish, Latinos, Asians, and even old-money Anglos, a lively mix of cultures packed into a small peninsula.

  San Francisco loosened Maupin’s Republican beliefs. His friend, British novelist Patrick Gale, writes that Maupin’s political philosophy “suffered a slow process of attrition in a city where no one approved of Nixon and where the counterculture held sway. Principally it was sex that brought him to transfer his allegiances. The orgy room at Dave’s Baths was democracy made flesh; race and social standing were checked at the door along with clothes.” Like many gay men who come out late to themselves, Maupin became very political about his sexuality. He came out locally in 1974 when San Francisco magazine wanted to include him as one of the ten sexiest men in the Bay area. He agreed, but insisted he be identified as a gay man.

  He did not stay long with the Associated Press. He tried other jobs in San Francisco, including advertising, but he wanted to write. He began to do articles for local magazines and newspapers, including the Pacific Sun, a weekly based across the bay in Marin County. When the Sun started a San Francisco edition in 1974, they used Maupin more frequently and suggested he add recurring characters to his pieces about local places. A new column was created, “The Serial by Armistead Maupin.” In the Sun’s Marin County edition, Cyra McFadden began a column also titled “The Serial,” satirizing the well-heeled liberals over there. Five weeks after Maupin started, however, the Sun decided to shut down its San Francisco edition. Luckily, his column had caught the attention of editors at the daily newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, who were looking for ways to attract a younger readership. They hired Maupin at a standard reporter’s salary and he started his column all over again, now retitled “Tales of the City.”

  He began with Mary Ann Singleton, a smart, curious girl from the Midwest, and set her loose among recognizable city landmarks and fads. Soon Mary Ann was meeting a host of transplants and natives, including gay men and, most famously, Anna Madrigal, her pot-smoking landlady. Maupin needed to produce daily eight-hundred-word installments five days a week for six months. “There were times when he was barely two days ahead of his readers,” he wrote of the experience thirty years later, speaking of himself in the third person. “Like them, he was waiting breathlessly for what would happen next—but counting on his life to provide it.” He tried not to plan too much in advance, but let his story and characters surprise him.

  The column caught on and became very popular locally. After Newsweek wrote about it, Harper and Row approached Maupin about doing a book. A collection of Cyra McFadden’s columns, The Serial, had been a best seller for Random House in 1977; Harper and Row hoped to have similar success with Maupin. He revised his columns, removing a subplot about a serial killer and adding a few dirty words. However, he kept the quick, elliptical approach to sex scenes that he had devised for a “family” newspaper. The droll ease with which he can allude to almost anything between the lines—impotence, oral sex, a rich wife fucking a delivery boy—is often quite funny in itself.

  Tales works beautifully as a book. The prose is crisp, smart, and lively. It’s dialogue driven, but it reads more cleanly and precisely than any play or screenplay. Here are Michael Tolliver, aka Mouse, and his friend Mona before Michael performs in the jockey shorts dance contest at a local gay bar:

  Michael groaned and readjusted his shorts. “What the fuck am I doing here, Mona? I used to be a Future Farmer of America.”

  “You’re paying the rent, remember?”

  “Right. I’m paying the rent, I’m paying the rent. This is a recording…”

  “Just take it easy.”

  “What if I lose? What if they laugh? Jesus! What if they don’t even notice me?… I think I’m gonna throw up.”

  “Save it for the finale.”

  The best writing is usually in Maupin’s dialogue, but there is no bad prose. The novel is built out of short, concise scenes because it was first written for serialization, yet those scenes snap along briskly in book form. People often compare Maupin to Charles Dickens, but only because Dickens is the world’s most famous serial novelist. Maupin himself has said he read little Dickens (he was more familiar with E. F. Benson of the Mapp and Lucia novels). I think he’s closer to a different Victorian serial storyteller, Anthony Trollope. Like Maupin, Trollope often used pure dialogue to tell his tales. He had a similar gift for improvisation, and the same ability to create characters who grow and deepen during the long ha
ul of a novel created in installments. Both writers start with clear, simple outlines for their figures and let the developing story reveal new colors and dimensions. Both men’s curiosity and imaginations are so rich that they could produce sustained series of lively books: Trollope wrote seven novels about the people of Barchestershire and six around the Palliser family; Maupin would eventually write eight novels about the circle of friends at 28 Barbary Lane.

  That’s the address of Anna Madrigal’s house, a brown-shingled three-story mansion on Russian Hill divided into apartments. Tales is a boardinghouse novel, following in the footsteps of Père Goriot and Goodbye to Berlin—both of which also include gay characters. Sociologists say a neighborhood is perceived as gay if anywhere between 15 to 25 percent of the residents are homosexual. That was true of San Francisco, and it’s true of the Barbary Lane novels. Three-quarters of the primary characters are straight, yet it’s seen as a gay series. The chief gay character, Michael Tolliver, isn’t introduced by name until page 70 of the first book. Michael plays a larger role as the novel progresses, and a much bigger role in the whole series. But the strongest plotline of the first Tales is the love story of a terminally ill, fifty-something, married businessman, Edgar Halcyon, and the fifty-something free spirit, Anna Madrigal. Madrigal is a transsexual, of course, but it’s not fully revealed until the next book, More Tales of the City. The love story reads as straight until then, and maybe afterward, too. Anna Madrigal is so entirely herself that her sex change feels secondary. She is literature’s first nonthreatening, nonsuffering, three-dimensional androgyne. Maupin told his editors at the Chronicle her secret before he began the series. They accepted her but asked that he not tell readers until the second year. It was inspired advice.

  The Chronicle editors nervously kept count of the number of gay characters in the series, but they had no difficulty with the high percentage of characters who smoke grass. Well, it was California in the Seventies. Yet Maupin acknowledged this freedom might be only temporary. In one memorable scene, Michael gets stoned with his straight neighbor, Brian, a lawyer-turned-waiter, and they talk about the changing times. Brian croakily describes a stricter future: “We’re gonna be… I mean people like you and me… we’re gonna be fifty-year-old libertines in a world full of twenty-year-old Calvinists.”

  Despite its relative straightness, Tales found its first audience with gay readers. They were initially drawn to the book because it was set in the gay mecca of San Francisco, but they enjoyed visiting a world whose straight inhabitants were as goofy as its gay ones. Everybody is Other in Maupin. The free-and-easy attitude toward all sex, gay and straight, was a welcome relief from the guilty dramas of Kramer and Holleran, which weren’t very different from the guilty erotics of Updike and Roth. Early readers were steered to Tales by word of mouth, and the most important mouths were the gay bookstores. Maupin himself contacted stores across the country and told them here was something that would interest their customers, even when his publisher stayed quiet about it. (Later, when his gay base was firmly established, he would have to press his publisher to pursue straight readers, too.)

  Shortly before the book came out, Maupin met his hero, Christopher Isherwood, in Los Angeles at a 1978 Oscar night party for Saturday Night Fever. Isherwood already knew his column. “Oh, that marvelous funny thing.” He told Maupin not to apologize for being entertaining. “It’s possible to commit art and entertainment in the same moment.” Maupin asked if he’d give the book a blurb, and Isherwood did—he compared Maupin to Dickens. Maupin also met Bachardy that night and later sat for a portrait, a beautiful drawing that brings out a casual sexiness that photos often miss.

  He was still unattached, falling in and out of love and having an occasional affair, including one with the closeted Rock Hudson (“As much as I liked Rock, I was just part of his sexual sub-life”), but he had not yet met a significant other.

  Maupin worked nonstop for six months on each new series of Tales, then took six months off. On November 27, 1978, during one of his breaks, city supervisor Harvey Milk and mayor George Moscone were murdered by city supervisor Dan White. Maupin never included the murders in the novels. Nor did he include the White Night riots of May 21, 1979, after a jury found Dan White guilty of nothing worse than manslaughter and gay people rioted in the streets. Such large public tragedies would have overwhelmed the private world of Barbary Lane. Yet politics found their way into the novels in a more intimate, personal manner. The feminist phrase “the personal is political” had already been picked up by gay men and women (Edmund White even wrote an essay with the title); Maupin’s politics were deeply personal.

  Anita Bryant’s 1977 antigay Save Our Children campaign in Dade County, Florida, infuriated him. He gave his anger to his characters. Michael’s mother writes Michael in praise of Anita Bryant; Michael is so furious that he finally comes out to her.

  I wouldn’t have written, I guess, if you hadn’t told me about your involvement in the Save Our Children campaign. That, more than anything, made it clear that my responsibility was to tell you the truth, that your own child is homosexual, and that I never needed saving from anything except the cruel and ignorant piety of people like Anita Bryant.

  I’m sorry, Mama. Not for what I am, but for how you must feel at this moment. I know what that feeling is, for I felt it most of my life. Revulsion, shame, disbelief—rejection through fear of something I knew, even as a child, was as basic to my nature as the color of my eyes…

  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.

  It has brought me into the family of man, Mama, and I like it here. I like it.

  Michael’s coming-out letter served as Maupin’s coming-out to his own parents. They subscribed to the San Francisco Chronicle, and he knew they would read the column. His father responded with a drily indignant letter written at his office on yellow legal paper, accusing Maupin of hurting his mother, who was ill at the time—but she already knew. Maupin heard over the years from scores of gay men who clipped out this column and sent it to their own mothers with a note declaring, “me too.”

  Most straight people, and many gay people, especially those who came of age more recently, don’t understand how momentous and difficult coming out was to men and women of this generation. It seems so obvious now, so banal. But the straight world made coming out important and dangerous. They despised homosexuals so much that the homosexuals responded with either total silence or the clever argument of Gore Vidal and others that there was no such thing as a homosexual—if only people understood that gay identity was a social fiction, then antigay feeling would go away. Yet it wasn’t until huge numbers of men and women took the banal and embarrassing step of naming themselves and sharing the name with their families that not just culture but the whole body politic began to change, shifting forward a few inches.

  14. White Noise

  Back in New York, the newly published writers were getting to know each other. Writers often begin their careers working in isolation, but afterward discover they have siblings.

  There’s an entertaining account of this time in the diaries of novelist Felice Picano, a useful picture of friendship and networking in the gay New York literary circuit of parties and book signings. The New York–born Picano had written a couple of popular thrillers, including a best seller, Eyes, and founded a small press for gay titles, Sea Horse Press. He met Andrew Holleran at a party on Fire Island in September 1978, after the publication of Dancer. He offered to advise Holleran on his career; Holleran asked to meet Picano’s sexy friend, George Whitmore. A talented writer from Colorado, Whitmore was working on an autobiographical novel, The Confessions of Danny Slocum. He and Holleran met and briefly courted each other—there was a sexual charge to many of these friendships in their early stages. Back in the city, Whitmore introduced Picano to his new fri
end, Edmund White. White invited Picano to lecture his class at Johns Hopkins about suspense. They rode the train down to Baltimore and back, talking the whole time. Afterward Picano wrote in his diary, “Edmund White… is a charming man given to stringent self-analysis, but hiding it behind a lovely surface of shifting polish and childlike delight…. I suspect he is unsure whether he wants pure love or respect more. I can love him more easily because I so much respect his work.” Sometime that fall White met Holleran on his own. Everyone soon met Holleran’s friend from Iowa, Robert Ferro, an Italian-American from New Jersey. Ferro’s boyfriend, Michael Grumley, was another writer who’d studied at Iowa. The two had a close yet open marriage—friends called them the Ferro-Grumleys. White appeared with a new boyfriend, Christopher Cox, an actor (yet another actor) from Alabama who wanted to be a writer but would end up becoming an editor. Floating in and out of the larger parties like an unwelcome older relative was Larry Kramer. He appeared less often after Whitmore published his scathing attack on Faggots in the Body Politic.

  The core group of friends were almost all in their thirties in 1978, with White the oldest at thirty-eight and Cox the youngest at twenty-nine. They socialized for another year before they began to think of themselves as a club, first as the Lavender Quill, then the Violet Quill. A group reading at Three Lives Bookstore in Greenwich Village was such a success that Holleran and Ferro suggested they get together for private readings like the writer workshops in Iowa. The first official meeting was March 31, 1980 at the Ferro-Grumley apartment on West Ninety-fifth Street. The guests were Holleran, White, Cox, Picano, and Whitmore. Holleran read a story titled “Sleeping Soldiers” about his time in the army, Ferro the opening chapters of a new novel titled Max Desir, and Picano an internal monologue later published as “Spinning.” They discussed specifics from the stories and larger literary issues, and Grumley served dessert.