Name: Armistead Maupin, 75
Who He Is: Author, activist
How He’s Contributed: Maupin grew up in North Carolina as the son of a powerful lawyer. After serving several tours in the Navy, including a stint in Vietnam, he landed in television journalism, working for future right-wing Senator Jessie Helms. Helms and Maupin would later become arch rivals during the AIDS crisis when Helms opposed HIV research and referred to gay men as “morally sick wretches.”
“I’ve changed and he hasn’t,” Maupin deadpanned years later.
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Maupin came out in 1974. Around the same time, he began writing Tales of the City, stories serialized in the San Francisco Chronicle revolving around a diverse group of friends living in the same San Francisco apartment building. The stories earned wide acclaim for their loving portraits of Maupin’s chosen city and for their groundbreaking portrayal of the warm family values of gay life. He would later migrate the stories to novel form, penning a whopping nine books over a period of 30 years. The books drew a generation of gay men and lesbians to San Francisco, looking for their own form of the community Maupin lived and imagined.
The series would also see three television adaptations beginning in 1993—Tales of the City, More Tales of the City, and Further Tales of the City—starring Laura Linney and Olympia Dukakis. A final installment premieres on Netflix in June. Maupin’s semiautobiographical novel The Night Listener became a film in 2006, starring Robin Williams in one of his best performances. Through it all, Maupin remained a vocal advocate of equality through the height of the AIDS epidemic to the present day. He became one of the first fiction writers to address the subject of HIV in Babycakes, the fourth Tales installment. Trans characters played key roles in his early books, but by the time the Netflix series came around a new creative team was updating the vastly less white and less cisgender male world that Maupin created.
Why We’re Proud: Forty years after its inception, Tales of the City looms as one of the defining works of American literature because of the breakthrough positive portrayal of gay characters. The eccentric residents of Barbary Lane feel like real, warm-hearted friends who just happened to stop by for a drink, toke, or dinner. This was a massive shift from earlier literary portraits of queer people as pathetic, lonesome or even evil who end up dead in the end.
Instead, Maupin drew his characters as often more full of life, community, and warmth than their non-gay counterparts and the lives they left behind in less diverse and even repressive parts of the country. Both the novels and subsequent TV series have given LGBTQ people a roadmap to the communal and social joys of gay life, not just the sexual ones, often overlooked by the mainstream.
The message: You can create your own family and live a life full of love, adventure, and friendship. It’s good to be gay.
As Maupin told BigFib in 2008:
When I came along and started to write, the image presented in gay literature was pretty damn grim. And soon I realized that it didn’t have to be that way. If you chose your friends carefully and behaved in a way that was worthy of love, then you could escape from that terrible fate—of being a depressed old queen. And you know, I have my ups and downs like anyone else, but I’m happier at 63 than I’ve ever been because I know more about myself.
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jcoberkrom
The sad thing is the need for this article.
I loved the original “Tales” on tv. It had an unmatchable cast. And I’ve read all of his books.
If you are gay and you don’t know Maupin get your head out your . . . .
Rex Huskey
agree. but there are so many gurls here with their heads up their azzes no one reads anymore beyond 280 characters….
djmcgamester
I was so in love with the series and then the books. I don’t think I’d been out all that long but it was wonderful. It was on PBS back in those days. I had known this new series was coming and it’s this month so I’m psyched about it. I don’t think the others are available but maybe Netflix can get those too. I would love to watch all of it in one go.
Karlis
The original Tales of the City series are knocking around on the Internet. Look on file sharing services. For that matter, look on YouTube. They are there, as well. I, too, am really, really looking forward to the new series, though. Like you, I adored the books when they first came out. Also the original TV series.
TAZnTampa
Amazon Prime as the original PBS Series, but it either for Rent or Buy….
marc sfe
Karlis, Netflix is supposed to airing the original 3. Not certain when but that’s what I’ve been told.
sfhairy
I watched the first episode of the new series last night and had tears in my eyes. So beautiful to come back to Barbary Lane. Armisteads books drew me to SF back in 93 and I’m ever so grateful for that. I love San Francisco and the Bay Area and so happy I pulled a MaryAnn and moved here.
BarnabyLane
As I wrote on another site this Tales was a total disappointment. Had so looked forward to a new Tales but what was back then, a can’t wait-shocking-racy for the times story to weekly television some 20 years ago turned this trip back down Barbary Lane into a total waste of binge watching last night. This new offering threw in just about every kind of queer person and or relationship and dealt with their resulting issues like an episode of Golden Girls. I take that back – binge watching any Golden Girls season still stirs some laughter. But this generation of Barbary Lane actors, dialogue and storylines lack any real interest or intrigue and just ends gasping for air – also like Anna Madrigal. So after the final episode this viewer was left with no desire for another incarnation of Tales. A truly ruinous add-on to this onetime brilliant story.