And just like that I rose on gossamer wings into a realm of unimaginable contentment where my heart was open and the stars hung low as fireflies and bare male flesh caressed me like a soft tropical tide. If there had been a baby to have, I would have had it on the spot. It was not like any orgy I have ever known. It was a conversation of spirits, a silent glider flight into the sweet possibility of everything.
I found an old fox fur coat in the bedroom and was inspired to put it on. The satin lining felt smooth and cool against my bare skin. I wandered out into the desert with the coat hanging open, like some tipsy dowager looking for her driver. Florence of Arabia, I remember thinking. Every time I glanced back, the house was smaller, finally reduced to a golden ingot against the black, black mountains.
I stopped and stood perfectly still.
I tried to take in everything, the here-ness and now-ness of it all. I inhaled the spicy desert night and thought of my faraway mother and how she would have disapproved of this coat—my avidly fox-hunting mother who wanted no foxes harmed, ever. I apologized to the creatures on the coat, petting their patchy fur, though they looked like they hadn’t been up and about since the forties. It came to me then, in the clarifying light of a gibbous moon, that my mother, despite her occasional contradictions, should have always been my guide. I had wasted my youth trying to be my father.
I turned my gaze away from the house and the mountains until I was facing a ghostly huddle of Joshua trees and the desert beyond. Somehow I had done this without turning my body at all. My head had apparently rotated 360 degrees, taking in everything along the way. I knew this had to be a hallucination—had to be—so I tried it again, going the other way this time with the same astonishing results.
Remember how to do this, I thought. Now that you know it’s possible.
I found Jack in one of the bedrooms, sprawled across a rumpled comforter. He made room for my head on his chest, where silky brown hair swirled in purposeful patterns, like the lines on a topographical map. His cock, though soft, was a marvel of beauty and girth. I wondered how I could ever have thought of him as less than extraordinary. If I were a movie star I would have wanted him in bed with me, too.
THE HIGH WORE off by morning, but the afterglow lasted for two days. The twelve of us wandered the desert in cars, like apostles in no need of a messiah. When we passed a dilapidated wooden billboard that bore only the words DESERT LIGHTING, I laughed with sheer delight, because, you see, it was no longer about a local lamp store but the very sunset that was gilding the desert and casting mystic blue shadows on the mountains. Later, we stopped at a date shake stand, my first-ever experience of that drink. Its cold, creamy, Mediterranean sweetness struck me as nothing less than an elixir of the gods. After that, just because we could, Jack and I went down on each other in a palm grove behind the date shake stand.
A woman joined us on the second day, a fiftyish socialite in a caftan, who seemed smitten with Jack. Everyone, in fact, seemed smitten with Jack, but I was the one by his side on this nomadic adventure. As proof of the moment he gave me one of his treasures, the corroded iron chassis of a toy car he had found in the desert years before. It was a magical object, rough and sculptural, and I clung to it like a trophy I’d won in a dream that might not be there in the morning. After we’d had sex for the third time, Jack told me about his current lover, a nineteen-year-old towhead on the Berkeley diving team. That could have bothered me just a little, but it didn’t. Jack said I would love him just as much as he did. In fact, he said we would make a perfect triad, so the three of us could meet again in the desert, where he knew of a special secret oasis with a spring. We could cover the sand with Persian rugs and wear loose linen drawstring pants like sultans and make love under the stars.
That sounded perfectly doable to me.
I was a little loony by the time I got back to Little Cat Feet, already pining for the seamless dream I had left behind. I decided to put it all in writing, so I sent a five-page letter to my sister about my desert awakening. I had already told Jane I was gay—she was the first person in the family I had told. We had been close for a long time in the way that a gay boy and his little sister can be in a fiercely patriarchal family. Approaching puberty, Jane was already tall for her age and very pretty, so I made up my mind (with only the tiniest bit of transference) that she would become a world-famous model. I named her Erika Thane (many years before there was a character named Erica Kane on All My Children). I thought that distinctive “k” in her new name would be crucial to her career. I took snaps of her down by the creek, posing her next to a bank of red azaleas. I have no memory whatsoever of approaching a talent agency, but to this day Jane sometimes signs her letters “Erika.”
She had been a lot bolder than I had in claiming young love. As a teenager I was still brewing vegetable dyes in the kitchen and burning incense in my bedroom. Jane, at that age, was creeping out her bedroom window to be with a stunning Paul Newman–esque boy whom my father considered “common.” A boyfriend with a funny Greek name did not jibe with our parents’ plans for Jane to lead the debutante ball. When I came out to my sister, it did not come as a surprise to her. She told me, in fact, that my mother already knew and the topic had been on the table in Raleigh ever since a young woman they both knew came to visit me in San Francisco hoping for a proposal, only to be taken to the end of the pier at Aquatic Park and told about the wonderful man I was dating. The three of them had agreed that my father must never know. Ever. Southern women keep secrets to protect their delicate men.
I spared no detail in my letter to Jane about my Palm Springs transformation.
I even wrote it with carbon paper, so I could keep a copy for myself and have a permanent record for the ages. I looked for it recently and couldn’t find it—no surprise, really, considering the tragic state of the cardboard boxes a university recently referred to as my “papers.” I called Jane at her home in Portland and asked if she had kept the original, but she didn’t even remember it. I wouldn’t have blamed her if she had tossed it on the spot, since, even for her, it must have been a bit much. But for all the silliness and false profundity of a first-time drug epiphany, I knew that something had changed in me. There had been a letting-go, a cracking-open that had finally made a fulfilling life imaginable.
And fiction. It made fiction imaginable.
JACK CALLED A month or so later and suggested a reunion of the TT1 gang. Rock Hudson was fulfilling a long-held dream of appearing onstage and had taken a role in John Brown’s Body at the San Bernardino Playhouse. Jack told me he had a block of tickets, and Rock needed lots of moral support. So I traveled south again, realizing that this time I would finally get to meet the tortured sea captain I had fallen for at fourteen in Twilight for the Gods. Not to mention the rancher who had courted Elizabeth Taylor in Giant and the big-city womanizer who had caused Doris Day to blow her bangs in exasperation in three wildly popular comedies.
John Brown’s Body was not suited to Rock’s talents. Based on an epic poem about slavery by Stephen Vincent Benét, it was essentially a glorified reading in which the actors stood soberly at attention like trees in a forest. While Rock was certainly the most imposing of the trees, that only complicated matters during his big death scene, since he hit the stage with the resounding boom of a felled redwood. It was funny, and shouldn’t have been, though the audience had the decency not to laugh.
The dressing rooms, as I recall, were subterranean, and the line of people waiting to see the movie star wove through a labyrinth. When it was finally my turn, Jack did the introductions, but as soon as Rock’s enormous hand was grasping mine, there was a power failure in the building, and the room went completely black for at least fifteen seconds. There we stood, in the dark, still holding on, saying nothing.
“Well,” I said at last, “this is certainly the opportunity of a lifetime.”
He laughed, to my great relief, and the lights came back on.
THE CHRONICLE FINALLY set a date for the la
unch of “Tales of the City”—May 24, 1976—a Monday morning that would inaugurate the five-days-a-week routine. As it happened, Rock was in San Francisco the weekend before, so he invited a group of mostly younger men to join him and his lover Tom Clark for a long Sunday brunch at Mama’s on Nob Hill. Somewhere in the course of the afternoon I told him—bragged to him, that is—about the start of my new serial in tomorrow’s newspaper.
Rock invited us all back to his suite—the Diplomat Suite of the Fairmont Hotel—where he showed up a few minutes later than the rest of us and announced that he would like to do a little reading. With the help of a desk clerk he had secured an early copy of the next day’s paper (what they used to call the Bulldog Edition), so he opened it with a dramatic (if slightly drunken) flourish and began to read aloud:
“Mary Ann Singleton was twenty-five years old when she saw San Francisco for the first time.”
That would have been thrilling enough in itself—that a legendary movie star was performing the first chapter of my new work—but there was something else that made the moment deliciously meta, as we like to say today. This is the scene in which the vacationing Mary Ann Singleton is on the phone with her mother in Cleveland, breaking the news that she plans to stay in San Francisco for good. Mom hates the idea and warns her daughter against all the “hippies and mass murderers” for which the city is notorious. “Your daddy and I were just talking about you. There was this crazy man on McMillan & Wife who was strangling all these secretaries . . .”
And who played Commissioner McMillan in that long-ago television series? None other than the man who was reading this passage to an audience of young men in his suite. And I had written it some months before I had ever imagined I’d meet him. Meta was the word, all right. The reading may have been a bit slurry, and more than a little calculated on the movie star’s part, but it charmed the pants off me.
The very next night.
ROCK AND HIS lover Tom had invited me to dinner at La Bourgogne, a chichi French restaurant in an alley cul-de-sac off Mason Street. We sat in a tufted beige banquette under a crystal chandelier. Rock ordered bullshots, the cocktail made of vodka and bouillon that he and Tom swore by. Tom was almost as tall as Rock but looked more like an accountant than a movie star. He had once been Rock’s PR man, in fact, and still identified himself that way when they wanted to avert suspicion. There were four people in their circle: Rock, Tom, the actor George Nader, and George’s lover Mark Miller, who functioned as Rock’s secretary. They were very close, the four of them, but they were rarely seen together in public, for fear of betraying what they were: two couples. Rock and Tom told me that night that they always went out in groups of three and carried briefcases, so they would look like they were headed to a business meeting. They were proud of this ruse, and seemed to think I’d find it amusing. It was just sad to me, though, a hangover from the past, and I wondered suddenly if that’s what I was at this very moment: the third man.
The bullshots had emboldened me. I suggested to Rock it might be time for him to come out. I said he had always been an icon of American masculinity, so his honesty about being gay would be a revelation to the world, a historic moment that would change the lives of millions of people like himself. And, best of all, he would finally be free to be himself. No longer hiding his love and moving about in threes. No more threats from tabloids. He would be a hero, not a source of secret gossip. He would finally be running his own life. The world would never forget him.
The actor gave me slow, sleepy smile, a smile I recognized from his screen performances. “I’ve always talked about writing a book someday.”
“Then write it!” I said. “I’d be happy to help if you need someone.”
He seemed to consider that, or maybe just pretended to consider it.
Tom’s face had suddenly hardened. He shot a look at Rock.
“Not until my mother dies,” he said.
I laughed, because there was truth in it. We queers can be so afraid of losing our mother’s love. But, privately, I was thinking: You gotta be kidding me! If I were married to Rock Hudson, I’d be calling my mother tomorrow!
AFTER DINNER ROCK suggested we hike up the hill for a nightcap at the Fairmont. Tom, who was already blitzed and irritable, flaked out as soon as we reached the alpine challenge of Powell Street and hailed a cab. “Aw, you’re a big wuss,” said Rock, waving him away in mock contempt. “We’re not wusses, are we, Armistead?” I wasn’t about to admit to as much, so I tried to keep pace with the giant striding ahead of me, his coat thrown over his arm, his fifty-year-old glutes dancing under the dark sheen of his gabardine pants. I was relieved when he stopped to catch his breath and attempted, with a jauntily extended thumb, to hitch a ride on a cable car. It didn’t work, of course—the incline was too steep—but the gesture had the desired effect: the tourists hanging on to the cable car went nuts, one even shouting Commissioner McMillan! as they passed us with bells a-clanging. I could tell Rock was tickled, and I was proud to be seen with him, though no one at all would have recognized me.
When we reached the Diplomat Suite, Tom was already passed out and snoring in the bedroom. Rock closed the door and led the way into the living room. Did he make us drinks? I don’t recall, but we ended up sitting across the room from each other, two guys in suits and ties, making talk too small to be remembered.
Then Rock said: “Well, I should be over there, or you should be over here.”
I wondered how often that line had worked for him, since it was certainly working now. One of us joined the other. (Again, I don’t remember which, since my mind at that point had slipped from its mooring and was levitating out of body, like souls are expected to do above the dying.) We kissed for a while, loosening ties and fumbling at buttons. Then he stood up and pushed down those gabardine pants. He was wearing cotton boxer shorts, gray and brown stripes on white. I remember that, of course, because I was focused now, and I remember the suspense of a grand unveiling because of all I’d ever heard, and for very good reason, about this man.
So why the hell couldn’t I keep my hard-on? Sure, he was older than most of the guys I went for, but he was easily more magnificent than any of them. If I had met him in a cubicle at the Glory Holes, I would have been on him like a puppy on a chew stick. He himself was hard as . . . all right . . . a rock, making him perfect for an act of objectification. Except, he wasn’t. The disconnect was just impossible. And he understood this all too well. This wasn’t his first time at the lost boner rodeo.
He got up off the floor and sat next to me on the sofa, laying his arm across my shoulder.
“You know,” he said quietly, “I’m just like any other guy.”
I gazed down at a little leather pouch on the floor. This was where he kept his poppers, his real medicinal amyl nitrate. His initials were monogrammed in gold: RH.
“No you’re not,” I said. “And I’m Doris Day.”
He smiled wistfully, as if he might’ve heard that one before.
THIRTEEN
IT TOOK A WHILE FOR “Tales of the City” to catch fire. Readers of the Chronicle were initially baffled. There hadn’t been fiction in a daily newspaper for at least a century. What the hell was that thing doing there, anyway, floating on an inside page of the People section? Some of the fault, I knew, was in the plotting. Those early episodes were as bland as a hospital meal—The New Girl goes to the disco, The New Girl looks for a job, The New Girl dumps her old high school friend. I was still being way too guarded about my own truth, and, even worse, I had yet to figure out how a compelling cast could evolve from this sequence. “I love your new writer,” someone wrote in a letter to the editor. “What high school does he attend?”
Things picked up when I found a place for Mary Ann to live, a rickety old house at the top of some rickety wooden stairs on a street that wasn’t a street at all but a wooded footpath. That gave me a dollhouse to play with, but I had to populate it and fast. I chose a straight guy named Brian Hawkins (a surname in
my family) who was exactly my age, and a failed lawyer to boot, and was exorcising the radical ideals of his youth with nightly doses of stranger sex, much the way I was offing my conservatism. Then came Mona Ramsey (also my age, and a family surname) who works as a copywriter at an ad agency having failed at her dream of being Lillian Hellman. She was one of those hippies who was still around in the Bicentennial Year, still dressing the part and owning her mantra, if somewhat cynically. She’s the only person in the house who knows about the secret past of its landlady, Mrs. Madrigal.
“So what’s her secret?” the managing editor asked one day. As a senior suit from the front office, he was tasked with keeping an eye on the plot.
“She used to be a man,” I told him.
He blinked at me for a moment. “What do you mean, ‘used to be a man’?”
“She’s transsexual. She had a sex change twelve years ago.”
He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes in weary exasperation. “You can’t say that, Armistead. You’ll lose them before it’s even started.”
“Lose who?”
“The readers. The people in the Sunset.”
It was the common conceit of the front office that folks who lived in the Sunset District, that treeless grid of stucco cracker boxes on the edge of the ocean, were not as sophisticated as the rest of us. They were more easily offended and prone to canceling subscriptions. They were often cited when critical decisions were made. The people in the Sunset . . . To me, it sounded like zombies on the march.
“Just hold off for a year or so,” said the managing editor. “Just keep her mysterious for a while.” Though it was firmly rooted in what we know today as transphobia, the managing editor’s panic proved useful. By keeping Anna mysterious I could build suspense and keep readers coming back for more every day. It also gave me a chance to establish Anna Madrigal’s humanity, before readers—or some of them, anyway—could dismiss her as a freak show. This was 1976, the year Bruce Jenner was racking up gold medals at the Olympics and being celebrated as Male Athlete of the Year. Caitlyn Jenner would have been unimaginable back then, and Anna Madrigal, while just a creature of newsprint, would have invoked similar disbelief. So I waited a year before breaking the news to the people in the Sunset, and by then they were so hooked they had no choice but to keep on loving the landlady. Now, without question, Anna Madrigal is my proudest achievement. Christopher Bram’s Eminent Outlaws, a critical study of “gay male writers who changed America,” published in 2012, called Anna “literature’s first nonthreatening, nonsuffering, three-dimensional androgyne.” But her full humanity might not have developed as it did without the nervousness of the Chronicle’s front office.