Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A writer and social satirist who made his name with the Tales of the City novels, chronicling San Francisco's cultural shifts and pioneering the portrayal of ga
On the island
Eight records
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.
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 ... Moon River is just a sort of soundtrack for my adolescence. I really connected with it.
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.
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.
And this is a song about friendship between two gay men. 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.
Well, this is just a song I like, really. Um Katie Lang singing Hallelujah. I'm not even sure what it means exactly, but there's something anthemic about it that uh appeals to me tremendously.
Chris and I heard this when we were driving around just listening to the radio. 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.
Wicked Little Town (Reprise)Favourite
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. 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.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:28What was it about your Southern roots that turned you into a storyteller?
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. We would take bits of our history and 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.
Presenter asks
2:07Did that mean then that you didn't start to properly live until you properly started to write?
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 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 Then I became a story teller.
Presenter asks
6:23At 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?
The keepsakes
The book
Cole Porter
You know, I think it would have to be a song book of some sort. Maybe the Cole Porter song book.
The luxury
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. I'd like to have some grass to grow with it.
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. in order to keep the closet door closed.
Presenter asks
7:38How much of [your Republican patriotism] was disguise, and how much of it was genuine?
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 I was gay. I knew I was headed there.
Presenter asks
15:54Tell me about when you were first aware that something socially was awry, that people were starting to become unwell.
For me the big uh slap in the face came when my friend Daniel Katz ... a mutual friend came back to the house where I was living at the time ... 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. 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.
Presenter asks
20:47How did [your relationship with Terry Anderson] begin, and did it give you hope that actually maybe this time there was something of permanence?
Well, Terry told me, um 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, I don't want to get out of it. I'm in love with you and I I want to be with you. ... So living with that was was very, very hard. And then, of course, time wore on and Terry did not die. And uh at one point when protease inhibitors came along, and Terry realized that he had a chance to live He basically started examining his own life and realized that he didn't want to live with me.
“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. in order to keep the closet door closed.”
“She recognized that there are two kinds of families, one that you choose and one that you're pretty much stuck with.”
“I have always confronted people through my writing, and very seldom in real life. It's always been hard for me.”
“And at the end of that visit my father pulled Christopher aside and said You take care of that boy, you hear? Now that's a ninety year old man telling a thirty year old man to take care of a sixty year old man. And it meant everything in the world to me.”