rock & roll

Armistead Maupin says Rock Hudson was “intimidating” in bed & had a unique way of doing poppers

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Rock Hudson
Rock Hudson in a scene from ‘Strange Bedfellows,’ 1964. Photo by Leo Fuchs/Getty Images

Fascination with screen legend Rock Hudson’s private life is as much a part of his legacy as is all his great work during the Golden Age of Hollywood.

While deeply closeted, Hudson had relationships with several prominent male lovers including esteemed Tales of the City author and LGBTQ+ activist Armistead Maupin.

Unlike Hudson, Maupin was out and proud and working for the San Francisco Chronicle, where he began Tales of the City as a newspaper serial.

In a new interview, Maupin detailed the first time he met Hudson in the mid-’70s after being invited to a Palm Springs party the movie star was supposed to attend.

“I ended up going home with a bunch of guys from the party who took me out to some house in the middle of the desert where we took some drug called TT1, which I’m told was a relaxant given to women in childbirth,” Maupin tells Interview magazine in a new sit-down. “It certainly relaxed me.”

But i wasn’t until Maupin went to see Hudson in a local theater performance that the pair wound up hooking up.

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“We went backstage afterwards to see him. The moment I had my hand in his, the lights went out. Just a blackout,” the 79-year-old recalled of the power failure. “I said, ‘Well, this is the opportunity of a lifetime.’ We got together on various occasions.”

However the sex “was not great” because Maupin, who was 19 years younger, found Hudson’s ’50s heartthrob fame hard to measure up to in the sack.

“It was massively intimidating,” Maupin added. “He said, very touchingly at one point, ‘You know I’m just another guy like you,’ which is all he wanted. I said, ‘No, you’re not, and I’m Doris Day,’ and he got it. But yeah, it was extremely intimidating.”

Maupin managed to get over his fears and soon learned Hudson had a penchant for enhancing the mood with the aid of poppers, which he carried around in the most luxurious way. Feel that bougie rush!

“He had the cutest little poppers case you’ve ever seen. A little leather case that said ‘RH’ on it. That partially was one of the things that intimidated me,” he said, before adding, “I’m killing myself that I didn’t buy it from his estate.”

Maupin previously talked about their romance in the 2023 documentary Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed, which examined the star’s life when the cameras weren’t rolling.

Filmmaker Stephen Kijak used archival footage, film clips, and interviews with Hudson’s confidantes to give a clearer picture of the man behind the film persona.

In the doc, Maupin discussed outing Hudson in a People magazine article after the actor disclosed his AIDS diagnosis in 1985. A decision he still stands by.

“I knew it was my responsibility to do that. I’ve never felt it was a betrayal of an old friend,” Maupin told Interview. “We were at a point in history where this had to be done. Somebody had to say he was a gay guy and the whole of Hollywood knew he was gay. And he has nothing to be ashamed of, so that’s what I did.”

Hudson tragically passed away on October 2, 1985 at the age of 59.

Maupin currently resides in London with his husband of more than 17 years, Christopher Turner.

Maupin recently released Mona of the Manor, the tenth novel in his beloved Tales of the City series. Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed is available to stream on Max.

Related:

How Armistead Maupin created a whole new and wonderful vision of gay life

The literary legend penned the ‘Tales of the CIty’ series, which Netflix has made into another series about the family values of queer life in SF.

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