[unidentified male] Mr. Armistead, you are...
[Armistead] No, got to start over again.
That's my first name.
[unidentified male] Okay.
Mr. Maupin, I guess you would call yourself a gay writer.
[Armistead] Not really.
I'm a writer who is gay.
I'm not a gay writer.
I write about heterosexuals as well.
My writing didn't really flourish until I came out,
because it's very impossible to... to keep a huge secret in
your heart and be a good writer.
I think it's very difficult.
And my whole success was concurrent with
my coming out sexually.
[Armistead] When I was a boy in Raleigh, I was afraid of being
locked in Oakwood Cemetery overnight.
Every Sunday after church when our blue tailed white Pontiac
cruised through the entrance, I fretted about the sign posted
above us, "Gates locked at 6:00 p.m."
What if they lost track of the time?
That enormous gate would clang shut and we would be trapped
there all night eating acorns for survival.
My brother, my sister, my parents and me,
Cemetery Family Robinson.
Oakwood Cemetery was not just the landscape of our past,
but also the very blueprint of family.
My father would eventually lay out the rules for his children
in a self-published family history.
One thing is certain, the old man wrote, wherever one of these
men met success, there was a self-effacing
and goodly lady by his side.
Back then, I was still too young to realize that there would
never be a lady by my side.
I felt only this shapeless longing, an oddly grown up ennui
born of alienation and silence.
Some little boys have this feeling very early on.
Sooner or later, though, no matter where in the world we live,
we must join the diaspora venturing beyond our biological family
to find our logical one, the one that actually makes sense for us.
So maybe I was beginning to understand something on those
Sunday afternoons in the cemetery.
Maybe I sensed that my true genealogy lay somewhere beyond
these gates with another family.
That would be scary, wouldn't it, to know that my long held
dream of family, the one laid out by my father,
came with a closing time far more final than 6:00 p.m.
[unidentified female] Possibly do you mind signing this?
[Armistead] No. No. No. That's is what I do.
[Armistead] This is for Nadine.
-[unidentified female] And Olin. -[Armistead] And Olin?
[unidentified female] Yeah. Thank you.
[unidentified female] I'm so happy to hear that you're writing your memoir.
We've waited with baited breath.
[unidentified male] When that shit coming out?
[Armistead] Seventeen.
I'm just delivering it
[Laura Linney] Typical of anything that
Armistead is involved with, Tales of the City is a classic.
And like a classic, you can pick it up at any time of your life
and get something different from it that's just as powerful and just as meaningful.
And you laugh, and you cry, and you... you feel close.
You feel intimate.
And that's something that everyone craves.
[Ian McKellen] Initially, he was writing for a San Francisco audience,
his neighbors, his friends,
people he might meet at a party, or on the street, or at a bar.
Just San Francisco people.
Oh, no, then when he publishes a book.
Well, America discovered it, and...
and then we discovered it in Europe.
[Ian McKellen] And when Armistead arrives in London for
a book reading, he's a Rockstar.
And the audience is very varied in age and sexualities.
The quirkiness of his writing, the honesty of it, is something
that just hooks people and... but all sorts of people.
He loves the world but he does find it hilariously funny.
Wonderful.
[drag queen] How are you, honey?
[Armistead] Hey, darling. I'm good.
Books in the Castro, who knew?
[Armistead] I know. Really.
Do people read?
I guess they do.
They read you.
[Armistead] I'm so proud [inaudible/fades off]
[upbeat music playing]
[unidentified male] Every morning, a half a million people
buy the San Francisco Chronicle.
For a lot of them, the most important part of this paper
is the inside back page.
That's where you read Tales of the City.
It also has made a local celebrity out of its author,
Armistead Maupin.
[clanking]
[Armistead] Not long after I arrived in San Francisco,
I was writing feature pieces for a Marin County weekly
called the Pacific Sun.
And what I wanted to do more than anything was just
whacky stories around town.
A woman friend of mine told me that I really should go down to
the Marin Safeway and check out the hetero cruising scene
on Wednesday nights.
So, I went down there, and sure enough, there
were all these over-dressed young women and men
kind of cruising the vegetable aisle.
And I tried to find somebody to admit that they had put on that
rhinestone studded, brushed denim pantsuit purposefully
in order to get picked up.
And there was... nobody would tell me that they
were there for that purpose.
So, I went home completely frustrated and thought I'm going
to have to do kind of a fictionalized version of this.
And I invented a new girl in town named Mary Ann Singleton.
And at the end of her search after meeting a couple of jerks,
she meets the man of her dreams and he's there
with the man of his dreams.
And the story completely struck a nerve, especially with
straight women in San Francisco who are figuring out why there
were so many attractive but unresponsive men in town.
And the editors at the Pacific Sun said why don't you do this every week?
Why don't you follow her somewhere else?
And so I did for about five weeks, and it was called The Serial back then.
While The Serial was appearing, one of the people reading it was
Charles McCabe, who was a senior columnist at The Chronicle.
And Charles was a brilliant essayist, very misogynistic,
totally homophobic, but really liked me, and loved the column.
And he said, I was just vulgar enough to make it work in The Chronicle.
And so I asked him if he would get me an interview with
the editor and publisher at the time, and I assured him that I
could write this thing on a daily basis.
I lied.
[Armistead] I basically lied.
I was panicked.
I thought how on earth am I going to do this.
And then I got the job.
[upbeat music playing]
[Richard Thieriot] The Chronicle was thought of as sort of a
colorful paper, and was trying to fit what we thought was a
more colorful and vibrant city, and we had a sense that that's
sort of what most of our readers wanted.
[Armistead] The day after I got the job,
I danced down Polk Street.
I actually jumped up in the air and clicked my heels together,
because I knew that I had landed on something that was
going to make me famous.
I knew it then, because I had this subject matter
that wasn't being covered.
[unidentified male] I came out to visit San Francisco and saw
everyone loving everyone else, and saw so much openness, and
I just knew I had to be here.
[unidentified female] We decided that we had to have more freedom
to be ourselves and we came to San Francisco.
[Armistead] There was a huge influx of LGBT people in the City,
and they weren't being written about.
[Richard Thieriot] While it was fiction, and therefore, not norm
for daily newspaper, that it would be one of the ways that
you could represent a lifestyle going on in the City at the time
that you couldn't if you were going to restrict yourself to
purely, you know, normal reporting.
[Armistead] The managing editor of The Chronicle was very
nervous about printing fiction in a newspaper.
So, it had to have the fictional aspect in the title and it also
had to indicate that it was about San Francisco.
And so they sent me five possibilities, and among those
was Tales of the City.
And I looked at it and thought, ooh, that's got kind of a
Dickensian ring and so I said, that's the one I want.
[Frances McDormand] Mary Ann Singleton was 25 years old when
she saw San Francisco for the first time.
She came to the City alone for an eight-day vacation.
On the fifth night, she drank three Irish coffees at the Buena Vista,
realized that her mood ring was blue, and decided to phone her mother in Cleveland.
[Armistead] Mary Ann was in many ways, my alter ego,
because I was the new girl in town, too.
I was looking at this strange new world in a state of
perplexity, and wonder, and fear.
She maybe judges people a little bit too much, the way I can do
in front of a pleasant façade, but I'm thinking what an idiot.
Michael Toliver is a romantic, gay man with a big slut side.
That's me.
I was having fun.
I was really having my adolescence, and yet, in each of
our little gay boy hearts, there was this thought that
you could also be in love.
And I poured a lot of my grandmother into the character of Mrs. Madrigal.
My grandmother was a suffragist who made speeches all over England.
She read my palm when I was a little boy.
She was a wonderful air, fairy,
almost seemingly psychic old lady.
She was really very dear to me.
I think the greatest influence on me.
And I told my grandmother just before she died at the age of 97,
that I had put her spirit into one of the characters and I was so glad to be able to do that.
[Frances McDormand reading]
[Laura Linney] Yes.
Yeah.
Yes.
[Olympia Dukakis] Good.
You're one of us then.
Welcome to 28 Barbary Lane.
[Laura Linney] Thank you.
[Olympia Dukakis] Yes, you should.
[upbeat violin music playing]
[Armistead] I was born while my father was a skipper of a
minesweeper in the South Pacific.
He actually found out about my birth through semaphore.
It was something like baby boy born, mother and son doing fine.
So, I didn't see my father for a year and a half.
I was the great great grandson of a Confederate
general who died at Antietam.
His name was Lawrence O'Brien Branch.
He was a U.S. Congressman before he served in the Confederacy,
and actually made a speech on the floor of Congress in which
he says that he will die for the right to take his property to
the new territories because they were passing laws that said
that slaves could not be brought to places like New Mexico.
And he said this was socialist Europeans imposing themselves on our...
our country and our sense of property.
And... and he did die for it.
So, we were always told that we were Southern aristocracy.
We lived in a suburban ranch house that looked kind of like a
Howard Johnson's, but we were very aware that,
you know, we had good blood.
[Jane Maupin Yates] All our Southern heritage was based
around the Civil War, the Confederacy, going to the right church,
and making your debut, which I was somewhat forced to do,
saying yes, ma'am, and yes, sir, and we were very much in that Southern tradition.
We were taught to be gentlemen and Southern belles.
My father was a lawyer and I can remember going down to visit him downtown.
And they had colored water fountains and white water fountains.
My father had quite a difficult time with... with civil rights
and anything that went against what the type
of world he had lived in.
[Armistead] I suppose you could say he was a white supremacist.
Everything about his life indicated that.
I remember going to the beach one time with our maid and her daughter.
She must have been ten or eleven.
And I got mad at her because she had taken my steam shovel
and I called her the N word.
And my mother grabbed me by the arm and jerked me away and said,
"You do not say that word ever.
You've hurt her feelings."
And I said, "But daddy says it all the time."
"That doesn't matter. He's your father."
She stood up for him, and protected him, but privately
told her children not to behave that way.
[Jane Maupin Yates] My mother was a beautiful, gracious,
gentle soul and very loving.
She was the buffer I think for us with my father, who,
on the other hand, never showed a lot of affection to us.
I think we knew he loved us, but I was always forever,
for years trying to get his approval and love.
And that's sort of the way he setup his relationship with his children.
Armistead is my oldest brother.
He is five years older than me, and then there's a middle brother,
Tony, who is two years older than me.
I call my brother Teddy, and I've been calling him
that since I can remember.
He is Armistead Jones Maupin, Jr.
Our father was Big Armistead.
When he was a teenager, my mother was always suggesting why
don't you go ask Mary Jane out for a date or someone like that.
And so I never sort of saw him as a mover and a shaker as...
as you know in the dating scene.
[instrumental music playing]
[Armistead] During the period where I was waiting for Tales to begin,
I actually met Rock Hudson.
He was visiting San Francisco and invited us up to
his suite at the Fairmont Hotel.
And he said, "I have a little reading to do."
And he produced the bulldog edition of The Chronicle, which
was the early edition that appeared the night before.
So, he stood up, a little drunkenly, and read the first
chapter of Tales of the City, which includes a moment where
Mary Ann's mother tells her you have to leave there immediately.
I was watching McMillan & Wife and there was
a serial killer on the loose.
[Rock Hudson] Pick me up. I'll be downstairs.
[Armistead] He meant it to be charming and I was charmed.
And the next day he and his partner invited me to dinner in San Francisco.
Do you want me to go on?
[Jennifer Kroot] I was just going to ask...
Oh, how sexy are we going to get here?
-[Jennifer Kroot] Oh, we're going there. -All right.
[Armistead] The first time it was at a little French restaurant.
They got quite drunk and when the evening was over, Tom said,
"I'm just going to go back to the room."
And Rock and I caught a cable car up the hill heading up to the Fairmont.
And by the time we got up to the Diplomat Suite, Rock and I were
sitting across the room from each other and he said at one point,
"Well, I should be over there or you should be over here."
Which was about as dreamy as something could be.
Although I was completely and utterly terrified.
And I just did not perform well at all and it was very touching,
because apparently, it happened to him all the time.
And he sat next to me and put his arm around me and said,
"You know I'm just a regular guy."
And I said, "No, you're not.
And I'm Doris Day."
[Rock Hudson] Don't take your bedroom problems out on me.
[Doris Day] I have no bedroom problems.
There's nothing in my bedroom that bothers me.
[Rock Hudson] Oh, that's too bad.
[Armistead] There was a second time and there was
once with him and his partner.
Oh, and there was a time after a gallery opening.
I just eventually stopped trying to get together with him because
I was coming out of the closet and he was firmly in it.
And I ended up writing about him in Further Tales of the City,
but I put blanks where his name would be.
[unidentified narrator reading]
[beep beep]
[unidentified male] Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.
We are proud to present Armistead Maupin.
-[cheering] -[Armistead] Thank you.
[applause]
Drunken bears, there's nothing like it.
I grew up in Raleigh in the South, and had a very...
Okay, you can clap for it if you want.
[laughter]
You know there are a lot... you know, so many things to still
love about the South except possibly the
-people and the politicians. -[laughter]
But I grew up trying to please my daddy.
He was all I'd ever had in terms of a moral compass.
And so, everything he said I thought, well, it must be true,
because he says it.
And I was actually embracing conservatism.
By the time I was 16 years old, I remember being interviewed by
the Raleigh paper and I said, "We young conservatives are
going to make a difference when we grow up."
[announcer] This is Viewpoint, the daily editorial expression
of WRAL Television voiced by Jesse Helms.
Michigan's very liberal senior United States Senator...
-[trumpeting] -[woman screaming]
[Armistead] I flunked out of law school.
So, I thumbed home to Raleigh and told my father
I didn't want to be a lawyer.
And he said, "We'll get you a job."
So, he talked to a friend of his, and he said, "Well, you can
come down and work for him at the TV station, and write news."
And so, Jesse Helms gave me my first writing job.
He thought I was the hope of the future.
[laughter]
The only fucking thing he's ever been right about.
That man's legacy was in the hatred he spewed his entire life.
I was sent out one day by Jesse Helms to cover a Klan rally.
And I interviewed the Imperial Wizard.
And at the time, Dean Rusk, who was the Secretary of State,
had a daughter who had married an African American man.
And I asked the Imperial Wizard what he thought about it.
And he said, "Well, what else would you expect from a man who's a practicing homosexual?"
[laughter]
And I went back to the station and told Jesse this scoop I had gotten,
and Jesse went white.
Whiter than he normally was and said, "That is absolutely the
worst thing you can say about anybody."
And I took it on.
I heard it.
I knew it was nothing that you could be.
But Jesse was the first person that just spelled out
what an awful thing it was.
[Jesse Helms] Many homosexuals average 16 different sex
partners every month.
[Armistead] The reason I am embraced conservatism was
I was terrified of who I was.
And so you keep the lid on, and you want the
lid on for everybody else, and they all have to
march in that straight line.
[helicopter whirring]
I volunteered for Vietnam, because I think I still had some
manhood issues going on and I wanted to go to the war.
My mother said I had a Lawrence of Arabia complex,
which was a lot closer than she knew.
[laughter]
[Armistead] And I found myself volunteering for more and more
rigorous places because I need to write home colorful stories
to my father to show that I was fighting for my country.
And I ended up in a little place on the Cambodian border called Chau Doc.
[airplane whirring]
[Bob Olynger] I met Armistead in November of December of 1969.
I was kind of shocked in some ways, because, while I hadn't
been trained for a lot of the things I had to do on the boats
when I got there, especially going out in the weeds and
laying up ambushes and all that type of thing, Armistead came
out from Saigon, where he was serving as a protocol officer
and he hadn't been trained for anything that was
out where we were either.
He went out and learned what he was going, and went up and down
the canals, and I admired him for all that, because
it can get pretty dangerous.
You're asked to go and do it, and you do it, and you remember it,
and you should be proud of it at times.
Maybe you don't agree with why you're there,
but you... you're there.
[crowd] Hell no, we won't go.
Hell no, we won't go.
[John Kerry] We cannot consider ourselves America's best men
when we are ashamed of and hated what we were called
on to do in Southeast Asia.
[Armistead] I had a friend call me.
He asked me if I would come to Washington and do press releases
for John Kerry, who at that time, was organizing the Vietnam
Veterans Against the War.
I didn't feel the way Mr. Kerry did, and as a result, I got
pretty angry and wanted to do something.
So, I wrote a letter to Admiral Zumwalt and asked if the
government would help out with a project in which Vietnamese
veterans could return to Vietnam to help the Vietnamese people.
Ten of us went back to Vietnam on a humanitarian
project and built houses.
It looked like a bad motel, really, when we were done.
We had no skill at all.
But at the end of it, the White House called and said that
President Nixon wants to see me in the Oval Office.
We showed up at the White House and were ushered in to meet
Richard Nixon, and I was immediately aware
of how insecure he was.
[President Nixon] The fact that you served there and were
willing to go back and help the people there, of course, really
demonstrates so clearly what it's all about.
I have never seen a figure as spectacular as the Vietnamese.
The Vietnamese women are actually...
[Armistead] They're so sexy in their little Áo dài.
You know they fly out when they ride their bicycles,
and it's real...
And I thought oh, my god, the...
He picked the queer to say this to, you know.
[Armistead] My father was over the moon.
You know, I had worked for Jesse Helms.
I had met Nixon.
Nixon had invited me back.
I was doing everything, everything that I needed to do
to make him happy.
He was very, very proud of me.
And he hadn't... he still didn't know the main truth about me.
[Neil Gaiman] The first time I met Armistead,
we talked about the strangeness of writing fiction that
is being read as you go along.
I was doing Sandman and you were doing in The Chronicle that sort
of Dickensian thing of writing serial fictions.
Did things ever happen that surprised you when you realized
how well you had set things up without...
[Armistead] All the time.
[Neil Gaiman] ...realizing what you were doing?
[Armistead] All the time.
The coolest things I have ever done have just come out of the moment.
We've both been conscious of keeping
an audience with a story.
When they hired me, they said, "We need six weeks' worth."
So, that was 30 episodes, 30 chapters.
Pretty soon, I got confident enough, that I just goofed off,
and I just ate up my whole backlog.
So, I would have to come in and think
you have to write something.
This woman was coming over to my desk and saying, "Write."
[Barbara Falconer Newhall] What was amazing about Armistead was
that he would come in in the morning, no notebook, no notes,
no help, and he's sit down at a desk that was bare of anything,
at an IBM Selectric typewriter, which is unforgiving.
What impressed me is actually how good he was at getting that
copy out in a short time five days a week.
I kind of identified with Mary Ann Singleton.
I'm a straight laced, middle class, Midwestern person.
So, I was really fascinated by this world that was opening up
to me and to all of The Chronicle's readers too.
And I think I've repressed a lot of what...
of the stories in there, because you know I suppose
part of me didn't quite approve.
[unidentified female reading]
[Richard Thieriot] I remember that in that column,
two men woke up in bed together.
The morphing from just being a... a sort of interesting,
unusual, somewhat controversial column aimed at the colorful
youth of San Francisco, it did slowly morph into obviously
being a largely gay themed column.
But it happened slowly and I'm sure a lot of people were
picking up on it way before I was.
The managing editor of The Chronicle, who was sort
of in charge of handling Tales, got very nervous when he
realized that Michael Toliver was going to be a regular
character, and that other gay characters,
and lesbians were showing up.
So, he actually created a chart in his office.
And when characters were introduced, he would put them
into the appropriate column.
And the theory was that it should at no time be more than
30% homosexual.
It annoyed me so much, that I had a quota.
His fiction is almost a Trojan horse.
It smuggles in all sorts of things and all sorts of things
under the guise of being a fantastic story
about people you're interested in.
[Armistead] My intention with Anna Madrigal from the very
beginning, was that she be transgender.
I'd made the mistake of telling or maybe not the mistake when I
look back on it, but I told the editors and
they were pretty horrified.
And they said, "Well, you cannot say anything
about that for a while."
Their fear actually served me, because I could develop her as a
character, and make her a woman of mystery, and have people
curious about her at the same time that
they're learning to love her.
So, that by the time that I did tell her story,
they would be onboard, and that's exactly what happened.
We all did it stealth back then.
No one was way, way out.
I was just starting to come way, way out.
We were mostly all like Anna Madrigal in those days.
We wanted to be respectable.
We wanted people not to know except who wanted them to know.
I wasn't like that.
I just said, "Fuck it.
Here, this is me.
Not a man.
Not a woman."
I moved to San Francisco in '88, started immediately
reading the books then.
I thought look at this, a transsexual who isn't a serial
killer, isn't a rapist, isn't some kind of terrible pervert,
is just a nice person.
And they're just weren't that many role models.
I think there were a lot of young, gay men and
women and trans people who... who had nothing to hang onto,
who had no story.
And Armistead did it.
He gave them a sense of hope, and joy, and security.
What I wanted out of literature and what I had never
found in literature was a story that would incorporate everyone,
that would place my life in the context
of the rest of the world.
So that gay people, and straight people, and in between people
would fit together all on one large canvas and function
lovingly with each other.
[Barbara Falconer Newhall] And I'm sure that there was a lot of
nervousness on the part of the management as to just how far
Army was going with his stories and of course they... they were
concerned about readership.
They didn't want anybody cancelling their subscriptions
because of something offensive in the paper.
[Armistead reading]
"Down with the gay life in quotes."
They still say that.
Why do you call it gay when it's not gay?
Well, it is gay.
It's very gay in every sense of the world.
[continues reading]
You know when people get really angry and start flinging Jesus
at you, that you've... you're speaking some truth.
[continues reading]
I loved that one.
Loved that one.
This just tells me that they were into it.
I lured them into a world they didn't want to think about.
The idea that he was doing this in a newspaper in
a... in what they call a family newspaper,
that is not just groundbreaking.
That takes chutzpa and, you know, testicles the size of asteroids.
[Christopher Turner] I first became interested in photography
when I was in my early twenties.
I was a model in Milan and... and London as well.
And just working with all these amazing photographers,
sort of got me interested.
And I was always a little shy on the other side of the camera.
It was sort of a stretch, which is one of
the reasons I wanted to do it.
And it also interested me because it was a way to combine
very technical stuff as well as creative work.
[footsteps]
[Armistead] Darling.
[Neil Gaiman] Armistead and Chris, they're like some
kind of strange storybook couple, in that each of them
is the other one's ideal.
It's like Armistead was being written by a beneficent creator
with a plan, who started off going okay, you are going to be
this repressed right-wing kid from North Carolina but just
stick through the story, and at the end, you will get your
happily ever after.
[Armistead] The way that Chris and I met was sort of a
combination of the old and the new.
My housekeeper had been on this website called DaddyHunt.
It was just for older men in general, who
were finding each other on it.
And I noticed in the personals there this young guy who the
most beautiful blue-eyed gaze.
He was gorgeous.
My younger friends were saying, "Oh, my God, he's really hot."
And I said, "Forget it.
He only likes them over 45."
The way he tells it, is that he stumbled
over my profile and was sort of stopped by it and printed out my photo,
and put it on his desk, and but never really had any
intention of contacting me through the site.
And then one day, I was walking through
the Castro and I saw him, and we... our eyes... we...
we did the little cruisy thing.
You were coming this way.
[Christopher Turner] Uh-huh.
And I was going that way.
And we did the old-fashioned stop and twirl.
And I just turned around and went back to him and said
perfect line, just remembered, it's so good,
"Didn't I see you on a website?"
And I said, "Which one?"
And he said, "DaddyHunt.com."
Which thrilled me because at the time, this was like right after
I had launched the site.
Well, it turned out he owned the website.
And that some of the captions appreciating
older men had been his.
[Christopher Turner] When I started DaddyHunt, a lot of it
for me was a political statement,
because I had always been attracted to older men, but I felt like a lot of the gay
community was very ageist.
The original tagline was wiser, stronger, hotter.
I really wanted to emphasize that there were qualities of
getting older that... that should be respected.
The disparity between the two of us that
a lot of people don't understand is not an issue,
because we understand it.
We understand what we have.
He has made me feel more confident in my body
than I have ever been myself.
I've started to own this, for instance.
A lot of guys like that, amazingly.
[Christopher Turner] Pretty much since day one, Armistead and I
acknowledged that we wanted to have an open relationship.
I think part of it was from past experience in other
relationships, realizing that not only the relationships that
I had been in, but many friends that I witness who are
supposedly monogamous, aren't.
You know, and I just felt like it would be better to
be able to be honest about it.
[Armistead] You know, I resist the term open relationship,
because it looks to me like a Facebook announcement like there's an
enormous breeze blowing through your relationship.
As a young man, I... it used to bother me.
I came with all the fool's, romantic, heterosexual,
it will be one person forever.
And somewhere inside of me, I knew that that
was a tough thing to pull off.
Some people do, and I'm happy for them.
I don't think there is one way to be married, whether it be
you're gay or straight.
What we both wanted was fidelity.
The notion that this person is with you no matter what.
And that if you love that person enough, you can give the freedom
to let them explore a little on the side, or sometimes with you.
That's another aspect of it.
It's very nice.
So, I think we've accomplished something that makes me feel more loved than ever.
And I hope he feels that way about it.
I had know that I was attracted to men ever since I was 12 years old,
but I didn't do anything about it until I was about 25.
So, I had a long, long period there where I...
[Steve Berry] Gestation period.
[Armistead] Gestation period where I had
no sex with anyone really.
I'm a... I'm what they call a perfect Kinsey 6.
I've never had sex with a woman, but and I waited a long time
before I had sex with a man I was--
[Steve Berry] A few drag queens though.
[Armistead] Never. Never.
[swishing]
[Armistead] I'd like to tell you about the first time I had sex.
I hope yours was better than mine was.
Oh, my God.
I didn't have sex with anybody until I was about 25 years old.
And I was living in Charleston, South Carolina, and I'm sure it
was the last time I was ever in a dark park in all innocence.
I had gone down there to sit on a bench, and look at the
moonlight on the water, and enjoy the scenery, and a man
walked up to me and said, "Have you got the time?"
And I said, "No, I don't.
I'm sorry."
And he said, "Have you got a light?"
And I said, "No."
Finally, I said, "Listen, I don't think
I'm what you're looking for."
I knew what he was up to.
And he apologized and kind of scurried away.
And... and I sat there on the bench for a while and I thought
what are you fucking up to?
You're exactly what he's looking for.
I hurried back into the park where this guy
was hitting on another guy.
I interrupted them while they were...
"I'm so sorry I was so rude back there.
Would you like to come to my house?
It's right over there.
And like we could have a drink."
So, I snatched this guy away from this completely dumbfounded
man and we went back to my little carriage house, and it
took less than five minutes.
I'm pretty sure I got a dick in my mouth, and that he did, too.
And I could just picture in that particular moment Peggy Lee in
the corner of the room singing the song that
was so popular that summer.
What was it?
[audience] "Is that all there is?"
[Armistead] Thank you, very much.
It was 1969.
That was the summer of the moonshot.
That was the summer of Stonewall.
Sort of appropriate, really, that I negotiated to lose my
virginity on the spot where the first shots
of the Civil War were fired.
But the next morning something amazing happened.
I realized I'd passed this point of no return that
I had dreaded my whole life.
You know, so what if it wasn't the best thing in the world?
There might be other people who came to that park.
And maybe I could get it right.
And it wasn't so much the death of innocence as a kind of brand
new, adolescence that made me feel like a reborn person.
[unidentified male] What about life in San Francisco?
Does a straight person need to be aware?
What's happened in San Francisco is that the 15%
or 10% of the population that is gay, is open about it.
People have learned to accept, learned to get over the
stereotypes, learned to get over their prejudice, and it's a
healthy atmosphere that's taking place.
[upbeat music playing]
I met Armistead in the early '70s.
He had that Southern manner and he was so polite,
and he was just funny.
You know, so you just felt as if he had the world in his hands.
But he had not come out at that time.
I took him all over San Francisco.
You know, it's been a Wild West for so long.
And you just would walk out the door and you'd smell people
smoking dope, and there would be music everywhere.
You just felt great.
I mean I didn't always feel great, because I overdid it a
little bit, more than I should have most of the time,
but it was a wonderful time.
[Armistead] I saw San Francisco on my way to and from Vietnam.
When I processed out of the Navy out on Treasure Island, I had a
mix of feelings, because part of me wanted to stay in the Navy.
I loved it.
I loved the uniforms, and the camaraderie, and the men.
But I knew if I actually acted on what I was feeling, that I
would be in big trouble.
And I remember looking over at this white city there on the
edge of the water and wondering if I could live there.
And it wasn't until the Associated Press offered me a
gig in San Francisco, that I knew I
had the opportunity to do that.
So, I leapt at it.
I remember telling a guy that I had actually picked up in the
park in Charleston that I was moving to San Francisco,
and he said, "Oh, my God.
You'll love it there.
They've got 50 gay bars."
And I said, rather primly, I'm sure, "Oh, I would never go into one of those."
Of course, I was in one of those on my first night in town.
I went down to the Rendezvous on Sutter Street.
And there were guys in there slow dancing to Streisand.
I think it was "People."
It was a horrifying sight to me.
My first good friend in town was a red-headed woman.
And I decided I was going to tell her that I was gay because
I wanted a new life and I didn't see any reason to be
lying now that I was in town.
And so I went over to her house, and I was drunk by
that time from about three mai tais
and said, "I have something to tell you."
And I hemmed, and hawed, and she came over and... and... and sort
of took my hands in hers and looked up at me and said, "What?
What is it?"
And I said, "I'm homosexual."
And she looked at me for a moment and then said...
"Oh, big fucking deal.
We... you know we love you.
Who cares?
And half of San Francisco is gay."
[Armistead] Sophisticated straight people in San Francisco
were more comfortable with my sexuality than I was.
Because I was still proudly hanging the picture of me
shaking hands with Richard Nixon, and I would pick up guys
down on Polk Street and bring them back to the house, and they
would see the picture of me with Nixon, and they would, you know
look a little bit disgusted and horrified as if they'd just
found out they were... had gone home with Jeffrey Dahmer.
It was... it... it... and I... and I took that on.
I mean I think I... you know, I think I'm still, part of me,
the... my whole life I've been trying to please people,
and... and then I got here and I thought nobody is happy
with my life the way it was.
Nobody is happy with it.
I was the one that changed.
I came out.
I finally became myself as a person and my heart opened up.
The sexual aspect of it, I can't minimize that.
There was just something amazing about, you know, I could... I would
go to the baths, and I would have sex, and the very process
of you know lying in someone's arms and cuddling, it opened my
heart to such an extent, that I started just taking the
world in in a different way.
Some of those guys that I'd lie with were of another color,
another race.
You know, everything I'd ever been taught, was falling away,
and I just realized what it was to be with another human being,
what human feelings were.
And that made me examine all the little prejudices that I'd been
given when I was growing up.
It wasn't just racist stuff.
It was my family telling me that I was better than anybody
because it was in my bloodline, you know.
This nonsense.
And it made me into a writer.
That's what it did, among other things.
It made me into a writer.
[clanking]
[instrumental music playing]
My grandmother and I were once, when I was like 14 years old,
were walking to a garden party in Raleigh, and there was a
woman ahead of us that was all just femmed out to the nines.
Pink, and perfumed, and powdered,
and little spike heels, and...
And my grandmother turned to me with this sort of sly little
smile on her face and said, "Any women who is all woman, or any
man who is all man, is a complete monster
unfit for human company."
[laughter]
And that's always been my rule for writing characters, you know.
We're all a mix of these things.
I try to find the part of us that isn't black, or white, or
male, or female, or any of those things but human, the part...
the part that comes from the heart.
And that is simply the function of the writer.
In my novel Maybe the Moon, it's told from the viewpoint of a
heterosexual, Jewish, dwarf actress working in Hollywood.
[clears throat] Okay.
"When you're my size and not being tormented by elevator
buttons, water fountains and ATMs, you spend your life
accommodating the sensibilities of 'normal people'..."
[continues reading]
"You do it if you want to belong to the human race."
Maybe the Moon is a novel about a friendship between a gay man
and a woman who's a little person.
The little person Armistead was friends with that the book is
inspired by was the woman inside the E.T. costume.
What I remember about it was just how much I understood and
related to the little woman's voice.
She wasn't a victim and I really loved that.
She was dignified, and smart, and just had a normal life, and
there wasn't anything mysterious, or kooky, or
fantastical, you know.
I was the only little person in my entire family, in my entire
surrounding and I was always the black sheep in that sense, and
it was very difficult for me.
And it was very isolating.
So, I couldn't wrap my head around how this normal size,
white, gay man, how could he possibly walk in my shoes?
I'm like a 3'10," you know, gimpy Mexican.
But I just can't help believing he can relate to just being
different and not by choice.
By the end of the book, my self-worth went
from like here to here.
It was... it... it was life changing, really.
It was just nice.
It was the first time in my life that I felt
someone out there understands.
[instrumental music playing]
[doorbell chiming]
In 1976 I had just moved to San Francisco and it
seems as though Tales of the City started the week that we
moved there, and was our guide to San Francisco, and everything
that was going on and what we were discovering.
[Neil Gaiman] If you make your list of the major characters
beginning with Ann Madrigal, and going down,
you will miss one of them.
And that character is San Francisco.
[instrumental music continues]
[Armistead] We are here at Macondray Lane, which was the
inspiration for Barbary Lane.
Actually, the steps were the... were the inspiration to me
because when I was living in the neighborhood, I saw them one day
and wondered what was up there.
I was just fascinated by the idea of this little city street
and I just made my way up the steps
into this little wonderland.
It was sort of a combination of an English
village story and an urban tale.
[instrumental music playing]
Oh, there's one over there.
[music continues]
I still think this is the most special place on earth, so to be
associated with it, is just... it's a great joy.
[music continues]
I started writing Tales in 1976.
So, I had two full years of writing five days a week,
800 words a day.
It was agonizing but kind of exhilarating, too.
[phone ringing]
I was contacted by an editor in New York and he asked me to send
him Xeroxed copies of the columns, because he thought
there was a novel there.
The miniseries didn't happen until 1993.
[Laura Linney] I think everyone quite wrongly thought
that she wasn't very smart.
And really what she was is she was a new
person in a strange land.
And that anybody can relate to.
She arrived there and just didn't know
what any of the rules were.
So, she was awkward, and overwhelmed,
and excited, but not dumb.
[Mary Ann] Hello?
And that's fun to play.
[Mary Ann] Hello?
[Anna Madrigal] Hello.
I'm Mrs. Madrigal, as in medieval.
[Olympia Dukakis] The research on Anna Madrigal was really
interesting, because I don't know, shit all anything here.
And I...
Alan Poul was the producer, and I called him up and I said,
"I've got to talk to a transgendered individual."
So, he found someone and invited them to my apartment, and I open
the door and there's this guy 6'3" - somebody who had been a
guy - 6'3", who was now a woman.
But the initial look was much more masculine, you... you know.
And his hands were like basketball.
People who play basketball.
I mean, it was like... but the voice was soft, and sweet, and
dear, and it was like, okay.
She looked at me and I said, "Tell me, what was it
that you wanted so much?"
And what this woman said to me was, "All my life, I yearned for
the friendship of women."
Now, I didn't know what she was going to say, but that one
really... I mean I, even now, it's like...
I thought... I don't know what...
I expected something sexual.
I didn't expect something so deeply
human, something that was
about people's feelings, and people's....
it shows you how stupid was.
Now, I know what it is to want the friendship of women.
And I want her to be my friend.
That's what I had learned.
And so you see the old dame
does have a past after all.
[Mary Ann] Oh, I'm prying, aren't I?
I hope it means we're friends.
[Alan Poul] Tales of the City broke the kiss barrier, which is
funny, because it was a big barrier.
I mean, you forget that man-on-man kissing, which is now
regularly featured on every Shondra Rhimes show,
in a much more explicit way than it ever was with...
with Mouse and John, was a big taboo.
Even showing two men in bed together with the implication
that they had had sex in that bed, was a really difficult
thing to do on television.
You cheated.
[Alan Poul] The show was also a gigantic success.
In many PBS markets, it was the highest rated
drama series they've ever had.
In other markets, it was second only to Upstairs Downstairs.
And in San Francisco, we beat the networks,
which doesn't happen with PBS.
Coming off the heels of the great success of Tales of the City,
they went into pledge drive mode.
Give us money so that we can continue to bring you
groundbreaking, wonderful programming like
Tales of the city.
"Something from my garden as a welcome from us all,
Anna Madrigal."
[instrumental music playing]
[Mary Hart] Hi, everybody.
I'm Mary Hart.
And I'm John Tesh.
Nude scenes, sexy romance, graphic language,
gay lovers, narcotics.
We are talking X-rated movie, right?
No.
It's a miniseries right in Mr. Roger's Neighborhood on PBS.
[Alan Poul] There was already a huge amount of momentum
certainly within the Republican Party that American public funds
should not be spent on material that is controversial, should
not be spent on material that some people might object to,
should not be spent on material that can't
survive in the marketplace.
The question is whether or tax dollars,
tax payers are going to be forced to help pay for one homosexual to
have anal intercourse with another homosexual and
to put that into a movie.
Donald Wildmon and the American Family Association
very famously put together this little 12-minute trailer of
highlights from Tales of the City.
There was men kissing.
They itemized how many times somebody was naked.
There was an underwear contest.
I remember they went and they counted every swear word.
[Mona] Beats the shit out of Tarot cards.
I forgot one of the most important ones, drugs.
I don't know how many times they must have had to
watch the thing in order to get all that information.
[gavel banging]
[Alan Poul] They delivered it to every member of Congress.
And the idea that anybody in the U.S. Congress or anywhere
else could watch it with a straight face,
is kind of astonishing.
And the PBS lowered the boom.
The shit hit the fan.
It was... it was amazing.
What the hell is going on when the taxpayers are
required to fund such garbage as that?
This was the time when Jesse Helms was talking
about defunding both the NEA and PBS.
So, I was in the thick of things with... with... with my old boss.
All the genuine commitments that PBS had given
to producing the second series, were immediately reversed.
We've got to understand that all of us become
a part of what we condone.
I still am disappointed that that happened,
because I think they would have made them all.
I think they would have done the whole series.
And... and they didn't.
Is everything alright, Mrs. Madrigal?
Naïve as it may sound, we felt we had made a
beautiful, loving show about family and about everybody's
right to search for love.
And there was nothing salacious in it.
So, the idea that this was so incendiary is difficult to
grasp, because when you look at now, you see it for...
for what... for what it was and for what it was always intended to be,
which is a valentine.
It's a different world we're living in now.
Oh, my God.
And on network television, I get surprised.
I... you know, I don't want to come off, you know... you know,
all, you know, uptight, but the line between actor
and sex worker is a very fuzzy one today.
It really is.
Can I tell you something?
Of course.
I think it might be cool with me if you...
You want me to fuck you?
Yeah.
[Jonathan Groff] I met Armistead while we were shooting Looking.
I'd heard about the legend of Tales of the City.
Just as like a young, gay man wanting to... wanting to sort of
like dive in to this world that I'd heard about before,
because I was in the closet from like 19 to 23 with a boyfriend
who was my roommate.
And in the moment of doing it, I...
I felt... fine.
It... everything was compartmentalized
and I had it all figured out.
I was doing a show on Broadway called Spring Awakening, where I
was playing a straight, romantic male lead.
And I never lied and said that I was straight, but I always kind
of like dodged the bullet.
And it really wasn't until I came out, that I understood how
suffocated I was when I was in the closet.
It's like once you're out, you're like, oh, my God,
I can't beli...
It's like taking a... like a deep breath for the first time
and you didn't realize that you were ho...
Well, for me, I didn't realize that I was holding
my breath all that time.
[newscaster] Actor Rock Hudson is in a hospital in Paris this morning.
One report is that he has liver cancer.
Another that he has AIDS.
But none of this has been confirmed.
He was brought to the American Hospital's emergency room Sunday
night, complaining he was exhausted.
This morning he met with his secretary.
Nothing. He looks wonderful, I must say.
[Armistead] Because I was no longer in contact with Rock,
I was as confounded as anybody else when I heard he had AIDS.
All my friends were public about it when they got sick.
When he showed upon Doris Day's pet show looking really bad,
there was all that speculation.
And the people around him were still saying,
"Oh, he has anorexia, he's been on a watermelon diet."
Just the worst kind of lying and obfuscation that was...
it was way too late for it.
Anybody who'd been through the whole
process of AIDS, knew it was.
Randy Shiltz, the first openly gay reporter and The Chronicle
and a friend of mine called up and said,
"Are you willing to talk about Rock?"
So, I said, "Yes, of course, he was gay.
Everybody in Hollywood knew it.
This should not be a scandal."
So, I talked about it publicly.
I was the first person to do it.
Meaning I... officially, I outed him.
The guy that had introduced me to Rock called me up sobbing at
night and said, "How could you do that to that beautiful man?"
A political columnist in the... in the local gay paper said,
"How can you call yourself a friend and do that?"
You were supposed to keep the secret, and I knew that the
secret was what was poisoning us.
Sometimes the truth just has to be told and there are systems
that have enslaved us all.
And the biggest one is the closet.
[Amy Tan] Armistead's come on the side of outing many people.
People who said it's my personal life, and I don't think it
enters into my work, and he thinks it's important, yes, that
they need to acknowledge that.
His belief is that when you do not talk about that, and you are
part of a community, a cultural group that is stigmatized by
people being silent, you have a responsibility, if you belong,
to acknowledge you belong.
Especially with somebody like Rock Hudson whose status in
Hollywood had so much influence on how people perceived who was
appropriate as a movie star.
So, yes, he was, in Armistead's mind, the person
who really had to come out.
[Kate Bornstein] I don't agree with that.
I will do that if I find out that someone has been
homophobic, and acting homophobically,
and speaking and writing homophobically,
and they're closed, phht, I'll fucking out them.
Hell, yeah.
But for a person just to go on... No.
No.
No, no.
Why on earth would you say something about the person?
Armistead's response, I... I supported
because if people are going to be gay to their friends and to
some strangers, is it then the responsibility of those friends
and strangers to lie on their behalf?
I should tell you about a moment in my life
that Armistead participated in.
It would be, I suppose, the mid to late '80s.
I was doing a solo show in San Francisco, and... and met up with
Armistead and his partner at the time, Terry.
And I said, not entirely out of the blue,
"Do you think I should come out?"
And he and Terry looked at each other, and smiled, and... and
nodded vigorously, and I... I think at that point,
it was a time when very few people in public life were... were out.
And his first reaction was, "Well, you'll feel better about
yourself if you come out."
Which was true.
"And it will be very good for a lot of other people who
don't feel able to come out to... to see someone
in public life doing it."
And I think that was the appeal to him.
And it was just a few months later that I came out.
I don't think I would have done with the assurance, and
confidence, and need perhaps, even, unless I'd had that
crucial evening with Armistead and Terry in San Francisco.
So, I think of Ter... Terry and Armistead
as my godfathers, really.
Changed my life for the better.
[instrumental music playing]
I met Armistead, I think I was
probably about seven years old.
And I can't... I can't remember if we had met or not.
I just remember seeing him.
He had done a signing at my family's bookstore, which was on
Polk and California, which was called Paperback Traffic.
The bookstore also was very gay, and so it was the perfect place
for a signing of Tales of the City.
Just a very, very big deal that he was there, because Tales of the City
really is all about that neighborhood.
It was a pretty exciting time just in San Francisco,
because this was before AIDS.
[unidentified male] If this thing that gay men are getting in the States,
it's a severe immune deficiency.
[continues reading]
When I think about AIDS, it's really like the...
my whole world disappeared.
My family lost their business.
They... they couldn't... they couldn't keep it open, because
there was no customers, because everybody died.
The... all the employees, you know, a lot of them are gone,
and it's really... it's hard to separate what happened in...
in my life from what happened in the books.
[Alan Cumming reading]
[Armistead] I had had so many valiant friends who had died of AIDS,
people who were openly gay, who were talking about
their illness in the face of the most extraordinary... mistreatment.
And their parents were throwing them out, you know.
They were dying and their parents were rejecting them.
John Fielding was the first character in fiction anywhere
who had died of AIDS.
It was the only way I could cope with it to... to take my
own... the pain I was feeling about the death of my friends
and make other people feel it.
[Michael] Uh-oh.
You have a hicky.
Where?
Right here on your neck.
[Armistead] There was a huge outcry, and a lot of gay people
wrote me and said, "How dare you spoil our light morning
entertainment with your political agenda?"
They didn't get it.
It would be impossible to write about San Francisco
in that period and not bring it up.
It would be kind of insulting in a way to all of the people who
were living with it and living through it.
And so, why not tell that deep and heartbreaking story of AIDS?
[Alan Cumming reading]
[Armistead] I had a two-week period where I was certain that
I had AIDS, because it took two weeks for the test to come back.
And I remember going to my doctor and wanting some
assurance that I didn't, and he started trembling and said,
"I don't even know whether I have it."
None of us did.
We all lived with the assumption that we had it
and that we were going to die.
And that's one of the reasons why I ended Tales of the City in 1989,
because I had established Michael Toliver
as a gay character who is HIV positive and I didn't want to continue
the tradition of killing off the gay man at the end.
[unidentified male] I don't know how much time I have left,
whether it's two years, or five, or fifty,
[continues reading]
[Armistead] Everyone I have loved since the epidemic
started has been HIV positive.
I knew Chris was positive when I met him.
And both my partner at the time, Terry, and my best friend Steve
were diagnosed at roughly the same time.
Steve and I tried to have a little romance, but we weren't
made for each other in that way, but we were so made
for each other as friends.
He taught me everything I knew at the time about Bette Davis,
Busby Berkeley, and Bette Midler, the holy B's.
And he was 15 years younger than I was, and didn't even remember
these people, but he was one of those gay men who knew our lore.
And I just adored him.
[unidentified male] What made you realize that you were gay?
A big man.
Will you shut up?
[laughter] I have to keep him under control.
Steve loved those old Busby Berkeley songs.
So, I was always playing "Let's Face the Music
and Dance", you know.
"There may be trouble ahead."
I'll cry if I repeat the rest of it.
"But... but while there's music and moonlight, and love, and
romance, let's face the music and dance."
And there were a lot of gay men who were doing...
doing that at the time.
["Let's Face the Music and Dance" playing]
♪ There may be trouble ahead ♪
♪ But while there's moonlight And music and love And romance ♪
♪ Let's face the music And dance ♪
[Armistead] Steve was a wonderfully open person who
made no secret of having AIDS, because he felt that it would
make life easier for people who came after him.
A day doesn't go by in which I don't feel the
impact of AIDS in some way.
I've lived with a man that I've loved for the past ten years,
and we've known from the very beginning
that he was HIV positive.
Maybe part of me thought that I would be the one that would be
sticking it out with Terry till the end.
They called it a cocktail divorce.
It's what happens when the HIV medications come along and
someone who's thought he's going to die, no longer thinks he's
going to die and the first thing he wants to do is breakup.
So, when the cocktail came along, and he had that choice,
I didn't see that coming.
It was a hard time.
It was a very, very hard time for me.
Probably one of the hardest of my life.
But you have to get through... you know everybody who
has ever been through a breakup, knows that is.
Finding your way back to yourself again.
Olympia and Laura were terrific during that period in my life,
because I was very fragile.
I think I must have been crying a fair amount on the phone with them.
[Laura Linney] My first marriage had just ended and Armistead
flew to Hartford and then in a great sort of Southern
tradition, we were just with each other.
And... and it strengthens your spine when you're feeling
confused, and heartbroken, and in grief, that
life is changing in a way that you didn't expect.
And we sort of clung to each other
during that period of time.
And... and... and then, after... I think it was... I think it was
after that, Armistead invited me to... to be with him during the
San Francisco Gay Pride Parade.
And he was one of the grand marshals, and so I was...
I got to be his lady in waiting.
And I found the original Mary Ann Singleton dress, the striped one,
and I wore that, and we were in the back of the car sitting,
and we were both brokenhearted.
I was brokenhearted.
Armistead was brokenhearted.
We were really vulnerable, you know, sad,
mopey people at the time.
And I remember there were people screaming
our names in adoration.
Armistead!
Laura!
Mary Ann!
And Armistead started to laugh, and he laughed,
and laughed, and laughed.
And the journalist from The Chronicle took a picture at that
exact moment, and that's the photo that they ran the next day,
was that moment of... of us both just in disbelief that we
were so brokenhearted and yet, at the same time, being so feted
in a community of people who were so loving,
who had so much love to give to us.
You can tell by the applause, we're here with
the grand marshal, Armistead Maupin, and one of the stars
from Tales of the City, of course, Laura Linney.
How... how's the parade going for you?
Oh, it's just heaven.
This is the best seat in town.
You get to see everything.
[news reporter] A lot of fun and feeling a lot of love.
[Armistead] Absolutely.
It's the best feeling in the world, really.
My father had left out big chunks of the family history.
His father killed himself, I think with a shotgun,
in his home while his family was there.
It was never talked about.
I wrote a novel about it, finally, in 2000.
And I guess the knowledge of that at 15 on my part, made me
start looking at my father in a different way, and realized that
maybe so much of this anger, so much of his political posturing,
and I figured that it may have come from that moment where he
had to suddenly be the man of the family.
And he was pissed off.
I would... I would have been pissed off.
And I always worried that my... my father
would do the same himself.
[man reading]
I lived in terror of that, actually.
And I suppose I let him get away with a lot of stuff,
and maybe my mother did, too.
She knew that about him, too.
In some ways he was just a big baby crying.
I was up in New York and we were shooting the Night Listener, and
there's a character in there that is sort of him.
[John Cullum] I'd be careful if I was you.
[Robin Williams] Why?
[John Cullum] Well, folks could talk, that's all.
[Robin Williams] About what?
Use your damn head.
Just because you're shut down, doesn't mean we all have to be.
What kind of new age crap is that?
And my sister called and said, appar...
"You should get home.
He's not doing well."
Chris, my husband, tells me that my response to that initially
was, um... fuck him, I can't take it.
[Christopher Turner] I remember saying to Armistead that you
know it's... that he would regret it if we
didn't at least make the trip.
You know, what could it hurt to just go and you know see him
while he was on his deathbed.
And so, we went down and daddy fell in love with
Chris, this man 30 years my junior, and Chris drove us
around town, and to any locales that my father wanted to go to.
His house on Hillsboro Street, the one where my
grandfather killed himself.
And we went out to the cemetery, which
had been an old family ritual.
[Christopher Turner] For me, it was significant, because my
father is very conservative, and I knew that it was a big stretch
for him to be accepting me and us as a couple.
And I remember before we left, when... as we were saying goodbye,
you know, his dad said to me, you know,
"You take care of that boy."
[Armistead] And now, that's a 90-year-old man telling a
30-year-old man to take care of a 60-year-old man.
He mellowed towards the end, and he did
tell me he was proud of me.
He just wasn't proud of the part that I thought
of as central to my life.
Many homosexuals have become active in the
defense of what they call gay rights.
Nowhere is that defense under greater attack
than in Miami, Florida.
[news reporter] Anita Bryant was once known
as an orange juice saleswoman.
Not anymore.
She has been selling her Save Our Children group.
And I know that there is hope for the
homosexuals, that if they're willing to turn from sin,
the same as any individual, that... that they can be
ex-homosexuals the same as there can be an ex-murderer, or an
ex-thief, or an ex-anybody.
[Jane Maupin Yates] During the time that Anita Bryant was doing
her anti-gay campaign in Florida, and Teddy took her on,
Newsweek decided they were going to do an article about him, and
it was going to... gay author, Armistead Maupin.
And he didn't want his father to find out that way.
So, that's when he wrote the letter.
My own coming out letter to my parents,
I published in The Chronicle as the letter of one of the
characters in my serial.
And so, that my... my literary life and my personal life
were running concurrently.
Okay. Okay.
This is the letter, The Letter to Mama
that Michael writes.
He says, "Dear Mama..." [continues reading]
"I have friends who think I'm foolish to write this letter.
I hope they're wrong.
I hope their doubts are based on parents who loved and trusted
them less than mine do.
I hope, especially, that you'll see this as an act of love on my part,
a sign of my continuing need to share my life with you."
"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."
"No, mama, I wasn't recruited.
No seasoned homosexual ever served as my mentor,
but you know what?
I wish someone had.
I wish someone older than me, and wiser than the people in
Orlando had taken me aside and said, 'It's all right, kid,
you can grow up to be a doctor, or a teacher just like everyone else.
You're not crazy, or sick, or evil.
You can succeed and be happy and find peace with friends,
all kinds of friends, who don't give a damn who you go to bed with.
Most of all, though, you can love and be loved
without hating yourself for it.'"
"I know this may be hard for you to believe,
but San Francisco is full of men and women, both straight and gay,
who don't consider sexuality in measuring the
worth of another human being.
These aren't radicals or weirdos, mama.
They are shop clerks, and bankers, and little old ladies,
and people who nod and smile at you when you
meet them on the bus."
"And their message is so simple.
Yes, you are a person.
Yes, I like you.
Yes, it's all right for you to like me, too."
"All I know is this, if you and papa are responsible
for the way I am, then I thank you with all my heart.
For it's the light and the joy of my life."
[Gay Men's Chorus performance]
♪There's not much else I can say ♪
♪ Except that I'm the same Micheal you've always known ♪
♪ You just know me better now ♪
"Please don't feel you have
to answer this right away.
It's enough for me to know that I no longer have to lie to the
people who taught me to value the truth."
"Mary Ann sends her love.
Everything is fine at 28 Barbary Lane.
Your loving son, Michael."
[Armistead] I wanted a response from my own parents,
which I didn't get.
My mother was dying of cancer at the time.
It was how I came out to them.
They were subscribing to The Chronicle and I knew when they
got to that, they would know it was me.
It was just too close for comfort.
But my father wrote me a very terse little letter on his legal pad
that said, "Any extra stress on your mother is only
going to make her die faster."
Not nice.
[instrumental music playing]
I, a few years back, coined a phrase.
I refer to the logical family as opposed
to your biological family.
It's clearer and clearer as I get older, that sometimes people
who... that you share blood with are not coming
along with you on the ride.
And it's time to stop punishing yourself about that and just
realize where the real love, and support, and unconditional love
is coming from in your life.
[Amanda Palmer] In this new crazy culture that we live in that has
gotten so far away from our old school tribal village culture,
we move into the world feeling alienated, and isolated, and
fucked up, and...and with a sense of not belonging.
You grow up somewhere.
It doesn't fit.
It doesn't make sense.
You don't feel real.
You don't feel accepted.
And then you get to part two of your life where you
find that place that you belong.
When Armistead described logical family to me, and I said,
"Oh, you mean that thing that we've all been doing all our lives?"
And he went, "Yeah."
[Jewelle Gomez] So many of us feel alienated from the people
who brought us into the world.
It can make you feel really isolated, desperate, unmoored in
ways that you just don't... sometimes you just
don't know are happening.
So, the idea of logical family, I think really gives people an
option to say I choose you.
[Kate Bornstein] I call it extended family
and that's what we do.
My role in most of the extended family is auntie or granny.
[Armistead] More and more these days, people are aware that
that's what they need to get through life, people who,
of like mind, who love and support you.
[clanking]
I would say that Armistead has told stories that
make you want to tell your story.
He made characters who were like people you know, and you wanted
to tell them in turn what you hadn't been able to say,
or what your back story was.
Tell me again about those Gatsby eyes.
[Amy Tan] He allowed people to be truthful, and to know why it was
important to be truthful beyond themselves.
[instrumental music playing]
[Armistead] My career has had a very slow unfolding,
and the story I've told has kept ongoing for 40 years,
and people are finding it.
A writer's life has ups and downs, and there's not a whole
lot of money flow going on right now.
It was a real lesson for me to move into our current
ground level flat in a Victorian house in the Castro.
I don't mind being back in a sort of Mary Ann Singleton
situation where I can hear the people going up
the steps to the flat above.
[Laura Linney] Have a good weekend?
[Armistead] I've had a hard time distinguishing between yearning
for my own youth and yearning for the old San Francisco.
This is still the most beautiful place in the world to me,
and where I want to be.
It still has an enchanted feel to it.
Times change.
[instrumental music continues]
Herb Caen, who was the great columnist when I was a young man
here, was always grumping about how things were so much better
back in the '30s and '40s.
Well, you were young then, Herb, and you know, and I
was young in the '70s and '80s.
And they were lovely, but here we are, and
I'm fucking lucky to be alive.
That's what I keep coming back to.
I'm so lucky to be alive.
I don't have friends who could be here with me,
and have the luxury of griping about the Google bus.
They are long gone.
And so, I try to live my life for them.
[Armistead] It was so cool to see Donna there.
[Christopher Turner] Let me show you this window.
-Have you seen this? -[Armistead] Oh, no.
[Christopher Turner] It's great.
[Armistead] Now, that's just so great.
[Christopher Turner] Stay visible.
Should we...
[Armistead] Go get a Dapper Dog?
[Christopher Turner] Dapper Dog.
-A little sustenance... -[Armistead] Yeah.
-[Christopher Turner] ...after your show. -[Armistead] Yeah.
-[Christopher Turner] That was great. -[Armistead] Oh, thanks, baby.
[instrumental music continues]