Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

by Christopher Bram

  Because a happy real-life event had affected the series: Maupin himself had found love. He met him in 1985 when he was invited to speak at the Gay Students Alliance at Georgia State University in Atlanta. The visit was arranged by Terry Anderson, a cute, boyish, twenty-five-year-old blond who had not read Maupin’s novels but admired his rules for gay men recently published in the Advocate. (“1. Stop begging for acceptance…. 3. Refuse to cooperate in the lie…. 5. Don’t sell your soul to the gay commercial culture.”) He met Maupin at the airport and the two immediately hit it off, talking endlessly on the ride into town. “We were finding instant points of agreement,” Maupin recalled, “largely about the closet and movies, which are the two things that are most important to me.” At the hotel they tumbled into bed together, then proceeded with the weekend’s scheduled events, ending up back in bed each night. Maupin returned to San Francisco but the relationship continued over the phone. He invited Anderson to come out for a month. Anderson came and stayed.

  Accelerating the progress of love, making it both urgent and dangerous, was the fact that, six weeks after moving to San Francisco, Anderson took the antibody test and found he was seropositive. Maupin was still seronegative. They knew how difficult life could be in a serodiscordant couple, yet they decided to risk it. They assumed Anderson had only so much time and they must make it count.

  Much of this went into Significant Others but with changes. The fictional lovers connect more gradually than the real lovers did, each pretending to be cool and aloof. And the new fictional love, Thack (short for Thackeray) Sweeney, is negative while Michael is positive. But then Maupin has as much in common with Thack as he does with Michael. Thack is Southern, but comes from the upper-class South of Maupin. Michael comes from the public-school South of Terry Anderson. Yet Anderson was far more confident and brash than Michael can be.

  Anderson got involved in local gay activism and eventually became manager of the city’s Different Light Bookstore. He managed Maupin, too, forming a business around him called Literary Bent. He was fiercely protective of his partner and very demanding of people in the book trade; they missed dealing with the laid-back author alone. Maupin later acknowledged that business affected their life together: It was good to work with someone he trusted, but it “increases the intimacy and it increases the dangers of fights, because you’re professionally and romantically entwined.” But Anderson helped his partner’s career immensely, getting him better contracts and more public attention.

  They became a highly public gay couple—they appeared together on TV in Britain and in the “Couples” column of People. They were very sociable. Among their new friends was British actor Ian McKellen, who first visited San Francisco while filming in New Mexico. One night Maupin and Anderson began to complain about famous people who stayed in the closet. McKellen listened quietly, then asked, “Do you think I should come out?” They told him yes and spent the rest of the evening telling him why. They thought nothing would come of it. But several months later, in an interview on Radio Four in Britain, McKellen told the world that he was gay. Maupin’s next novel would be dedicated to McKellen.

  When Sure of You was published in 1989, Maupin announced it would be his last Barbary Lane novel. He’d been considering ending the series for a while. He did not want it to go on like a TV show that overstays its welcome. He yearned to write something new and decided that Sure of You would be a good place to stop.

  The novel begins quietly. Michael and Thack now live together. Their scenes of domestic life, the daily exchanges of talk, affection, aggravation, and apology, are expertly done—a convincing happiness. AIDS remains present in the chorus of beepers regularly going off to tell Michael and others to take their AZT. Brian works with Michael in a landscaping business and is still married to Mary Ann—he dotes on their daughter. An old boyfriend of Mary Ann’s comes to town, Burke, who suffered from amnesia three novels back. Now a TV producer, he offers Mary Ann her own national talk show in New York. She not only wants the job, she intends to use it to leave Brian.

  It’s a surprisingly simple crisis for the climax of the entire series, yet it’s enough. Michael and Thack are caught in the middle. Mrs. Madrigal and Mona are visiting Lesbos—the literal Greek island—in a subplot that’s a pleasant break from the heavy drama back home. The drama becomes even heavier when Michael fears his HIV has turned into full-blown AIDS.

  Maupin’s prose was always good, but it’s even better here. Scenes have the precision and pacing of good comedy, yet Maupin folds real emotions and serious ideas into his characters’ thoughts. Here is Michael sitting on a bench after a nurse tells him that the purple blotch on his leg might be a Kaposi’s sarcoma lesion:

  Three years of daily fretting had left him overrehearsed for this moment, but it still seemed completely unreal. He had vowed not to rail against the universe when his time came. Too many people had died, too many he had loved, for “Why me?” to be a reasonable response. “Why not?” was more to the point.

  Michael imagines all the pornographic details of illness, growing more upset. Then he remembers he has Thack and friends to help him and he recovers a little.

  He tilted his head and let the sun dry his tears. The air smelled of new-mown grass, while what he could see of the sky seemed ridiculously blue. The birds in the trees were as fat and chirpy as the ones in cartoons.

  The emotions leading up to this are so strong that the last image isn’t really sweet, but slightly bitter, even angry.

  The book and the series end not in a deathbed scene or an operatic confrontation, but in a handful of very real, well-observed encounters. Mary Ann acts simply, but badly. I won’t give away the ending completely, but say only that what she does is human and plausible. Yet it is shocking in the world of Barbary Lane. Readers were appalled. Some blamed Maupin, as if he’d made her behave badly. But I believe Mary Ann is only being true to herself; I admire Maupin for letting her do what she does. She is his boldest creation: a character we like and even identify with but who changes over the years, achieving what she wanted but being changed by success. Maupin gave her emotions and needs that he must have feared in himself. He even implies that we, his gentle readers, could behave just as badly. Readers don’t like being told such things.

  Mary Ann is the dark note in the novel, the good person who fails and is expelled from Arcadia. More accurately, she leaves freely. Yet there was another dark note for readers who paused to think about it: What will happen to Michael? He might be fine for now, but there was no treatment for AIDS in 1989. Maupin left the question hanging, though there was only one answer at this time. That might be another reason for Maupin ending the series here: he did not want to see Michael die.

  In a highly involving, deceptively entertaining relay race of tales and stories, Maupin explores some very profound subjects. He asks important questions about love and loyalty. He shows a circle of disconnected people inventing an alternative family that’s more flexible than any natural family yet not without its problems. He demonstrates how gay and straight people can bond, using each other to define and redefine themselves. And he discovers a different kind of morality, a newer, truer set of values more real and right than the petrified, secondhand rules that too easily turn into hypocrisy. He found a middle way between the libertines and the Calvinists.

  Sure of You was not serialized in a newspaper but came out as a finished book. The last novel in the series was the first to get a full review in the New York Times Book Review, written by gay novelist David Feinberg, who’d just published a first novel, the angrily comic Eighty-Sixed. Feinberg was known for his scathing wit and cynicism, yet he adored Barbary Lane. He called the series a love letter to San Francisco, found it as valuable as social history as John Updike’s Rabbit novels, and concluded, “Mr. Maupin writes for everyone: gay, straight, single, married, square or hip. His most subversive act is to write in such a matter-of-fact manner about his gay characters. There is nothing exceptional or lurid about them:
acceptance is a given.”

  Yet Maupin had found success without the Times. His books sold 700,000 copies by the end of the decade and his readers didn’t just buy them, but read and reread them, longing to enter his world. When he appeared at A Different Light Bookstore in New York in 1989, the store was mobbed and Maupin was besieged by fans—one man wanted his picture taken sitting in his lap, as if Maupin were Santa Claus. He was so popular that, like Shakespeare, there were rumors he was actually somebody else. An obsessed reader figured out that “Armistead Maupin” was an anagram for “is a man I dreamt up.”

  Nevertheless, Maupin now walked away from Barbary Lane, much as Conan Doyle tried to walk away from Sherlock Holmes or Frank Baum tried to shut down the Land of Oz. He needed to try something new; he wanted to explore something besides gay lives.

  Oddly enough, the man whose novel had done more than any other to trigger the recent wave of gay fiction did not immediately ride it himself. Edmund White was off in Paris, working on a different kind of book. He not only left New York after A Boy’s Own Story, he left gay literature, too, for the time being.

  His next work, Caracole, was a highly literary novel set in an alternate reality like Nabokov’s Ada, a return to the experimental mode of Forgetting Elena. But this time White replaced sexual ambiguity with overt heterosexuality. A young teenager, Gabriel, is sent from a run-down provincial estate to a decayed city of palaces and canals to live with his uncle—much as White’s nephew, Keith Fleming, had lived in New York with White. Gabriel has love affairs with two older women while his true love, a wild girl of the forests, fourteen-year-old Angelica, comes to the city and becomes Uncle Mateo’s mistress. After some complications, the young lovers escape their corrupt elders and happily reunite to lead a revolution.

  Caracole is part adult fairy tale, part dream novel, part satirical allegory, and a complete dud. It’s understandable that White would want to take a vacation from both gay fiction and AIDS at this time, but his new novel was all lobster shell and no lobster. It fails not because it’s straight but because it’s dry and uninvolving. The only interesting element is its fantasy autobiography. Uncle Mateo is a hetero White. The “nasty little blond” actress, Edwige, is another version of his unrequited love, Keith McDermott. (McDermott later told White’s nephew, “Well, at least you got to stay your own gender.”) And the imperious bluestocking, Mathilda, is none other than Susan Sontag. Gabriel becomes her unlikely lover. “You’ve given me the gift of your completely innocent trust,” she tells him. “I’ll give you fame and power—and my love, too, if you want it.” There’s a heavy whiff of 1950s costume drama in the novel—it might be more entertaining if there were more. There’s a perverse joke in a gay man writing a heterosexual love story where he imagines his skinny nephew breaking the heart of a famous closeted lesbian, yet Caracole is too sluggish to be much fun. Not even the finale at a masked ball where Mathilda guns down Edwige is half as enjoyable as it sounds.

  The novel received mostly bad reviews when it appeared in 1985. The gay press and British press sometimes praised it (although one wonders if novelist Peter Ackroyd meant White mischief when he called it the “most accomplished of his novels”) yet the book attracted few readers, gay or straight. It ended Sontag’s friendship with White. She had blurbed A Boy’s Own Story and recommended him for his Guggenheim. She not only dropped him, she insisted her blurb be removed from all future editions of Boy’s Own Story, foreign and domestic. It’s hard to understand how White could think Sontag would be amused by his mocking portrait of her. Later he blamed his unconscious, repeating his claim that he couldn’t help betraying people who got close to him. I suspect it was a return of the repressed: his unconscious was tired of being nice to someone important. Or maybe his unconscious just wanted to burn his American bridges so he could stay in Europe.

  White thoroughly enjoyed living in Paris. He had a little two-room apartment on the Île Saint-Louis, an island in the Seine east of Notre Dame full of seventeenth-century mansions and hotels. He lived off his Guggenheim money, book advances, and occasional articles he wrote for Vogue. He had a new boyfriend, John Purcell (the dedicatee of Caracole), but they were more friends than lovers, and both saw other men. He shaved off his mustache and stopped drinking. He wrote for an hour each morning, in longhand while sprawled on his bed, and was free for the rest of the day. He told an interviewer, “In Paris people cultivate social life as an art form; in New York people cultivate it as a form of self-advancement.” He may have been referring chiefly to himself: he did not need to play courtier in Paris the way he had in New York. Through his French translator, Gilles Barbedette, he met other French gay writers, including Michel Foucault and Hervé Guibert, future author of To the Friend Who Could Not Save My Life. He tricked with men he picked up each night in a nearby park on the Seine and explored an early version of phone sex.

  In 1985 he met Matthias Brunner, the Swiss-German owner of a chain of movie theaters. Brunner was close to White in age, handsome, wealthy, and urbane. They saw each other regularly and often traveled together. White became more serious. Then Brunner suggested they take the HIV test. White agreed. Brunner tested negative but White tested positive, as he thought he would. Visiting Vienna with Brunner shortly afterward, White found himself constantly crying. Brunner insisted that their different HIV statuses were not important, but the two men began to drift apart.

  White visited a friend in Greece whose partner had recently died. He returned to Paris thinking about illness and death. He wrote a long short story, “An Oracle,” the quiet tale of an AIDS widower trying to come to terms with the death of his lover of twelve years.

  “An Oracle” is a great work of fiction, perhaps White’s best up to this point. The prose is plain and direct, with a new kind of urgency.

  Even though George had been a baby, he’d fought death with a winner’s determination but had lost anyway. Ray thought that he himself wouldn’t resist it so long. If and when the disease surfaced (for it seemed to him like a kid who’s holding his nose underwater for an eerily long time but is bound to come up gasping for air), when the disease surfaced he wouldn’t much mind. In a way dying would be easier than figuring out a new way of living.

  White concisely captures the pampered life of this New York/Fire Island couple in the first half of the forty-page story. George, an advertising executive, is the more successful and dominant of the two. Ray selflessly looks after him when he’s ill. Before he dies, George tells him, “You must look out for yourself.” In the second half, numb and drifting, Ray visits a friend in Crete. He regularly has sex there with a teenage hustler, Marco, who speaks no English. Projecting his own thoughts and emotions on the boy, Ray falls in love. Before Ray leaves, he gets a friend to translate a love letter into Greek, one that says he will return to Crete and wants Marco to live with him. He gives the letter to Marco on his last night. The boy reads the letter; he gently says no; he actually speaks English. “You must look out for yourself,” he tells Ray. Afterward, Ray finds himself smiling and crying, “as he’d never allowed himself to cry over George, who’d just spoken to him once again through the least likely oracle.”

  White published the story in Christopher Street in 1986. Two more stories about AIDS followed, including “Palace Days,” about his friend, David Kalstone, who also died that year. These were collected with four stories by British writer Adam Mars-Jones in The Darker Proof in 1988, still one of the best books, fiction or nonfiction, about the epidemic.

  But White could think more clearly about AIDS in fiction than when he wrote nonfiction about it. He followed his fine short story with a manifesto on art and AIDS, “Esthetics and Loss,” in Artforum in 1987. It’s a notorious essay, cold and haughty, full of rules and judgments. White speaks dismissively of The Normal Heart, As Is, and the 1985 TV movie An Early Frost, before he lays down the law: “If art is to confront AIDS more honestly than the media have done, it must begin in tact, avoid humor, and end in anger…. Humor dom
esticates terror…. Humor, like melodrama, is an assertion of bourgeois values.” It sounds like a parody of bad French criticism. Many gay readers and writers hated the essay for being not only condescending but just plain wrong. Ed Sikov, media columnist of the New York Native, usually a supporter of White, angrily pitched into the essay at length, calling his admonition against humor “pure twaddle.”

  The truth of the matter is White didn’t know what the right response to the epidemic was. Nobody did. Everyone was badly shaken and nervously grabbing at contradictory ideas about the role of art. But trust the tale, not the teller. When White himself wrote fiction about AIDS, he was not afraid to use humor or melodrama.

  He now resumed work on a new novel, a sequel to A Boy’s Own Story tentatively titled The Beautiful Room Is Empty. He decided to explore his life in a series of autobiographical novels, as Marcel Proust, Doris Lessing, and others had done. He mapped out a tetralogy, four novels, which meant he needed to write three more. He was unsure if he would live long enough to finish them.

  The deaths of both the young and the old continued. AIDS jumbled together the chronologies of different generations so that newcomers died at the same time as the old guard. On December 1, 1987, in the south of France, James Baldwin died.

  He had lived a curious life since the civil rights movement and the attacks by Eldridge Cleaver. After years in Istanbul, he moved back to France, dividing his time between Paris and the village of St. Paul-de-Vence in Provence. He visited the United States for teaching engagements and public speaking. He still drank heavily and his appearances were often unpredictable.

  In 1979, he published Just Above My Head, his novel about a gay gospel singer, Arthur Montana, as told by his straight brother, Hall. Baldwin mixed pieces of himself with pieces of his own brother David. He imagined his family talking about him after he was gone. “Whatever the fuck your uncle was, and he was a whole lot of things, he was nobody’s faggot,” Hall tells his son. The book is full of promising stories, such as a love affair between two teenage boys in a gospel quartet touring the postwar South. (“They walked in the light of each other’s eyes… they were called ‘lovebirds’ and ‘Romeo and Romeo’ because they were alone, they were far from other people, they were in danger.”) But the narrative keeps sliding around without building to anything. The book badly needed another draft, but Baldwin no longer knew how to revise. It would be his last novel.