It's difficult to separate Armistead Maupin from his characters, thanks to his lifestyle, right-wing roots and charm, writes Donald Clarke
Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City won the author a lot of friends in the 1970s and 1980s. The books, which began life as a series of columns in the San Francisco Chronicle, helped to heave certain aspects of gay culture into the mainstream. Focusing on the diverse collection of eccentrics - mostly, though not all, homosexual - that hovered round one sylvan house in the city by the Bay, the stories, published between 1974 and 1989, smuggled arguments for tolerance and acceptance into an agreeably soapy superstructure. It was, however, the sheer warmth of the tales that most endeared them to readers. Even as the narrative dealt with the horrors of the Aids years, Maupin still managed to deliver literary comfort food of the highest order.
It would be a terrible disappointment to discover Maupin throttling puppies or pushing old ladies down escalators. Happily, he seems, on first glance, to be as engaging and convivial as his stories suggest. Not insubstantial in the belly department, a bushy moustache punctuating his round face, he rolls into London's Covent Garden Hotel with the gentle swagger of an off-season Santa Claus.
"I am travelling to eight different European cities," he says, settling behind a pot of tea. "I am always surprised that the fetishisation of San Francisco is even greater here than in America. They seem to see it as a kind of Shangri-La." A glance at Maupin's latest book, which returns to the Tales of the City characters for the first time in 18 years, confirms that the author, now 63, still views San Francisco in a similarly rosy light.
Michael Tolliver Lives follows the title character, one of the most likeable in the original books, as he leaves the city to visit his dying mother in Florida. Contrasting the liberalism of the west with the staid conservatism of the south, Michael Tolliver Lives takes in gay marriage, the right to die, and the travails of Islamic America, as it forms itself into an accidental state-of-the-nation novel.
"I think these sort of malaises crop up when many gay San Franciscans go back to visit their biological family," he says. "Since that was in the novel it became important to me to address the red state/blue state divide. But I am just expressing individual characters' views. Most people I know in San Francisco feel that harsh separation from their families who live in more conservative places."
Michael Tolliver, diagnosed as HIV-positive some years back, has just come to accept that new treatments may save him from dying of Aids when the awareness of everyday mortality strikes him. Happily, he has just begun a relationship with a younger man and, thus bolstered, appears willing to face middle-age with some optimism.
"I never quite know what I'm going to write next," Maupin muses. "I am not HIV-positive myself, but I am facing up to aging. I was thinking about writing about a gay man who has survived Aids and is now facing up to ordinary mortality, and then realised I had a character ready. I knew Michael would have a particular resonance. I had also happened to fall in love with a younger man myself and I thought it would be good to share that love with a character who had a rough ride over the years."
Comparisons between Michael Tolliver and Armistead Maupin are unavoidable. Both are from the south. Both have younger lovers. Both were raised by staunchly conservative parents. Indeed, Maupin used Tolliver as an agent to reveal his own homosexuality to his family.
In Tales of the City, Michael writes a letter to his folks complaining about a particular anti-gay campaign then underway in Florida. Mr and Mrs Maupin, subscribers to the San Francisco Chronicle, read Tolliver's letter and made the obvious deduction.
"I'm afraid I was always a bit of a pussy about confrontation," he admits. "My writing served me quite well there and elsewhere. Fame happened concurrent with my coming out. So when they picked up Newsweek magazine, and there I was described as 'America's gay writer, Armistead Maupin', nothing else needed to be said. I confess it. I am a coward."
MAUPIN GREW UP IN Raleigh, North Carolina. As a child, he failed dismally at sports, but excelled at storytelling. His dad expected him to become an attorney and Maupin duly enrolled at law school where, hard though it may be to believe, he adopted the pose of an angry young conservative. His dad must have been furious when he finally flunked out.
"Yes. But I made up for that by volunteering for Vietnam," he laughs. "My father's dream of my being a lawyer was deferred and I was able to relive his life in the navy. It wasn't bad. I was attached to an Admiral's staff at first, then relocated to a communication bunker in the field. We were shot at occasionally."
So what's all this about him being a young Republican? At one stage, he even worked for the notoriously right-wing Senator Jesse Helms."That's the one thing I have to keep coming out about," he says. "Look, I was surrounded by ordinary conservatives in North Carolina. I was addressing these things as political issues. William F Buckley was my role model. I look back and realise the main reason was to keep my father happy, because there was something about me he wasn't going to like at all - my homosexuality."
At any rate, his conservatism did not survive relocation to San Francisco. Maupin still comes over all mushy when the city is mentioned.
Shuffling excitedly in his seat, he eulogises the weather and the way exposure to so many varieties of sexuality challenged his own remaining prejudices. "Heterosexuals in San Francisco were more comfortable with my gayness than I was myself," he laughs.
Maupin eventually quit his job as a stringer for Associated Press and began scribbling a series of fictions about the adventures of an odd woman who meets even odder people when she moves to San Francisco.
Originally published in the Pacific Sun, a local paper, the stories were snapped up by the Chronicle in 1976 and slowly began gathering a cult following.
Tales of the City brought a lightness to gay fiction that had, to this point, been somewhat absent. His growing mainstream popularity did, however, encourage some grumbling among more pointy-headed critics.
"It's hard to talk about any of this without tooting one's own trumpet," he says. "The success I've had is difficult for a lot of less-successful gay writers to handle. They assume I must have sold out to achieve such popularity. I must be less than an artist. But I have not sold out. I have stood by my guns in arguing for the visibility of gay people and I strive for art."
He goes on to detail the outrage that greeted his decision to maintain a largely light-hearted tone when writing about the Aids years. Edmund White, the waspish gay critic and novelist, stated firmly that humour was not an acceptable response to such a tragedy.
Then there were those who felt that the epidemic should be ignored altogether. "When I killed off a character in 1983, he was just about the first gay character to die of Aids in fiction," he remembers. "I got these letters from gay people saying I was ruining their breakfast entertainment with my political agenda. They did not want to be reminded of the truth." There have already been some rumblings about the sunny tone that - notwithstanding the detailing of at least two deaths - hangs about Michael Tolliver Lives. The lead character seems to have put the plague years behind him and appears happy to settle down in bliss with his young partner. "Oh yes. Some critics say: 'This guy has this impossibly wonderful lover.' Well, I do have an impossibly wonderful lover myself and, as I say, I rather wanted to share that with Michael. It was nice to reflect on the way your life can change for the better if you just keep your heart open."
EARLIER THIS YEAR, Maupin and his partner, Christopher Turner, a website producer and photographer, were married in Vancouver. If we are to take the experience of Michael Tolliver as any guide - the character, like the author, first made contact with his husband on an internet dating site - then the couple seem to spend much of their time in settled domestic harmony. There are occasional sexual safaris in the book, but Tolliver and his partner appear to have willingly joined a faintly complacent gay establishment. The contrast with the bohemian hedonism of the previous six volumes is marked.
"I do have a very strong domestic streak," he says. "It is coupled with the old randiness, but domesticity tends to win out most of the time. Things are maybe less exciting, it's safe to say. I have been to one too many gay black-tie dinners recently. But there is always somebody trying to break through that bourgeois world."
On that issue, one can fully understand the symbolic importance of securing the right to go through same-sex marriage ceremonies. But actually tying the knot is terribly bourgeois. Is it not? "I am secure in my leftiness," he laughs. "If we were not automatically granted the right then we might not be rushing out to do it. That's true. But when it came round to putting the rings on fingers in that little B and B in Vancouver, I was surprised by how moved I was. We were profoundly touched by what was going on."
Pointing out that Michael Tolliver Lives is, unlike earlier Tales of the City collections, written in the first person, Maupin denies that it can properly be considered the seventh book in the series. He is wasting his breath. Fans of the Tales are already asking if Maupin is considering an eighth volume.
"There may be one," he says. "If so, it won't be like Star Trek: The Next Generation. It will be more of the same generation. Somebody once asked me if there would be a geriatric Michael Tolliver. I replied: 'I sincerely hope there will be a geriatric Armistead Maupin and, if so, there will be a geriatric Michael.'"
Michael Tolliver Lives is published by Doubleday, £17.99
