My LGBT Hero: Armistead Maupin

Armistead and Me, 28 November 2010

Armistead Maupin
Author

Long before there was Will & Grace, there were Michael ‘Mouse’ Tolliver and Mary Ann Singleton. Living at 28 Barbary Lane with their transgendered landlady Anna Madrigal, they were the original fag and hag. First serialised in the San Francisco Chronicle in the mid 70s, Armistead Maupin’s first Tales of the City novel was published in 1978 and brought the gay lifestyle to the masses. Years before Queer as Folk scandalised the nation, Channel 4 had already been involved in the production of two series based on the books.

Maupin is a true LGBT pioneer. He grew up in North Carolina in a conservative family, trained as a journalist and served in the US Navy during the Vietnam War. He came out at 30 and began the Tales of the City serial the same year. Opening on Mary Ann Singleton moving to the city from Ohio, the focus quickly changes to Michael Tolliver, a newly-out gay man, a character essentially mirroring Maupin’s own life. Maupin came out by sending his parents the same letter Mouse sends his.

I know I can’t tell you what it is to be gay. But I can tell you what it’s not.

It’s not hiding behind words, Mama. Like family and decency and Christianity. It’s not fearing your body, or the pleasures that God made for it. It’s not judging your neighbor, except when he’s crass or unkind.

I was born after the Aids crisis began and by the time I was out and had moved to London there were drugs available allowing people to live long and relatively healthy lives with the disease. It was primarily reading these books, seeing it through his characters’ eyes, that I realised the real effects of it on the people living, and dying, with it and those around them. The third book in the series, Babycakes, was published in 1983 and is considered to be the first mainstream fiction to deal with the situation.

I was deeply honoured to meet Maupin last November when he visited London to promote the latest book in the series, Mary Ann in Autumn. He read an excerpt from the book – a moving passage about a couple with a large age difference between them, which dealt with dementia and the younger partner caring for the older.

His earlier books opened up the ‘gay world’ to me, beyond my circle of friends and what I’d read about on the internet. I lived in an extremely close-knit community of gay people when I made the move to London, terrified of not being accepted if people at work or in ‘straight bars’ found out I was gay. Maupin’s tales taught me that friendships between people of all sexualities were possible.