Author of the week: Armistead Maupin

last updated 8 January 2015

Moving to San Francisco changed everything for Armistead Maupin, said Lynn Neary in NPR.org. The Raleigh, N.C., native and U.S. Navy veteran had until age 27 spent his life carefully guarding his sexual identity. “I grew up terrified of what I knew myself to be,” he says. “I felt haunted by it, because it was both a crime and a mental illness when I was a child.” But in 1969, while on his way to deployment in Vietnam, he caught his first glimpse of the Bay Area and its burgeoning gay culture. He moved to San Francisco two years later and came out at age 30, in 1974. “I was part of this wonderful wave of liberation,” he says.

Not everyone was on the same page, said Hermione Hoby in The Observer (U.K.). Maupin’s beloved Tales of the City saga, whose ninth and final book was published last week, began life in 1974 as a newspaper serial that chronicled the heterosexual dating scene before gay characters quietly joined the stage. That development worried Maupin’s editors. “They actually kept a chart in the office that said ‘heterosexual’ and ‘homosexual,’” he says. Their apparent intent? To ensure, Maupin says, that the gay characters didn’t outnumber the hetero ones and “thereby undermine the natural order of civilization.” Today, the 69-year-old author chafes at being pigeonholed as a “gay writer,” but he’s proud of the role he played in combating homophobia. “I realized that part of my function was to be very clear and very public as a gay man,” he says. “I’m prouder of that than anything else.”