Armistead Maupin
Armistead Maupin is an openly gay American novelist best known for his engaging storytelling and dedication to portraying diverse human experiences. Born in Washington, D.C., in 1944 and raised in the conservative South, Maupin's early life was shaped by traditional values and family expectations. After graduating from the University of North Carolina, he pursued a brief career in journalism and served in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam War, where he received commendations for his service.
Maupin's significant contribution to literature began with his serial "Tales of the City," first published in the San Francisco Chronicle in the 1970s. The series, which features a cast of vibrant characters and reflects the cultural landscape of San Francisco, became a cultural touchstone and was later adapted into acclaimed television miniseries. Throughout his career, Maupin has continued to explore themes of identity, love, and the impact of the AIDS crisis, drawing on personal experiences, including a long-term relationship with a gay rights activist.
Maupin's work has garnered numerous accolades, and he remains a prominent figure in LGBTQ literature. His later novels and memoirs further expand on his life's narrative, demonstrating his evolution as a writer and individual. In addition to his literary achievements, Maupin has embraced a life of advocacy and celebration of human diversity, solidifying his legacy in contemporary fiction.
Subject Terms
Armistead Maupin
American novelist
- Born: May 13, 1944
- Place of Birth: Washington, DC
Biography
Armistead Jones Maupin, Jr. is an openly gay novelist known primarily for his casual storytelling style and passionate desire to present an inclusive portrait of the universal human experience. Born in Washington, DC, in 1944, Maupin was the eldest of three children. His family was descended from a Confederate general, and he grew up in the conservative environment of Raleigh, North Carolina, in the 1950s and 1960s. Maupin’s father, Armistead Jones Maupin, Sr., was a leading Southern lawyer who wished for his son to follow in his footsteps. While growing up, Maupin explored his early creative impulses by acting in local theater productions with his mother, Diana Jane Barton, an amateur actor.
Maupin graduated from the University of North Carolina (UNC) in 1966 with a Bachelor of Arts in English. Following his father’s wishes, he abandoned his English studies to enter UNC’s law school. After failing his first-year exams, however, he quit school. He worked as a reporter at the WRAL television station in Raleigh with conservative senator Jesse Helms, one of the station’s executives. Maupin has said he shared Helms's political views at the time, though he later drastically changed his stance.
Maupin left the station shortly to enter the United States (US) Navy’s officer candidate school. He served as a communications officer in the Mediterranean region before volunteering for duty in Vietnam, where he served with the River Patrol Force as a lieutenant from 1967 to 1970. For his service, Maupin received the Navy Commendation Medal. After the war, he organized a group of American veterans to return to Vietnam and build homes for Vietnamese veterans with disabilities. For this effort, he received a presidential commendation from US President Richard Nixon in 1972 and the Freedom Leadership Medal from the Freedoms Foundation in 1973.
By 1970, Maupin had begun working as a journalist for the Charleston News & Courier in South Carolina, covering the military beat and writing occasional feature articles. He left the newspaper in 1971 to accept a year-long position with the Associated Press (AP) in San Francisco. This move from the conservative South to the more tolerant and liberal West Coast was a watershed in Maupin’s life. The atmosphere of tolerance and free expression he found in San Francisco encouraged him to publicly announce his identity as a proudly gay man in 1974.
After leaving the Associated Press in 1972, Maupin worked at a variety of jobs, including public relations account executive (1973), publicity organizer for the San Francisco Opera (1975), and commentator for KRON-TV (1979). His first job as a regular columnist came in 1974 when he began writing for the Pacific Sun newspaper. After an assignment covering an event known as “singles night,” in which single people went to a Safeway supermarket to find a date, Maupin created the character of Mary Ann Singleton and began writing a weekly fictional series for the paper.
Maupin left the Pacific Sun in 1976 and pitched his serial to the San Francisco Chronicle. The newspaper quickly picked up the idea, and Tales of the City was born. The highly popular, eight-hundred-word daily installments followed several characters, including Mary Ann Singleton, who lived in a large, tumbledown boardinghouse at 28 Barbary Lane in San Francisco, with Anna Madrigal as the eccentric landlord of the house. In addition to providing entertainment, the series serves as a historical record of San Francisco’s culture, events, institutions, and local lifestyles from the mid-1970s through the late 1980s, including the emergence of the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) crisis in 1981.
Maupin briefly stopped writing the series in 1977 to collect and revise the installments into books. The first, Tales of the City, was published in 1978, followed by More Tales of the City in 1980. The San Francisco Chronicle ran a second series of installments from 1981 to 1983, from which the books Further Tales of the City (1982) and Babycakes (1984) were derived. Maupin’s ten-year relationship with gay rights activist Terry Anderson, which began in 1985, influenced the somber tone of the series' later books, as Anderson tested positive for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).
Maupin left the San Francisco Chronicle in 1986 and began writing his serial for the San Francisco Examiner under the title Significant Others, for the first time signing a book deal before beginning the series. The novels Significant Others (1987) and Sure of You (1989) concluded the stories of the Tales of the City characters. In 1991, the latter three novels were released as a single omnibus edition titled Back to Barbary Lane.
Maupin had first entered into discussions to turn his series into a film or television series in 1979, but the project was not realized until 1993 when the British television network Channel 4 adapted it into a six-hour miniseries. Although the series met with controversy when it aired in the United States on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in 1994, it won the prestigious Peabody Award and the National Board of Review Award for Best Film Made for Cable Television. In June 1998, the cable network Showtime adapted and aired the sequel, More Tales of the City.
Despite readers' pleas to continue the series, Maupin left his characters on Barbary Lane and went on to write Maybe the Moon (1992), the story of Cadence Roth, an actor and former Guinness Book record holder for “World's Shortest Mobile Adult Human” whose fame is concealed behind the costumes she must wear. In 2000, Maupin published The Night Listener, featuring a fifty-three-year-old gay writer and his relationship with an abused boy named Pete.
Although he had previously claimed to have finished the Tales of the City series, Maupin picked it up again in 2007 with Michael Tolliver Lives. This new installment features several original characters, including Madrigal, Singleton, and the title character. It highlights the changes that have taken place in the intervening years for both the characters and San Francisco as a whole. The series revival continued with Mary Ann in Autumn (2010) and The Days of Anna Madrigal (2014).
In 2004, Maupin started dating photographer and website entrepreneur Christopher Turner, whom he met by chance after first seeing Turner's profile on one of his websites. The couple were married in February 2007 in a ceremony in Vancouver, British Columbia. They held another wedding ceremony just outside San Francisco in October 2008, after same-sex marriage was legalized in California earlier that year. Maupin is so associated with San Francisco that his and Turner's 2012 move to Santa Fe, New Mexico, was reported in local newspapers. The couple returned to San Francisco in 2014. In 2019, the couple moved to London, and Maupin became a British citizen in 2023.
Maupin continued to publish, writing a memoir, Logical Family: A Memoir (2017), and another novel, Mona of the Manor (2024). In 2016, compilations of his best-loved novels were released in three parts: 28 Barbary Lane: The Tales of the City Books 1-3, Back to Barbary Lane: The Tales of the City Books 4-6, and Goodbye Barbary Lane: The Tales of the City Books 7-9. In 2018, Maupin's life and works were explored in the documentary The Untold Tales of Armistead Maupin.
Author Works
Long Fiction:
Tales of the City, 1976 (serial), 1978 (book)
More Tales of the City, 1977 (serial), 1980 (book)
Further Tales of the City, 1981 (serial), 1982 (book)
Babycakes, 1982 (serial), 1984 (book)
Significant Others, 1986 (serial), 1987 (book)
Sure of You, 1989
Twenty-eight Barbary Lane: A “Tales of the City” Omnibus, 1990
The Complete Tales of the City, 1991
Back to Barbary Lane: The Final “Tales of the City” Omnibus, 1991
Maybe the Moon, 1992
The Night Listener, 2000
Michael Tolliver Lives, 2007
Mary Ann in Autumn, 2010
The Days of Anna Madrigal, 2014
Mona of the Manor, 2024
Drama:
Beach Blanket Babylon, pr. 1975
La Perichole, pr. 1976 (libretto; music by Jacques Offenbach)
Heart’s Desire, pr. 1990 (musical; music by Glen Roven; adaptation of his short story “Suddenly Home”)
Edited Text:
The Essential Clive Barker: Selected Fiction, 1999
Bibliography
Bass, Barbara Kaplan. “Armistead Maupin.” Contemporary Gay American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. Edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, Greenwood, 1993 pp. 254–59.
Bram, Christopher. Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America. Twelve, 2012.
Gale, Patrick. Armistead Maupin. Absolute, 1999.
Kilmer-Purcell, Josh. "Love Stories: Armistead Maupin and Christopher Turner." The Advocate, 8 Oct. 2008, www.advocate.com/news/2008/10/08/love-stories-armistead-maupin-and-christopher-turner. Accessed 9 July 2024.
De Anda, Juan. "Final Tales: Q&A with Armistead Maupin on Concluding His Iconic San Francisco Series." SF Weekly, 27 Jan. 2014, www.sfweekly.com/culture/final-tales-qa-with-armistead-maupin-on-concluding-his-iconic-san-francisco-series. Accessed 9 July 2024.
Maupin, Armistead. Interview by Scott A. Hunt. Christopher Street, 23 Nov. 1992, pp. 8–12.
Maupin, Armistead. Interview. New Statesman and Society, 25 Mar. 1994, p. 13.
Shariatmadari, David, and Marina Kemp. “'Look at your Country! It's Amazing:' Armistead Maupin on Moving to London.” The Guardian, 24 Feb. 2024, www.theguardian.com/books/2024/feb/24/look-at-your-country-its-amazing-armistead-maupin-on-moving-to-london. Accessed 11 July 2024.
Turner, Christopher. “Biography of the Novelist, Speaker, Activist — Armistead Maupin.” Armistead Maupin, 19 Feb. 2014, www.armisteadmaupin.com/bio. Accessed 11 July 2024.