Still, I’ve never regretted taking that heat. Once the press could talk about Rock’s homosexuality, a whole new dialogue could open about AIDS and the people whose suffering had been ignored. Within the week, People magazine had published what had to have been its first sympathetic cover story about a gay Hollywood star. Rock’s hospital room received 35,000 letters of support from fans saying they loved him just the way he was.
And Rock finally commissioned The Book—the one we had talked about nine years earlier at the restaurant in San Francisco, the book where he could reveal the true stories he’d always wanted to share. To my great relief, he told his biographer, Sara Davidson, that I was the first person she should talk to.
FOURTEEN
ORTON PLANTATION WAS EVERYTHING AN ANTEBELLUM Southern mansion was supposed to be: white-bricked, white-columned, lazing in idle elegance on the banks of the Cape Fear River. Nothing else in North Carolina came close to it, which was why, when I was still a boy, we made pilgrimages there to import its azaleas to our suburban Raleigh backyard. We bought tickets like everyone else, even though my parents knew the owners, who threw garden parties there sometimes for the Society of the Cincinnati, a hereditary society that George Washington had founded to keep aristocracy alive in the absence of royalty. By the 1970s, my father had risen to the august position of President General in that fraternity, a job that came with a diamond eagle pendent that Washington himself had worn, and all sorts of chances to wear it. Among them: an invitation to an overnight stay at Orton.
Mummie liked fancy-dress parties as much as Daddy did, and Orton would have been a lovely setting for her hazel-eyed English beauty. By then she was letting strategic streaks of gray appear in her dark hair, knowing they worked to soften the lines in her face. My guess is she had driven to Durham to find a gown at Montaldo’s, North Carolina’s temple of high couture. She had once excitedly shown me a dress from Montaldo’s she said was “just like one worn by Suzy Parker.”
So there she is at that MGM plantation house, soaking in an old-fashioned clawfoot tub, soaping her body with luxurious deliberation as she meditates on the night ahead. Her gown is laid out on the bed in the other room. She can hear the tinkling of crystal as tables are prepared downstairs for the grand soiree. She touches her breast once, then a second time, then frowns. There it is.
I think it’s safe to guess that she didn’t tell Daddy right away, knowing it would sour his antebellum weekend. More than likely she had slapped a brave Melanie Wilkes smile on her face and waited until her doctor in Raleigh could confirm her self-diagnosis. That’s the way she was when it came to bad news.
She had deserved a better life from this point forward. She had grown up in relative austerity, despite a father whose pretensions of aristocracy had foretold her husband’s. As a teenager during the Depression she had canned apricots in a factory in Georgia to pay her way at the Martha Berry School for Girls. She remembered how the velvety pulp had scalded her hands. At twenty she had saved her brother Richie’s life by authorizing the amputation of his left leg after a car accident. She stood by him for six hours, holding his hand, watching everything, and at one point he begged her for a gun, so he could end his pain right there. Her first child, me, had been a difficult breach birth, kicking his way out of her like a Rockette when her husband was away at war. As an adult, she had endured my father’s whiskey-driven tantrums and spent years as the lone caregiver to his increasingly feeble and addled mother. But Mimi had died in her room out at Mayview and joined her husband at Oakwood Cemetery, and the three children were grown and gone. She was still in her fifties, still considered lovely. She must have thought, at least for a while, that she had a shot at a happy ending.
I don’t remember how I first learned about the cancer, but I remember the forced jollity with which my mother spoke of the mastectomy on the phone. “I told them they could have one breast as long as I was allowed to tattoo the other one.” That was so unlike her that it made me cry. I said, “Good for you,” trying to match her jauntiness. She made the same remark to a reporter with the Triangle Pointer, a local Raleigh tourist guide, of all things, that had once interviewed her about fox hunting. She referred to her illness as “The Big C”—just the way Daddy’s hero John Wayne had done several years earlier. Folks in Raleigh thought her candor was very brave, and of course it was, especially then, but I suspect Mummie knew there was no way she could endure the loneliness of that secret. I think she wanted this out there in the world, marshaling the love and support of her friends, beyond my father’s ability to squelch discussion. Our journeys were uncannily similar, my mother’s and mine, at this point in our separately lived lives. We were both escaping from secrecy, unilaterally claiming our truths, and both using the media to do it.
For me, it was Newsweek, which identified me, in the summer of 1977, as a “homosexual columnist” in a cover story about Anita Bryant and the new surge in gay activism. Like so many queers of my generation, I had received Anita Bryant like a punch in the gut—and earlier than most, I suppose, since I had seen the story about her “crusade” on the wire service as soon as it arrived at the Chronicle. This former Miss America runner-up and gospel singer, the current spokesperson for Florida orange juice, was so enraged by a new ordinance protecting gay people from discrimination in South Florida that she vowed to repeal it through an organization she called “Save Our Children.” Gay people could not reproduce, she argued, so they were forced to “recruit children” for their lifestyle. They must never be protected by laws of any kind; they must be stopped, in fact, in the name of the children, in the name of Jesus.
Bryant’s campaign and a new nationwide demand for gay rights brought Newsweek to San Francisco for its cover story. They asked my permission to call me homosexual, which I granted freely, joyfully, in fact. (You had to ask permission back then, since the mere suggestion that someone was gay was seen by the law as a libelous act. Liberace—Libe-fuckin’-race—was infamously awarded a million-dollar libel settlement after a British columnist described him as “fruit-flavored.” As late as 1981, when I described my activist friend Vito Russo as a “gay film historian” in an op-ed piece for the New York Times, I was met with editorial squeamishness. Vito, author of The Celluloid Closet, had been out for many years and writing about it, but the Times required an affidavit from him before I could call him gay in print. I never saw that affidavit, but I’m sure Vito had enormous fun composing it.)
Like Vito, I was proud of my role in this revolution and welcomed any recognition for it. I knew that my mother had known I was gay for years, but I was never sure if she’d discussed it with my father. A heads-up was in order, so I wrote my parents to alert them about the upcoming Newsweek article and how it would describe me. They never wrote back, but forty years later I’ve learned how they dealt with it—a solution that seems downright quaint in an age when media disgrace is instant and inescapable. They simply left town for a week, riding horses up at Cataloochee Ranch in Maggie Valley until Newsweek was off the stands and my father could safely face the gaze of his fellow lawyers on the Fayetteville Street Mall.
That can’t have been an easy week for my mother, since the old man, by long-established custom, used her as a sounding board for his rage. I can only hope that she had a few moments to herself on horseback in the hills. Her mastectomy had not stopped the relentless march of the cancer in her body. It had found its way into her lymph nodes and was already hell-bent for her bones. She didn’t talk about it anymore. She was worried about how it would trouble him. She knew he couldn’t face the thought of losing her, so why make it difficult for him?
IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO overstate how thoroughly Bryant’s pious eye-batting bigotry galvanized the queers of my generation. From the moment I read the wire story, I had set about plotting ways to address it in “Tales of the City.” As freakish fate would have it, I had already established Michael Tolliver as the son of Florida orange growers. (I had figured this would make him a working-class
boy, someone not immediately identifiable as me, and place him a safe distance from my folks in North Carolina.) It was completely plausible that Michael, a gay man still closeted to his family, might get a letter from his churchgoing mother in Orlando, proudly telling him that she had just signed up with the Save Our Children campaign. It would finally force the issue between mother and son in a way that neither one of them could ever have anticipated.
I wrote Michael’s reply to that letter in forty-five minutes at my desk at the Chronicle. Nothing had ever taken less time to write, since I’d been collecting my thoughts on the subject for more than fifteen years. My mother had not actually joined Save Our Children; though, with my father’s goading, she had embraced a new archconservative Republican movement that would demonize LGBT people in one way or another to this very day. (With the notable exception of my sister, my biological family continued to vote for Jesse Helms for the remainder of his career.)
The Chronicle, typically, didn’t get it at first. The editor who had kept the hetero/homo chart in his office said I was moving drastically off topic and was sure to lose readers. “Why should people in San Francisco care about something that’s happening in Miami?” He had his answer in a matter of days when the city erupted in anti-Anita rallies and heated press conferences. Harvey Milk, the gay candidate for supervisor, was as quick on the draw as I was. There were no memes in those Web-free days, but there might as well have been. Oranges were suddenly everywhere, sprouting on lampposts and bulletin boards in bars with slogans attached: ANITA BRYANT SUCKS ORANGES. A DAY WITHOUT TOLERANCE IS LIKE A DAY WITHOUT SUNSHINE. When a nationwide boycott of Florida orange juice was launched, gay bars no longer served screwdrivers but a drink made of vodka and apple juice called an Anita Bryant. At the annual Cops vs. Queers softball game in San Francisco, I was invited to throw out “the first orange,” a predictable fiasco since the fruit fell far short of the plate.
“Letter to Mama” was set to be published on a Monday. That weekend there was a midnight benefit at the Castro Theatre for the Miami Gay Support Committee. With typical homo sass, the event was titled “Moon Over Miami.” The performers included a group called the Sometime Sondheim Singers, the comedy team of Brown & Coffey, Bobby Kent at the Mighty Organ, and someone identified at the top of the bill as Armistead tales of the city Maupin. I was nervous. I was just going to read something, after all. The conceit was that the audience would be privy to Monday’s “Tales” column before anyone else in town, but that seemed a little flimsy the more I thought about it. And not all that entertaining.
The Castro is one of those great old Deco movie palaces, a Bedouin’s tent of gilded plaster draped histrionically from the highest point. Though it holds 1,500 people, its “stage” is just a movie-theater stage, a thin strip of darkness upon which it’s awfully easy to feel small. I don’t remember whom I followed that night or how I introduced the letter. I remember only that moments after I began reading, the piece had stopped being about Michael at all and become something much more excruciatingly personal. There I was, alone, with a manifesto shaking in my hands, fighting to keep my balance. I felt in danger of toppling onto the Mighty Organ.
An unnerving silence settled over the room when I was done. It took me a while to realize that people were crying. I noticed my own tears as I made my wobbly way to the steps at the end of the stage. I sank into an empty seat in the front row of the theater as the applause began. It was a primeval sound, a rumbling that grew from a few hands clapping into a stadium-style foot-stomping frenzy as the audience rose to its feet.
“I thought the fucking roof would come down,” was how my friend Cleve Jones put it recently when we shared memories about that long-ago evening. Cleve had been Harvey Milk’s curly locked young lieutenant in those days. He had personally flyered the Castro to draw a crowd for the midnight event when ticket sales were flagging. He and Harvey were both weeping over the letter, he said. As for me, I was too shaken to stand, and it felt inappropriate somehow to take a bow for something we were all sharing at that moment. I stayed in my seat, where I felt a sort of laying-on-of-hands, dozens of my brothers and sisters touching me in benediction.
The letter met with a similar response when it appeared in the Chronicle on Monday morning. Readers wrote to tell me that they had cut out the column, deleting Michael’s name and substituting their own before mailing it to their parents. Others had used it as a template for their own coming-out letter. Nothing I’ve ever written has had such an impact. “Letter to Mama” has been set to music three times: as an art song by composer Glen Roven, as a solo number in the Tales of the City musical by Jake Shears and John Garden, and, perhaps most enduringly, as a choral piece by David Maddux that has become a standard for gay men’s choruses around the world. Actor Paul Hopkins performed it in the Showtime miniseries of More Tales of the City. Ian McKellen and Stephen Fry have both read the letter to audiences in Britain and America. Embarrassingly enough, reading it myself can still make me cry.
I WAITED FOR a response from my parents, the smallest sign that they had seen “Letter to Mama” and been moved by it. It had been a love letter to them, after all.
The only response came from my father several weeks later. He had scribbled it, as usual, on a yellow legal pad:
Dear Teddy,
As you know your mother is very ill, so any additional stress can only exacerbate the situation.
Love,
Daddy
In others words: Shut up before you kill her.
I knew my mother didn’t feel that way herself. We talked enough on the phone for me to understand that I had not broken her heart. We talked about the plush toy fox I had sent her, about her beloved horse, Pegasus, and how she wanted to start looking for a good home for him, you know, just in case. She was thrilled about an offer I’d received from Harper & Row in New York to collect my columns into two novels, for which I would be paid the staggering sum of five thousand dollars.
But one day, out of the blue, she said: “You know, I’m glad that you’re happy, sweetheart. I just don’t think you should talk about your . . . lifestyle . . . so much.”
I couldn’t blame her for using that ridiculous word, since it was all over the place in those days. It was everyone’s convenient substitute for the Great Ickiness, the Lifestyle That Dare Not Speak Its Name, and with it came the implication that it was chosen—a style, not a life. Only straight people got to have lives.
“Why?” I asked pleasantly. “Why should I not talk about it?”
I knew already that my family was talking about it. All of them. My younger brother, Tony, upon hearing the news, had minced no words and called me a cocksucker, which at least favored accuracy over euphemism.
“I’m just afraid,” said my mother, “that it’ll hurt your career.”
“Mummie . . . it is my career.” I explained to her that this was my chance to make a difference in the world, that I had found my voice as a writer, and that I could mine my own life for completely fresh material. There would be readers who could relate to that, too, if I remained honest and wrote from the heart. Being openly gay would work completely to my advantage. It could make me famous, I told her. There simply wasn’t a downside.
She wasn’t buying it. Her voice was quavering, like we were in a car heading toward a cliff. “Do the people at Harper & Row know about . . . your intentions?”
“Of course! Why do you think they bought it?”
Okay, that was stretching it. Harper & Row (now HarperCollins, and still my publisher after forty years) was angling for a stylish New York Times bestseller along the lines of Cyra McFadden’s The Serial, the franchise I had originated when I was still at the Pacific Sun. They even had plans to mimic that book by binding Tales in glossy cardboard with a spiral ring. That proved not to be cost effective, thank heavens, since I could never have looked Cyra in the face again. We ended up with a whimsical map of San Francisco on the cover (by Sausalito cartoonist Phil Frank) that was linked to a
key on the back identifying various locales in the book. There were no other words at all—nothing so bold as to say it was a novel. Many bookstores, out of confusion, ending up shelving Tales in the travel section.
And, despite my assurances to my mother, Harper & Row did not have big plans for me as a queer. Many of its executives, still tiptoeing around their own sexuality, or denying it outright, had squirmed noticeably when I sailed into the offices at East Fifty-Third Street full of my recent liberation—Scarlett O’Hara arriving at the ball in her red dress. My own editor, a bow-tied, old-world bachelor, was so vague about his life after work that he seemed not to have one at all beyond a weekly card game with friends. I told him I wasn’t asking for a naked male torso on the cover—a cliché the publishing world would eventually employ ad nauseam once it realized there was a market out there—just some tiny bit of text to indicate that this was a novel that could appeal to people like me and their friends. He gave me the weariest of Old World New York sighs and said, “Oh, Armistead . . . toujours gai, toujours gai!”
I had had high hopes for that first of the Tales novels. Rock Hudson had lent me his modest gravel-roofed getaway house in Bermuda Dunes, so I could work for a week on reassembling and, in some cases, reimagining the first year’s worth of columns. At one point I put them all on the living room floor and rearranged them like a Rubik’s Cube, discovering new ways to heighten suspense and develop themes. How could this not be a bestseller? To get on the New York Times list all you needed (I had heard) were book sales of roughly fifty thousand; “Tales” had grabbed ten times that many readers in the Chronicle. Surely, some of them would want the story in permanent form, or would at least tell their friends about it.
Not nearly enough of them did. They thought they knew the story already. Harper & Row took 25,000 returns on that mysterious map-covered book. It was as if Tales of the City had entered the Witness Protection Program and successfully disappeared. I would eventually build a readership for the subsequent books through the pioneering LGBT bookstores that were popping up across America in the 1970s, among them Unicorn Books and A Different Light in Los Angeles, Walt Whitman Books in San Francisco, Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop in New York City, Giovanni’s Room in Philadelphia, White Rabbit in Raleigh, Glad Day Bookshop in Boston, and Lambda Rising in Washington, D.C. When Gay’s the Word in London imported the books they were seized in 1984 by Maggie Thatcher’s customs agents as part of “a conspiracy to import indecent material.”