Armistead Maupin

Presenter0:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in two thousand seven.

Presenter0:28

My castaway this week is the writer Armistead Maupin. Regarded as one of the great social satirists of his era, he made his name with his Tales of the City novels, chronicling the shifting cultural landscape of San Francisco throughout the seventies and eighties. He's achieved widespread acclaim for placing gay characters within a large cross-section of humanity, bound together by the universal search for love and acceptance. He was also one of the first novelists to portray the devastating impact of the newly emerging threat of HIV AIDS. His status as one of America's best-known gay writers and political activists couldn't be further from his background. Brought up in the genteel American South, he describes his father as the most hide-bound, arch-conservative, neo-fascist Southern gentleman you could imagine. But he credits that same family background with giving him the perfect tools to be a great storyteller. The legacy, then, of your Southern roots, what was it about that that has turned you into this wonderful storyteller?

Armistead Maupin1:24

Well, all of my family members were storytellers. My father remained to his death a couple of years ago, a terrific storyteller. I realized it was just in our blood.

Armistead Maupin1:34

We would take bits of our history and

Armistead Maupin1:37

spin it and maybe make it a little more colorful than it actually was in real life, but it was part of our our instinct.

Presenter1:45

You've said in the past that life is inseparable from work for you. Can you expand a bit on that?

Armistead Maupin1:50

Well, I I um I'm always gathering. In my last novel I let the character say I'm rather like a magpie. I save the shiny bits and discard the rest. And I've done that my whole life, in terms of just gathering the bits of my life and saving them and using them in my fiction.

Presenter2:07

Did that mean then that you didn't start to properly live, if you like, until you properly started to write?

Armistead Maupin2:13

Yes, it did, really. I tried journalism in the beginning, but uh it was always never quite right for me. When I would do a story I'd think, Well, this would be much better if such and such had happened. But it hadn't, I realized, and and what I was finding there in myself was my story telling instincts taking over. So

Armistead Maupin2:30

Once I got to San Francisco and came out of the closet, basically I think that was really the fundamental change. Once I opened my heart and let people know who I was

Armistead Maupin2:40

Then I became a story teller.

Presenter2:42

Tell me about your first choice this morning, your first disc.

Armistead Maupin2:45

Uh this is Mockingbird Hill by Patty Page, which really just represents for me my sort of household memories of childhood in North Carolina. We lived in a neighborhood with azaleas growing on the banks around the house and a little stream flowing down the hill, and because we were the Maupin family, uh there was a joke that we were Moppinbird Hill, so that this song we thought was about us.

Speaker 43:10

Tra la, twiddly deedy, it gives me a frill To wake up in the morning to the mockinbird's trill. Tra la, twiddly deedy, there's peace and goodwill. You're welcome as the flowers, O Mockinbird, here.

Presenter3:39

Patty Page and Mockingbird Hill. You grew up then in in North Carolina, Armistead Mopen. Can you tell me uh a little more about it?

Armistead Maupin3:47

It was quite conservative place. You know, my sister was expected to make her debut. We were well off, I would say, but mostly we were told by our parents that we were aristocracy, that we were descended from various Confederate generals, and we were very aware of our place in the world, even though we lived in basically a ranch house in a suburban neighborhood.

Presenter4:09

And what did your father do?

Armistead Maupin4:11

He was a lawyer.

Armistead Maupin4:12

My father had a great sense of humour I valued that.

Armistead Maupin4:15

a lot, and he had a certain amount of charm. He could say terrible things about people behind their backs based on their race or their color or something, but be utterly charming to their faces, and would not think of being unkind to someone.

Presenter4:29

What age did you know that you weren't particularly interested in chasing the girls?

Armistead Maupin4:34

Oh, very early on. I think it was presexual for me. It i uh most gay people I know, um they know they're gay before they feel sexual attraction to anyone. They know something's different.

Armistead Maupin4:46

With me it was I you know, I didn't want to play the war games. I remember at summer camp they'd have war movies at night in the in the dining hall and I'd go to them because they were movies and that was my escape from the world, but I didn't much care for the war. I would always wait for the moment when when the lady came on. That would be the soft music and the soft words and, you know, a quiet, gentle moment.

Presenter5:08

The fifties and the sixties, of course, in the Southern States of America is when the civil rights movement was beginning to emerge. Do you have any memories at all of of that time and of watching society beginning to shift?

Armistead Maupin5:20

I remember that there was a water fountain in front of the court house in downtown Raleigh that they were very proud of because it offered separate but equal facilities to black folks and white folks. It had a statue in the middle, and it had a water fountain on the right hand side that said

Armistead Maupin5:34

White people carved in the stone, and one on the left-hand side that said colored people carved in the stone. And they honestly thought that that was.

Armistead Maupin5:43

A generous thing to do.

Presenter5:45

Did you have a personal view on that as a teenager? Did you just take it as a given and that's the way it is?

Armistead Maupin5:50

I took it as a gift and my family actively taught the value of segregation to me and I believed that for the longest time.

Presenter5:57

What about when you went to university? Because you were at university in the early 60s then. Did did you begin to to question those values or did you just accept that? I started a little bit of a

Armistead Maupin6:04

I started a little bit, but I'd also carved out a name for myself as the campus conservative.

Armistead Maupin6:09

And was actually getting weekly editorials from a man named Jesse Helms, who went on to become the most homophobic senator in the U.S. Congress.

Armistead Maupin6:18

who sort of considered me to be his golden boy he thought I would be following in his footsteps.

Presenter6:23

At this very right wing stance then, do you think you were taking some sort of refuge, some sort of comfort in not having to acknowledge whatever was going on deeply?

Armistead Maupin6:29

Absolutely. That's very astute. Yeah. I think if you if you scratch a Tory, you often find a queer right underneath because it's what you do when you're trying to hold the lid on. You need a rigid system.

Armistead Maupin6:43

in order to keep the closet door closed.

Presenter6:46

Tell me about your second record.

Armistead Maupin6:48

I picked uh Moon River, the Audrey Hepburn version that she sings in the film of Breakfast at Tiffany's.

Armistead Maupin6:54

Partially because of the way I felt at the time that the movie came out. I was seventeen years old. I was really drawn to Audrey Hepburn, but even more to George

Armistead Maupin7:04

Moon River is just a sort of soundtrack for my adolescence. I really connected with it.

Speaker 17:14

Wider than a mile.

Speaker 17:18

I'm

Speaker 17:20

Then you win style someday

Speaker 17:28

Yeah.

Speaker 47:28

River.

Speaker 47:32

And me

Presenter7:38

Moon River, sung by Audrey Hepburn. So, Armistead Morpyn, by around about the nineteen seventies then, you were essentially living the life of a fully fledged uh Republican patriot. You'd served in Vietnam, indeed, you'd been honoured by Richard Nixon. How much of this was disguise, and how much of it was genuine? Did did you feel a passion for being American?

Armistead Maupin7:57

I think I was really trying to please my father, to be perfectly honest with you. I think I was trying to be the one thing I knew I could be because I was about to break the news to him that

Armistead Maupin8:07

I was gay. I knew I was headed there.

Presenter8:10

Yeah.

Armistead Maupin8:11

With man and earth. Yeah, I was I you know, that there was that the crossover period was really rather funny because on my way out to San Francisco, Nixon brought me back to the White House and I was photographed shaking hands with him in the Oval Office because of this sort of propaganda program I'd helped him with.

Armistead Maupin8:27

And I had that photograph hanging on the wall of my little apartment in San Francisco, and I would bring guys home at night and all the blood would drain out of their face when they saw the photograph. You know, they it was as if they'd gone home with Jeffrey Dahmer. And I began to realize that the standards that I'd held back on the East Coast just weren't gonna cut it in San Francisco.

Presenter8:47

And what was the reaction of the rest of America at this time to San Francisco? W was it just, you know, the place where all the hippies went, or did people think actually this is the beginning of a significant change?

Armistead Maupin8:52

Oh the hit

Armistead Maupin8:54

You know, I mean, San Francisco from the very beginning has had this reputation. There's a quote from the New York Post in eighteen forty eight when the gold rush began saying the people of San Francisco are mad, stark mad.

Armistead Maupin9:09

And I think we've had that reputation ever since. In fact, now we kind of cultivate it. We like it when people say that about us.

Armistead Maupin9:16

We're proud of the fact that we're able to experiment in all sorts of different ways. And as a consequence, amazing things have happened there. Television was invented in San Francisco by a Mormon kid working in a lab down at the foot of Russian Hill.

Armistead Maupin9:31

Um the first movie images were actually shown there.

Armistead Maupin9:35

Not to mention the whole cyber revolution that grew up just south of there.

Armistead Maupin9:39

We've always been free to make fools of ourselves, and in doing so some good things have come out of that.

Presenter9:44

So Tales of the City then. It started out as this daily column. Was it a conscious decision by you to mark a kind of revival of those great nineteenth century chroniclers like Dickens? Did you think this is in a proud tradition?

Armistead Maupin9:55

Yeah, but

Armistead Maupin9:57

Yes, I c I you know, at the time they were comparing it to television soap operas and I was saying, wait a minute, this goes way back before that and this is written, this is serialized in a newspaper.

Armistead Maupin10:07

You know, I told him the story about people running down to the docks to

Armistead Maupin10:10

Wait for the ship to come in that would have Dickens's latest installment. I I knew it had power.

Armistead Maupin10:16

I was in love with the Wilkie Collins adage at the time Make em cry, make em laugh, and make em wait.

Presenter10:22

This was entirely uh foreign to most readers of American newspapers.

Armistead Maupin10:26

Oh, it hadn't been done for forty or fifty years and back then it was Western stories or romances or something. And it certainly hadn't been done in the context of a

Armistead Maupin10:36

satirical social commentary that uh

Armistead Maupin10:40

Covered such new material.

Presenter10:42

Much more to talk about there in a moment, but let's take a break for some music.

Armistead Maupin10:45

Uh this is the Eagles, a song called Desperado that was

Armistead Maupin10:49

Seemed to speak to me really loudly in the mid seventies. I was pretty much settled in at this point, living in San Francisco, and my heart was being broken about every ten minutes because I really didn't know yet how to fall in love and how not to fall in love. And I felt that it was talking to me. You know, you've been out mending fences for too long, you know, let somebody love you before it's too late.

Armistead Maupin11:10

And the Eagles in general were just the sound of the seventies in California to me.

Speaker 411:15

Desperado

Speaker 411:19

Why don't you come to your senses?

Speaker 411:24

You been out riding fences?

Speaker 411:28

We're so long now.

Speaker 411:32

Oh, you're a hard one?

Speaker 411:35

I know that you got your reasons.

Speaker 411:40

These things that are pleasing you

Presenter11:44

The Eagles and Desperado. One of the great skills in your books is that the gay characters are no big deal. That actually they're the same and equal to every other character. There's no sense in which you're brand standing their position.

Speaker 411:45

The E

Presenter11:58

Was that a plan from the beginning, that you would simply interweave their lives pretty much like everybody else's lives?

Armistead Maupin12:03

Yeah, and I wanted to pay equal attention to the straight folks as well. What I realized when I first started writing it was that

Armistead Maupin12:09

When I would write episodes about Michael say the gay character that a lot of gay people were only reading the episodes that were about Michael.

Armistead Maupin12:17

And the straight girls were only reading the Mary Ann Singleton columns, and what I realized I had to do was to intertwine their lives to such a degree that in order to figure out what the story was, you'd have to read about everyone.

Armistead Maupin12:30

which is, of course, the nature of life itself, you know.

Presenter12:33

And the device that you used was this boarding house on twenty eight Barbary Lane, run by Mrs Madrigal, who had what you called this this very clever and intriguing little phrase, a logical family rather than a biological family. She gathered around her people that she was interested in, that she felt a certain curiosity and motherly warmth towards.

Armistead Maupin12:52

Right. She recognized that there are two kinds of families, one that you choose and one that you're pretty much stuck with.

Armistead Maupin13:00

I decided to make her a transsexual because that made the most sense to me. She'd been on both sides of the fence, as it were.

Armistead Maupin13:07

One of the characters says at one point, A nice old lady who used to be a man could very well know what's on everybody's mind.

Presenter13:15

When did people start to talk to you? When did you know you had something of a hit, a local hit, on your hands?

Armistead Maupin13:22

Oh, when somebody called me up and told me that they were doing a Tales of the City scavenger hunt and that I was on it.

Armistead Maupin13:29

You know, whenever I went out at night and people b basically auditioned for the story in the hope that somehow they would get woven into it.

Presenter13:37

Did you enjoy that notoriety? Because lots of writers, of course, love the anonymity of what they do. They don't particularly want themselves as individuals drawn attention to.

Armistead Maupin13:44

I loved it. I really loved it.

Armistead Maupin13:47

There's a scene in More Tales of the City where Brian, the sort of lost straight guy, is basically having a romance through a window with a woman across the way. And at one point, he holds up a piece of paper with his phone number on it. Well, when I wrote about that in the column, I put my own phone number on the piece of paper. And so five o'clock the next morning, people called. And the young man I was with at the time was answering the phone and saying, Oh, hang on, Brian's just down the hall. He was totally playing along with the game, you know. And it was fun. It was just messing with people's minds in that way. Tell me about your.

Presenter14:19

Her fourth record.

Armistead Maupin14:21

Well, I hate to be such a gay cliche, but this is Liza Manelli singing Maybe This Time, which really was kind of a gay anthem in the in the seventies. Every gay man I knew was singing this song and thinking, I'm going to find him, you know. It works equally well for men and women, of course.

Speaker 414:39

Maybe this time.

Speaker 414:42

I'll be lucky.

Speaker 414:45

Maybe this time he'll stay

Speaker 414:51

Something's bound to begin

Speaker 414:56

It's gotta happen. Happen sometime. Maybe this time I'll win.

Presenter15:07

Liza Minelli and maybe this time. So, Armacide Montpin, you um were on the cusp of the eighties when things were really cooking for you. I mean, all of your writings were selling like hot cakes, and and this was the time in America it's been described as the Priyes pinnacle of optimism and contentment. There was a sense in which it maybe wasn't a war that was being won, but a sense in which there was an acceptance that there were all sorts of ways of living your life, and they were pretty much all valid.

Armistead Maupin15:32

Yeah, it it was an opening up. It was very exciting. We were watching uh a culture blossom that had grown out of our insistence that we simply be ourselves. I remember feeling that I was very much part of a revolution. I still feel that today, of course, but I remember that this was the most exhilarating period because we were just

Armistead Maupin15:52

Coming out of the darkness, you know.

Presenter15:54

Tell me about when you were first aware that something socially was awry, that people were starting to become unwell.

Armistead Maupin16:02

For me the big uh slap in the face came when my friend Daniel Katz, uh the one who was actually uh the one who actually answered the phone that morning when people started calling the house

Armistead Maupin16:12

Um, a mutual friend came back to the house where I was living at the time, a place we called the Duck House.

Armistead Maupin16:19

He was sobbing. He said, Daniel's really sick and this is what he's got and he flopped down a copy of New York magazine that had a headline that said The Gay Plague.

Armistead Maupin16:29

It's the first we'd heard of it. And uh Daniel was dead within the year of pneumocystis pneumonia. And I realized that I, you know, the world had changed. And I knew that I was going to have to write about it in Tales of the City. That if I was going to continue to reflect the way that life was, that I was going to have to

Armistead Maupin16:46

Accommodate this new horror.

Presenter16:47

The headline that you just quoted, the gay plague, was of course very much uh the attitude of, if you like, people on the outside, of the mainstream media, of mainstream politicians. Was there panic within side the gay community? And was there a sense in which you felt that you were knocking on the window to the world outside, but nobody wanted to listen?

Armistead Maupin17:06

Absolutely. I mean, our friends were dying.

Presenter17:08

Yeah.

Armistead Maupin17:08

Yeah.

Armistead Maupin17:10

And they were being blamed for something that they didn't even know how they got it. It was not as if they were aware that this thing was out there.

Armistead Maupin17:17

So it was especially brutal.

Presenter17:19

You said that you wrote about it in your columns, of course, and one of the people you wrote about was Rock Hudson. I mean, this extraordinary male heterosexual icon of the fifties, who all women lusted after, and who couldn't really have been more of an emblem of all that was good and true in the American male. And he himself did not come out until the final weeks of his life when he was dying from the men.

Speaker 117:29

Yeah.

Armistead Maupin17:41

No, and I actually wrote about him well before his diagnosis because he had come into my life. It's a good example of how.

Armistead Maupin17:49

My life was working at that point. My material was coming to me, and I'm actually became part of his little circle and was fascinated by the notion of this man who had to live this.

Presenter18:01

You mean do you rule to mm in the guise of somebody else?

Armistead Maupin18:03

I wrote about him I put blanks where his name would be, to use the old Victorian tradition.

Presenter18:03

By r

Armistead Maupin18:09

He had a a deep groove in one of his nails, and I asked him one day about what it was, and he said it was a war wound, and I kind of accepted that at face value until

Armistead Maupin18:19

Later on his secretary turned to me and said, It's not a war wound. Look at what he does. And he would constantly worry that thumb nail with his forefinger, and had deformed it because of this

Armistead Maupin18:33

thing that was you know getting at him that he couldn't really deal with.

Presenter18:37

Tell me about your next record.

Armistead Maupin18:39

And this is a song about friendship between two gay men.

Armistead Maupin18:42

And there's a line in it that was especially moving because of AIDS, where it says We don't care that to morrow comes with no guarantees we've each other for company. And that was the story of so many gay men at the time.

Armistead Maupin18:55

You know, might not be a lover there, but there was some dear friend that was gonna see you through this if it struck you.

Speaker 419:01

You, you, and me, and me.

Speaker 419:06

We're the kind of people, are there people?

Armistead Maupin19:08

Uh

Speaker 119:08

Farmer, people.

Speaker 119:11

One who I

Speaker 419:13

To be

Speaker 419:15

A little strolling? Why not? Wandering free.

Speaker 419:21

We present the kind of picture people.

Armistead Maupin19:24

Joe

Speaker 419:26

Ah, glad.

Speaker 419:28

Juicy

Presenter19:31

You and me from the musical Victor Victoria, sung by Julie Andrews and Tony Roberts. And I want to talk about the political situation that HIV and AIDS foisted upon the gay community. In a sense, it forced mainstream society-I can't really think of a better phrase than that to describe it, so that's what I'll use-to acknowledge in all sorts of very normal pedestrian areas like health care and voting and pensions, to actually speak to these people. Do you think that AIDS did that in a sense? It brought the gay.

Armistead Maupin20:00

Oh, absolutely. It opened up the discussion of homosexuality in general in a way that nothing else would have.

Armistead Maupin20:07

And as cruel as it was the way in which the disease forced people out of the closet.

Armistead Maupin20:12

You know, widened the knowledge of what it was to be gay. I led the fight at the San Francisco Examiner back in the late 80s to allow partners to be listed in obituaries. And I think it was easy to sell it at that point because the so-called, you know, mainstream straight folks had already seen loving partners in situations of great trauma and bravery and.

Armistead Maupin20:36

The love was evident in the act of these men dying and the people who were caring for them. It was there, and people realized for the first time that there were marriages out there that already existed.

Presenter20:47

It was in this atmosphere of uncertainty and trauma and bereavement that you yourself began your first long term relationship with Terry Anderson. How did that begin, and and did it give you hope that actually maybe this time there was something of of permanence?

Armistead Maupin21:02

Well, Terry told me, um

Armistead Maupin21:05

He went off to get a HIV test because I was negative and he wanted to assure me that he was too, but it came back positive, and he said, Now's your chance to get out of it. And I said,

Armistead Maupin21:15

I don't want to get out of it. I'm in love with you and I I want to be with you.

Armistead Maupin21:19

Um

Presenter21:19

And this was at a time when being positive was as good as a death sentence.

Armistead Maupin21:22

Absolutely. So I was basically just wondering when it's going to be. Is it next year?

Armistead Maupin21:28

the year after, what do we do? How do we spend the time? We ended up buying a farmhouse in New Zealand, I think, just for that reason, because we felt that was something that neither one of us had done and we'd like to do.

Armistead Maupin21:40

So living with that was was very, very hard.

Armistead Maupin21:44

And then, of course, time wore on and Terry did not die.

Armistead Maupin21:48

And uh at one point when protease inhibitors came along,

Armistead Maupin21:53

and Terry realized that he had a chance to live

Armistead Maupin21:56

He basically started examining his own life and realized that he didn't want to live with me.

Armistead Maupin22:02

I use the term cocktail divorce in the night listener, and there are lots of'em.

Armistead Maupin22:06

Couples who were together because one or the other was facing certain death, and when certain death went away.

Armistead Maupin22:13

They broke up.

Presenter22:14

That's a hugely complex set of emotions, isn't it, in the mixture of a relationship. If if at one time you're feeling that somebody is depending on you for what may be the final months or years of their life and then it turns out not to be the case, do you think it's almost almost impossible for a relationship to survive healthily i in that atmosphere?

Armistead Maupin22:17

Absolutely.

Armistead Maupin22:32

I think it'd be pretty tough. Um, I really do think it would be pretty tough.

Presenter22:38

Tell me about your sixth piece of music.

Armistead Maupin22:40

Well, this is just a song I like, really. Um Katie Lang singing Hallelujah.

Armistead Maupin22:46

I'm not even sure what it means exactly, but there's something anthemic about it that uh appeals to me tremendously.

Speaker 422:52

Heard there was a secret chord that David played and it pleased the Lord

Speaker 423:01

You don't really care for music, do ya?

Speaker 423:07

Well it goes like this, the fourth, the fifth, a minor fall, a major lift, and baffled king composing hallelujah.

Presenter23:21

Katie Lang and Hallelujah. Let's talk for a moment, if you will, about The Night Listener. Th this is the book that's been turned into a movie starring Robin Williams. How how did the book come about? There's a particularly nasty hoax at the the root of the story. Can you explain that briefly to us?

Armistead Maupin23:36

Um the b the brief version is that uh I was sent the galley of a book written by a fourteen year old boy who had supposedly been subjected to terrible abuse by his parents and who now was dying of AIDS.

Armistead Maupin23:49

So I struck up a conversation on the phone with this boy after I gave the publishers the blurb they asked for.

Armistead Maupin23:55

I had no reason to believe that this kid did not exist.

Armistead Maupin23:58

But it was Terry Anderson who

Armistead Maupin24:00

one day picked up the phone and talked to the adoptive mother of this child.

Armistead Maupin24:06

And Terry noticed there was a similarity in the two voices.

Armistead Maupin24:10

And that set me off into a sort of tail spin for a number of years, trying to figure out whether or not I was actually talking to a dying fourteen year old boy or a forty year old woman pulling off a hoax. And I was never certain, even as I sat down to write the novel,

Armistead Maupin24:28

What the truth was.

Armistead Maupin24:30

She was very clever at manipulating in that way, and you'd be given some new piece of information that would make you feel that yes, this is ridiculous of me to assume that this isn't true.

Armistead Maupin24:40

The whole thing was put to bed by the program 2020 last year when they.

Armistead Maupin24:46

Initially got voice prints of both the mother and the boy.

Armistead Maupin24:50

and then ran the picture that was sent to me that was supposedly of the little boy and found that the boy is still around. He's twenty seven years old and

Armistead Maupin24:59

That that photo had been taken in his kindergarten by his kindergarten teacher, the woman who had promulgated the hoax.

Presenter25:06

It is the most extraordinary story, and if I didn't know it was true I wouldn't quite be able to believe it. I wonder why your way of addressing it was to address it in a novel, to address it in fiction, not to confront the woman.

Armistead Maupin25:19

I have always confronted people through my writing, and very seldom in real life. It's always been hard for me. I had built such a connection with the so called child, you know, and he was a very brave, funny, scrappy kid.

Armistead Maupin25:33

On several occasions, I was told that he was not going to make it through the night, and it was my job to.

Armistead Maupin25:39

give him his last, you know, words of encouragement.

Armistead Maupin25:42

And I knew that I could get to the truth by writing this fictitious story. I knew that I could use it first of all to tell her.

Armistead Maupin25:51

What I suspected.

Presenter25:52

Has the woman herself admitted the hope?

Armistead Maupin25:54

Never. Nope.

Armistead Maupin25:56

She's never acknowledged it. She's never even been interviewed. She lives in a gated community outside of Chicago, a place called Lake Bluff, Illinois, ironically enough. But the story's been pretty much put to bed. It's been proven that she was the person who pulled it off.

Presenter26:14

You are happily married now to a man called Chris, but Chris is a is a good deal younger than you.

Armistead Maupin26:19

Oh, absolutely. He's thirty five and I'm sixty three.

Presenter26:22

Are you fine with that?

Armistead Maupin26:23

Totally. Because I'm fine with him. I mean, it's our souls that linked up. It was really quite evident.

Armistead Maupin26:29

From almost the moment we met,

Presenter26:31

I said there that you were married. Of course, as you will know, there are many people who flinch at that very phrase in connection with a gay couple. They think well, you can't r what are you talking about, married? I mean, we we have now in Britain civil partnerships, but in America there is still significant opposition to the idea of gay marriage.

Armistead Maupin26:38

Yeah.

Armistead Maupin26:40

Ma

Armistead Maupin26:46

No shit. Well, we had to go to Canada to do it. We were married in British Columbia, in Vancouver.

Armistead Maupin26:52

I'll tell you, it was funny. I had so intellectualized the thing because it was just like we're just going to get married so we can say that we're married. But when the moment came.

Armistead Maupin27:02

And we were actually standing there looking into each other's eyes, putting the ring on each other's fingers. It was just so unexpectedly, profoundly moving.

Armistead Maupin27:11

Just the gesture, just the ritual, really got to us both.

Presenter27:15

Tell me about your seventh piece of music.

Armistead Maupin27:18

This is The Heart of Life by John Mayer. Chris and I heard this when we were driving around just listening to the radio.

Armistead Maupin27:25

I hadn't heard the song before, and we were really struck by the lyrics, because both of us had felt sort of kicked around by our past relationships, and yet both of us felt we'd been saved by love again.

Armistead Maupin27:38

And uh both of us, I think, feel that the line at the end of this is true, the heart of life is good. I believe that. It colours my work, it colors my life.

Armistead Maupin27:48

And it certainly colours my relationship with Chris.

Speaker 427:51

Pain throws your heart to the ground

Speaker 427:56

Life ties the whole thing around.

Speaker 428:02

No it won't all come the way it should But I know the heart of life is good

Presenter28:13

The Heart of Life by John Mayer. You've talked Armisted Moppin about your work as a writer being, if you like, removing the disguises and that how so often through your work you can confront things and acknowledge things that might be more difficult for you in your own life. You seem a very straightforward person. It it seems surprising that often it takes the writing for you to be as honest as you want to be. How would you explain that?

Armistead Maupin28:39

I'm not sure exactly. Maybe because as a Southerner I was always taught to be polite and to say what people want to hear and to not, you know, ruffle the water.

Presenter28:48

You have said that being gay you learned at a very early age to wear disguises. Are all your disguises gone now? Are you living a a life that is straightforwardly you?

Armistead Maupin28:57

Yes, I am. They're pretty much all gone.

Armistead Maupin29:00

You know, that has something to do with age, too. Both my parents are dead now, so

Armistead Maupin29:05

You sit around thinking, who am I worried about finding out about me now? Who do I think I'm going to shock?

Presenter29:13

Your father died back in two thousand and five. You took Chris along to meet him in his dying days, I understand.

Armistead Maupin29:17

Yeah.

Armistead Maupin29:18

Yeah, it was such a lovely time.

Presenter29:20

What happened?

Armistead Maupin29:21

My sister called and said, You know, it looks like he's pretty close to dying and you should come home. And so we went back and uh

Armistead Maupin29:28

My father met Chris for the first time, and was completely charmed by him.

Armistead Maupin29:32

And Chris offered to drive us around town at my father's direction, so he would.

Armistead Maupin29:38

Take a left here, go right here, and we we went and looked at the old cemetery, which is something we always did when I was a kid.

Armistead Maupin29:44

And at the end of that visit my father pulled Christopher aside and said

Armistead Maupin29:50

You take care of that boy, you hear?

Armistead Maupin29:53

Now that's a ninety year old man telling a thirty year old man to take care of a sixty year old man.

Armistead Maupin30:00

And it meant everything in the world to me.

Presenter30:02

That's an extraordinary moment. There's there's so much in that, isn't there? Because there's a sense in which your father has moved on from that very neo-conservative, right-wing, unaccepting set of values that he passed on to you, and also accepting that to publicly acknowledge where his son is now and that it makes him happy is something that he's comfortable with.

Armistead Maupin30:20

It's something that he's capable of. Yes, and that he knows what love and support is. He had another form of it in my mother.

Armistead Maupin30:27

And he knows that's what I need.

Presenter30:30

Tell me about your final piece of music.

Armistead Maupin30:33

Well, this wicked little town. I've often called this song my funeral song. I don't know why exactly, but it just really gets into my soul. It's from.

Armistead Maupin30:41

Hedvig and the Angry Inch, and there is a lyric in here that pretty much speaks to my religion, if I can say that I have one.

Armistead Maupin30:49

in which uh it basically stated that there is no mystical design, no cosmic lover preassigned, there's nothing you can find that cannot be found. It's basically saying you have love and the moment, and uh that's all you need.

Speaker 431:09

Maybe there's nothing up in the sky but air

Speaker 431:18

There's no mystical design No cosmic lover preassigned There's nothing you can find That cannot be found

Presenter31:34

The Reprise of Wicked Little Town from the musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch, sung by John Cameron Mitchell. So we come to the point in the programme, Armisted, where I will give you the Bible and Shakespeare to take on to this imaginary island. You're allowed to choose one other book. What book might it be?

Armistead Maupin31:50

You know, I think it would have to be a song book of some sort. Maybe the Cole Porter song book.

Presenter31:55

That you may have, and a luxury too, to make life on the island that bit more bearable.

Armistead Maupin31:59

I think my vaporizer it takes the essence of cannabis out so that you don't inhale smoke, you're just breathing cannabis-flavored air.

Armistead Maupin32:08

I'd like to have some grass to grow with it. Maybe I'd have to grow it on the island.

Presenter32:11

I was going to say, under the rules of uh the BBC, I'm sure that I can't give you it, but if you want to find some on the island, that's that's all down to you. If the waves were to to rush to the shore and threaten to wash away these discs, which one would you save?

Armistead Maupin32:24

I think wicked little town. There's something so humane and generous and poignant about it.

Presenter32:31

Armisted Moppin, thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

Armistead Maupin32:34

Totally my pleasure.

Presenter32:35

Uh

Presenter32:42

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.