Not that they weren’t concerned about the proliferation of garden-variety gay characters. Michael had picked up a hunky gynecologist at the roller rink and enjoyed a long chat with him in bed. (The bed was merely implied by the mention of sheets.) Mona, apparently, had once had a live-in girlfriend, who was now back in town. Even Beauchamp, DeDe’s philandering husband, seemed to be logging time at the baths. Almost overnight the serial had gone gay as a goose.
The poor managing editor had to call me into his office and show me, with some mortification, a wall chart he had made. There were two columns on the chart; one was headed Heterosexual; the other, Homosexual. He would enter the names and “preferences” of characters as soon as they appeared in the serial. The idea was that at no time should the gay people in “Tales” number more than one-third of the total population and thereby, presumably, disrupt the course of Western Civilization. I couldn’t help wondering if the managing editor had cooked this up on his own or if Charlie Thieriot himself had told him to bring me in line pronto.
I went back to my desk and wrote an episode in which Frannie Halcyon, the society matron from Hillsborough, returns from a long, drunken luncheon with her friends and passes out in her herb garden, only to wake and find her beloved Great Dane, Faust, vigorously humping her leg. The next time I saw the managing editor I told him the dog should go in the Heterosexual column. He conceded defeat with a curdled smile and never brought out the chart again. (You won’t find that episode in the finished novel, since my editor at Harper & Row found it distasteful and urged me not to use it. I regret that decision. It’s a funny bit, I think, and rather poignant, since Frannie refuses to reveal Faust’s misconduct to her family. “It’s okay, baby,” she says to the dog at the end. “Mama knows you didn’t mean it.”)
I usually wrote in the early afternoon at the Chronicle office at Fifth and Mission. The six-week backlog I was supposed to maintain got gobbled up quickly by an active nightlife and a tendency to shoot the shit with the women in the People section, where I found that telling stories was a lot more fun than writing them. I would also take a lunch break sometimes and walk down to the Glory Holes, where the cheap daytime entry fee was called the Businessman’s Special. (After one such lunch break, I was called into the editor’s office for a reason I’ve long since forgotten. A minute into our meeting I glanced down and saw a glob of pink bubblegum on the knee of my Levi’s. I covered it with my hand, trying not to smile. Quite the businessman.)
All this procrastination made the People editor very nervous, since sometimes I was writing Wednesday’s column on a Monday afternoon. I got a little nervous myself, wondering where this saga would end (or, rather, where it was heading, since it was never supposed to end). I snatched stories from the night before—if, for instance, some preppie guy had taken me home from the Twin Peaks because of his unbridled lust for my Weejuns, the collegiate loafers that betrayed (or, perhaps, in this case, exploited) my Southern-boy origins. Sometimes, at a loss for personal yarns, I would arbitrarily force two of my characters to talk to each other across Anna Madrigal’s kitchen table, thereby letting them take the reins of the plot and veer off wildly into the unknown. That’s when I began to find out who they were. Or, more to the point, who I was. The pressure of the deadline made it impossible to overthink things. There was, in fact, a lot of underthinking going on, which unconsciously revealed all sorts of embarrassing truths about the author himself.
My parents were subscribing to the Chronicle by mail. That meant they would get four or five episodes in a single mailing. There were encouraging words from them at first, when “Tales” was all Mary Ann and her landlady and the handsome rogue who lived upstairs. When the plot threads grew more sexually diverse, my mother began making nervous jokes on the telephone: “Your father wants to know how an Eagle Scout knows these things.”
I laughed and told her that I lived in this crazy town, after all, and that I noticed things. I reminded her that a writer must empathize, so my story would unfold from all its characters, whether I was writing about an alcoholic matron or a dying businessman or a disillusioned hippie. (I could hide behind all those people, I assured myself, because I was all of them, and none of them.)
My mother was silent for a moment. “Well, I love the story. And your dialogue is very believable.”
She was not buying it, but never mind.
We were used to avoiding that subject.
THE PUBLIC WAS hooked on “Tales” before the year was out. I heard this from readers in bars and restaurants, and even at the baths sometimes, where other patrons would often express amazement (or outright ire) that I was exposing our secret gay world. One guy was outraged that I had written about Gay Night at the Grand Arena roller rink, since everyone in his law office knew he always went skating on Tuesdays, and now, goddammit, they knew why he had chosen that night. I thought that was hilarious and told him so. I was losing all respect for the closet by then, including, of course, my own.
People began to speculate about who I might be. No one, after all, could be named Armistead Maupin. The smarter ones cited Mademoiselle de Maupin, Théophile Gautier’s novel about a lusty, cross-dressing woman, in support of their claim that my name was a pseudonym. Others thought I might be Herb Caen, the newspaper’s beloved “three-dot columnist” (so named for the ellipses that peppered his daily entries), a theory that irked me, since I was already feeling competitive with Herb for the reader-bestowed title of “the first thing I read in the morning.” Caen was already King of the Chronicle. Why should he get credit for what I was doing? My favorite speculation came in an anonymous letter: “You’re not fooling me, Armistead Maupin! I know for a fact that you’re a lesbian collective in Marin County.”
Well, I was certainly doing the work of a lesbian collective in Marin County, and my dutiful labors at the loom of story were beginning to get to me. The more intricate the tapestry became, the more I worried about eventually having to unravel it. Why the hell hadn’t I mapped this thing out before I began? My cast of characters was relentlessly lily-white, for one thing, so I decided to introduce a major African-American character, that former lover of Mona’s who arrives unexpectedly to rekindle their relationship. D’Orothea, as I named her, is a New York model, a sophisticated beauty not unlike women I’d met while working as a mail boy at the ad agency. I could write about such a woman, and convincingly. So that’s what I did.
One of my readers wasn’t buying it, though. “Shame on you,” she wrote. “Up until now your characters have rung true, but D’Orothea is nothing but a white woman in black skin.” I found this completely demoralizing. My Southern white-boy bones had been laid bare for all to see. And, if one reader felt this way, there must be others in a readership of half a million who were thinking the same thing.
I was despondent for an afternoon, until I saw the way to make lemonade from this unconvincing lemon. What if D’Orothea really was a white woman in black skin? What if she had curled her hair and darkened her pigment (like the white author of Black Like Me) to secure a job as an “Afro model”? What if Mona, a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, had loved D’Orothea’s blackness at least as much as she had loved D’Orothea, and D’Orothea was fearful of letting the truth be known at last. That would give me a whole new closet to explore, a whole new source of humor and absurdity. (Forty years after I wrote my way out of this literary corner, I saw just such a comedy play out in real life when Rachel Dolezal, a civil rights activist for the NAACP, was revealed to be a white woman posing as an African-American. Folks on Twitter gave me far too much credit for predicting Ms. Dolezal.)
DID I MENTION that during these days of desperate invention I had a night job as well? I worked down at Club Fugazi, in North Beach, where I tore tickets and pushed scenery and wrote corny dialogue for a brand-new musical revue called Beach Blanket Babylon Goes Bananas. This homegrown phenomenon, featuring a zany Carmen Miranda piled with fruit and an operatic Glinda the Good Witch (both played by the hilarious, saucer-ey
ed Nancy Bleiweiss) today holds the record as the world’s longest-running musical revue. No, I did not get a piece of the action—I’ve never been clever about business. What I got was the nightly thrill of standing in back of that old Italian meeting hall while the lights dimmed and the curtain went up and a four-man band dressed as French poodles played the opening bars of “San Francisco.” This was one of those times when you say to yourself: This is it, kiddo. These are your glory days. Remember them when you’re old. I was so proud to bring out-of-towners to the show, among them Rock Hudson, whose towering, laughing presence near the front of the stage added to the joy of the room that night.
After that first debacle of a tryst at the Fairmont, Rock and I had become buddies with occasional benefits. We cruised some of the raunchier San Francisco clubs together, including the Glory Holes and a leather bar called the Black and Blue, where a slab of corrugated iron hung in one corner to form a triangular orgy room. It was packed, and Rock wasn’t exactly dressed for it. The biker wannabes writhing in the darkness around us all but ignored the tall, touristy-looking guy with a slight paunch under his red alpaca sweater. If you only knew what you’re missing, I thought. Since Rock was looking left out, I reached over and gave his butt a friendly pinch.
He looked baffled, then turned to me.
“Was that you?”
“Yep.”
“Just checking.”
His smile could light up the darkest corner.
ON SEVERAL OCCASIONS Rock invited me and some friends to stay in his home in Beverly Hills, a tile-roofed ranch house on Beverly Crest Drive his circle referred to facetiously as “The Castle.” Everything there, in fact, had a whimsical name. The guest room, a relentlessly red space often reeking of poppers from previous visitors, was referred to as “Tijuana.” Rock himself had been dubbed “the Matinee Idol” by his lover Tom, who uttered the words more often in contempt than in affection. Rock’s other private nickname was Trixie, presumably because of his extracurricular sex life. He was a good sport about such teasing when he wasn’t drunk himself. He loved being a host, perhaps because it offered him respite from Tom’s sniping. The image that lives in memory is Rock in his sunlit kitchen, sporting the world’s longest nightshirt as he scrambled eggs for his guests in a big iron skillet.
Rock had a deep groove on one of his thumbnails—a deformity really—that made me curious enough to ask about it one day. “Just an old war wound,” he said, and I believed him, because I knew of his naval service and remembered how he had heard Doris Day, his lovely costar-in-waiting, singing “Sentimental Journey” on his ship’s speaker system as they passed under the Golden Gate on their way home. It was Rock’s assistant Mark Miller who set me straight about that thumb. “That’s not a war wound,” he said. “He does that to himself. Watch him.”
Sure enough, Rock was digging that groove with his own forefinger, incessantly gouging away at the nail in a quiet act of self-flagellation. He had spent decades being someone he was not—an illusion that was successful outside of the gay grapevine—but that mangled thumb betrayed the pain of his repression.
So did the booze. He was horrified to see that I smoked grass (and asked me not to do so at the Castle), but he went on vodka benders that left him angry and sobbing. When I watched him stagger across the courtyard and collapse into a hot tub full of young men, forcing them to break his fall, it wasn’t nearly as charming as he seemed to think. Things got even worse when Rock and Tom were hammered at the same time. Their George-and-Martha bitchery, so witless as to be unworthy of that term, sometimes drove me into another room.
Still, Rock seemed genuinely to believe in coupledom. When he realized I was still single, he made it his business to fix that. “Everybody needs a husband,” he told me. He was more excited than anyone I knew when I told him I was going on a Love Boat cruise to Mexico with a guy I had met in Minneapolis. When the ship returned to San Pedro, Rock was there to greet us, waving up from the crowd on the dock like a doting aunt with hopes for a wedding. (The chatty passenger standing next to me at the rail gasped when she recognized him.)
That should have been the consummate blessing for a new romance, but my shy, collie-dog of a Minnesotan met someone he liked better right after he moved to San Francisco to live with me. I was still on deadline, of course, so there was no way I could skulk off to lick my wounds. I chose instead to suffer publicly, in my column, believing then, as I did for far too many years, that fictionalizing pain is the best way to make it go away. I walked to the newspaper office and wrote a melancholy monologue for Michael Tolliver in which he says that you must never show your need for love lest you doom yourself to never having it at all.
Lordy. I might as well have been Miss Alma in Summer and Smoke. My public tristesse didn’t last for long, though. It couldn’t. Not when a group of self-described Mary Anns found their way to my house and wanted my autograph for a scavenger hunt. Not when a straight bar in the Financial District threw a “Tales”-themed party at which a signature drink was created for Anna Madrigal, and half the room came dressed as her. And certainly not when I dragged myself out of the Glory Holes at four o’clock one morning to find a box of Advocates with this headline on the cover: ARMISTEAD MAUPIN IS SAN FRANCISCO’S NEWEST CELEBRITY.
I was having so much fun. The personal and the political had merged for the first time in my life. The most frivolous act imaginable could be part of this new revolution. When I auctioned off jockstraps in a rabbit suit at a Folsom Street bar, I was doing it to benefit lawyers who were fighting for our rights.
MY GROWING VISIBILITY as an openly gay man had a downside: it made it harder to maintain a friendship with Rock. I had really just been part of his sexual sublife, the part he didn’t show to the world, and now that I was finally the master of my own soul, it felt demeaning, even insulting, to cooperate with the closet, just for the sake of hanging out with a movie star. It was nothing dramatic; I just stopped going to the Castle. Rock was used to others organizing his life, so I doubt that he even noticed. In many ways I was glad to be free of the poisonous alcoholic atmosphere of the house. It smelled of mendacity—an old Tennessee Williams word that is more than adequate for a nest of harpies living out a lie at the bitter end of the seventies.
I wrote about Rock in “Tales” in 1981, using Michael Tolliver as my stand-in at an all-boy pool party. In the Victorian storytelling tradition, I put blanks in place of Rock’s name, and changed telling details to blur his identity. I consider it an affectionate portrait of a man who wants to be “just another guy like you” but is too suffocated by the Hollywood closet to find his way into the light.
In 1985, when Rock’s AIDS diagnosis was made public, I was as jolted as the rest of the world. I was heartsick, of course, because he was suffering the fate of so many of my friends, and I knew what lay ahead. But then I got angry when I read pathetic lies being spun by the people who ran his life. Rock didn’t have AIDS; they claimed in some accounts he had anorexia. Or, even more preposterously, they claimed he was on a watermelon diet. Ross Hunter, the gay man who had produced so many of Rock’s movies, said he had never known the actor to be gay. Hollywood was used to lying about that subject, and they kept right on doing it.
Then my friend Randy Shilts, a reporter for the Chronicle, called and asked if I would speak on the record with another reporter about my friendship with Rock. (Randy would write And the Band Played On, the definitive study of the AIDS epidemic, and eventually die of the disease himself.) I knew what he was up to. The tabloids were already having a field day with the “secret shame” of Rock Hudson and his “deadly kiss” with Linda Evans on the set of Dynasty, so it was time for the mainstream press to treat the story with dignity. When the Chronicle reporter called, I kept it simple: I said yes, of course, Rock was widely known within the industry to be gay, so there was no scandal at all here beyond the fact that it had taken this horrendous disease to demolish the charade that had made Rock’s life miserable for so long. The word outin
g had yet to be invented (by a reporter at Time magazine, when brave gay activist/journalists like Michelangelo Signorile started telling the truth in print), but that, in effect, was what I had done.
Some people were unhappy with me. A columnist for the Bay Area Reporter, San Francisco’s gay newspaper, wondered in print what sort of “friend” I could be if I was willing to spill the beans so freely. Gay people were supposed to keep that secret, weren’t they? The old man who ran the sidewalk flower stand on Castro Street clucked his tongue at me as I passed. Rock’s old lover Jack, the very person who had introduced me to Rock, called up drunk one night to yell, “How could you do that to that beautiful man?” It stung to have my motives misunderstood, especially by gay people, and I wondered if Rock was among them. I hated to think that he might feel that way, especially as he was suffering. I did not call the Castle, however, in fear that similar vitriol awaited me there.