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THE PIONEER
With the release of Michael Tolliver Lives earlier this year, one of our greatest writers proves he won't be slowing down anytime soon
"I didn’t expect it to hit me as hard as it did," writer and activist Armistead Maupin tells me about his intimate February 2007 wedding to partner Christopher Turner. “It felt like the most important moment of my life. This will not be progress if we suddenly have this whole new breed of gay bridezillas!”
It’s a classic Maupin moment: honest sentiment pricked with the pin—or pen—of social commentary. The author of the Tales Of The City series, Maupin’s stories mix the over-the-top plot twists with characters based on the real denizens of his beloved San Francisco. For almost thirty years, readers have fallen for the series’ transgendered matriarch, Anna Madrigal, and her protagonists, the naïve Mary Ann Singleton and the soon-to-be-gay-icon Michael “Mouse” Oliver.
Without sacrificing his wit, Maupin was one of the first writers to chronicle AIDS, particularly the epidemic’s effect on its survivors. “During most of the ’80s, whenever I went on a book tour, I was the person who spoke about AIDS,” Maupin recalls. “I’ve never been an expert on AIDS, but I felt a responsibility to do it because very few other people were. Ironically, I think that’s why I have a reputation today. I’m not the best writer or the smartest one or the bravest one, but I did it when nobody else was doing it.”
The books were a huge sensation. Mouse’s famous coming-out letter was actually Maupin’s own announcement to his parents. They read it along with thousands of closeted men, who were so moved that, Maupin says, “they simply changed the name on the letter and sent it to their own parents.” It changed him too: “I didn’t start to be a good writer until I came out…because I had not gotten to the heart of myself.”
It’s tempting to peck at the similarities between Maupin, now 63, and his character Mouse, but the author stresses, “There’s so much of me in Mary Ann.” He says his long friendship with actress Laura Linney, who’s played Mary Ann in three Tales miniseries, came from the bond of the character. “We both instinctively knew that we understood each other, because she understood Mary Ann.”
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Maupin genuinely believed he had finished the series in 1989 but was galvanized in recent years by what he calls “a generation of gay men that survived homophobia and started a revolution, and then survived AIDS and were now settling into their maturity.” He spent 18 months writing Michael Tolliver Lives, which was released this past summer and focuses on Mouse, now in his 50s, but features appearances from the core Tales characters.
When I express relief over Mary Ann’s reappearance in the book, Maupin gives me a scoop: “My next novel is tentatively called Mary Ann In Autumn, about a 57-year-old woman trying to reinvent herself, much as she did when she was 25.”
There have been some memoir-worthy twists in Maupin’s own life. When I ask if it’s true he was a lover of Rock Hudson’s, he retorts, “That’s the British—they keep using that term. I was a fuck buddy of Rock Hudson’s…it wasn’t exactly an elite club!”
Maupin laughs when I attempt to ease into a question by mentioning U.K. newspaper The Guardian. One of their journalists visited the author at home and quietly noted a black-and-white photo of a young, nude man. When the profile was published, Guardian readers were treated to the report that Maupin was “dauntingly well hung.”
“The photo is actually of a 1907 Sicilian youth—it’s not me!” he exclaims. “I called [actor and longtime friend] Ian McKellen and said, ‘Do I let people think I’m the kind of guy that has a naked picture of myself in the living room for a reporter to see?’ and he said, ‘I think I’d leave it alone!’ ”
It’s been an eventful year for Maupin, with a wedding and a new book. He’s also found emotional gratification in meeting his readers at the public appearances he’s been making since the book’s release. It’s become a familiar occurrence for people to approach the author in tears. “That can’t help but be moving to me,” he says of his interaction with longtime readers. “They’re not crying over my writing, they’re crying over something that happened to them at some point in their lives. That makes me feel I’ve done something useful.”
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