“Robin Williams said to give you his love,” I told my father.
He smiled. “How’s my favorite funnyman?”
That sounded wrong, so completely out of character. Pap had never used the word funnyman (who does, anyway, beyond the announcers on Entertainment Tonight?), and the old man, as I remembered, had been furious when Robin came out publicly against the war in Iraq.
He’s trying to be sweet, I realized. He’s scared and he needs company.
I could see why. There was an air of grim submission in the house, a mute anticipation of the end. When Chris suggested we go for a ride in the rental car, everyone liked the idea, including my stepmother, who told us, right there in front of Pap, that she’d be glad to have him out of the house for a while. She must have had her reasons—I’m sure she did—but I was suddenly so grateful that I had found someone like Chris, someone kind and self-aware who wouldn’t disconnect with me before the end has come. Someone who wouldn’t talk about me as if I were no longer in the room.
Chris drove. Pap was up front, riding shotgun, giving directions.
I loved sitting in the back, listening to their back-and-forth. It felt miraculous.
“Take a left up here, then swing around the bend and follow her straight up to Canterbury.”
“This neighborhood is nice,” said Chris. “So leafy.”
“Yes it is. You’re a damn good driver.”
“Thanks.”
“Much rather have you drive than that fella in the back.”
Chris chuckled.
“You know what I mean, doncha?”
“Oh yeah.”
“I can hear you two back here,” I said.
“Take a left on Canterbury,” said the old man.
We drove downtown, connecting the dots of my childhood, of Pap’s childhood, a jagged constellation of memories. We passed the historical marker honoring Grandpa Branch, who had died defending slavery and whose bed had been shipped to me in San Francisco as a gesture of my mother’s acceptance. (The general’s house was no longer there, even as a funeral home, having long since been replaced by a plain red-brick office building.) We rounded Capitol Square, past the Confederate monument and the steps where I’d spoken against Jesse Helms at Raleigh’s first Gay Pride March. On the other side of the square I pointed out Christ Church, with the incongruous rooster on its steeple, the inspiration for Dansapp’s “collection of cocks.”
Then we moved on to Oakwood Cemetery, where my mother had been buried for over a quarter of a century. I showed Chris her tombstone and its inscription—“All Things Bright and Beautiful”—chosen by my father because of Mummie’s favorite hymn, the one about “all creatures great and small.”
Then, still following my father’s directions, Chris drove us out to the far end of Clark Avenue, to the big old house where my father had grown up and my grandfather had killed himself. We didn’t talk about that; we didn’t need to. Under the comfortable cloak of fiction I had written of my grandfather’s suicide in The Night Listener, and Pap had loved the book, though he made a point of saying that “that business” hadn’t affected him as much as I’d imagined. When he had come to my appearance at a Raleigh bookstore he even became part of the show. During the Q & A portion, the inevitable question arose about where I get the inspiration to write, so I did what I always do and pantomimed a long, hard toke on a joint. It got the usual laugh, but Pap stole it from me by barking, “Shut the hell up!” from the audience. Suddenly we were a comedy act. “Ladies and gentlemen,” I said. “Have you met my father?”
After our tour, back at the house, when conversation began to flag, Pap said, “I reckon you’ve got a plane to catch.” It had been a perfect afternoon, a perfect summing-up in the presence of a sympathetic witness, and neither one of us wanted to screw it up. I hugged the old man goodbye—or as much of a hug as he would ever allow—and headed for the door. I thought that was the end of it until Pap pulled Chris aside and said something he thought I couldn’t hear:
“You take care of that boy, you hear?”
It was just an instruction, delivered almost brusquely, but in that moment of our last goodbye, it felt like a benediction.
EPILOGUE: LETTER TO MAMA (1977)
Dear Mama,
I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to write. Every time I try to write to you and Papa I realize I’m not saying the things that are in my heart. That would be OK, if I loved you any less than I do, but you are still my parents and I am still your child.
I have friends who think I’m foolish to write this letter. I hope they’re wrong. I hope their doubts are based on parents who loved and trusted them less than mine do. I hope especially that you’ll see this as an act of love on my part, a sign of my continuing need to share my life with you.
I wouldn’t have written, I guess, if you hadn’t told me about your involvement in the Save Our Children campaign. That, more than anything, made it clear that my responsibility was to tell you the truth, that your own child is homosexual, and that I never needed saving from anything except the cruel and ignorant piety of people like Anita Bryant.
I’m sorry, Mama. Not for what I am, but for how you must feel at this moment. I know what that feeling is, for I felt it for most of my life. Revulsion, shame, disbelief—rejection through fear of something I knew, even as a child, was as basic to my nature as the color of my eyes.
No, Mama, I wasn’t “recruited.” No seasoned homosexual ever served as my mentor. But you know what? I wish someone had. I wish someone older than me and wiser than the people in Orlando had taken me aside and said, “You’re all right, kid. You can grow up to be a doctor or a teacher just like anyone else. You’re not crazy or sick or evil. You can succeed and be happy and find peace with friends—all kinds of friends—who don’t give a damn who you go to bed with. Most of all, though, you can love and be loved without hating yourself for it.”
But no one ever said that to me, Mama. I had to find it out on my own, with the help of the city that has become my home. I know this may be hard for you to believe, but San Francisco is full of men and women, both straight and gay, who don’t consider sexuality in measuring the worth of another human being.
These aren’t radicals or weirdos, Mama. They are shopclerks and bankers and little old ladies and people who nod and smile to you when you meet them on the bus. Their attitude is neither patronizing nor pitying. And their message is so simple: Yes, you are a person. Yes, I like you. Yes, it’s all right for you to like me, too.
I know what you must be thinking now. You’re asking yourself: What did we do wrong? How did we let this happen? Which one of us made him that way?
I can’t answer that, Mama. In the long run, I guess I really don’t care. All I know is this: If you and Papa are responsible for the way I am, then I thank you with all my heart, for it’s the light and the joy of my life.
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.
Being gay has taught me tolerance, compassion, and humility. It has shown me the limitless possibilities of living. It has given me people whose passion and kindness and sensitivity have provided a constant source of strength.
It has brought me into the family of man, Mama, and I like it here. I like it.
There’s not much else I can say, except that I’m the same Michael you’ve always known. You just know me better now. I have never consciously done anything to hurt you. I never will.
Please don’t feel you have to answer this right away. It’s enough for me to know that I no longer have to lie to the people who taught me to value the truth.
Mary Ann sends her love.
Everything is fine at 28 Barbary Lane.
Your loving son,
Michael
AC
KNOWLEDGMENTS
In the making of this book I am deeply grateful to the following people:
My longtime literary agent, Binky Urban, for telling me that she knew the perfect editor for a memoirist.
Jennifer Barth, for turning out to be exactly that, an editor of great tact and taste who saw what I was trying to do and saw to it that I did it.
Steven Barclay, Sara Bixler, and Emily Hartman of the Barclay Agency, for helping me tell my stories onstage before I pinned them to the page.
Jane Maupin Yates, Louise Vance, Darryl Vance, Kathy Barton, and James Lecesne, for reading early drafts of this text and offering invaluable suggestions and corrections.
Kirk Dalrymple, for holding down the family store and for being Philo’s loving uncle.
Edward Ball, for his enthralling book Peninsula of Lies, which helped me fill in the blanks about Dawn Langley Simmons.
Patrick Gale, my dear old friend, for coaxing some of these memories from me for his 1999 biography, Armistead Maupin.
My husband, Chris, for loving and indulging me through the usual tremors of writing and for insisting that a term I coined a decade ago would be just the right title for this book.
PHOTOGRAPHIC SOURCES
All images courtesy of the author with the exception of the following:
Chapter 10: Photograph by Kim Komenich/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images.
Chapter 11: Courtesy of the Crawford Barton Collection, the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society.
Chapter 18: Courtesy of Don Bachardy.
Acknowledgments: Photograph courtesy of Fred R. McMullen.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ARMISTEAD MAUPIN is the author of the nine-volume Tales of the City series, which includes Tales of the City, More Tales of the City, Further Tales of the City, Babycakes, Significant Others, Sure of You, Michael Tolliver Lives, Mary Ann in Autumn, and The Days of Anna Madrigal. His other novels include Maybe the Moon and The Night Listener. Maupin was the 2012 recipient of the Lambda Literary Foundation’s Pioneer Award. In 2014 he was awarded an honorary doctor of letters degree by the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill. He lives in San Francisco with his husband, the photographer Christopher Turner.
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ALSO BY ARMISTEAD MAUPIN
NOVELS
Tales of the City
More Tales of the City
Further Tales of the City
Babycakes
Significant Others
Sure of You
Maybe the Moon
The Night Listener
Michael Tolliver Lives
Mary Ann in Autumn
The Days of Anna Madrigal
COLLECTIONS
28 Barbary Lane
Back to Barbary Lane
Goodbye Barbary Lane
CREDITS
Cover design by Milan Bozic
COPYRIGHT
LOGICAL FAMILY. Copyright © 2017 by Literary Bent, LLC. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Print ISBN 978-0-06-239122-3
ISBN 978-0-06-282126-3 (B&N Signed Edition)
EPub Edition October 2017 ISBN 978-0-06-239123-0
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