Logical Family: A Memoir

by Armistead Maupin

my mother believed in the curative power of letters.

He told me he was gay like me but not very good at it.

He seemed so profoundly sad.

It took me another quarter of a century to level with her.

My youth would be like that, the slow decay of cherished myths—about politics and race, about love itself—until nothing was left but compost from which something authentic could finally begin to grow.

But what struck me most about that fading artifact was how profoundly innocent it seemed to me in late middle age. I was hard-pressed to remember how the very sight of Demigods had once scorched me with shame and dread,

How could I have guessed then that the thing I feared most in myself would one day be the source of my greatest joy, the inspiration for my life’s work.

Grannie built a nest out of old mattresses in her cool basement laundry room where I could curl up with my “Uncle Scrooge” comics and feast on buttered bread and iced tea,

Grannie first began reading my palm, gently interrogating me about all my lives, past and present.

palmistry was her excuse for offering t...

but she knew about me. She knew.

Grannie became a comfort in the minefield of my adolescence.

she made no assumptions (and held no expectations) about my blossoming masculinity.

He made me think how nice it would be to live with a boy forever.

Show me a man who doesn’t eat out his wife, and I’ll show you a wife I can steal from that man.”

easy enough to say that he was still angling for the love of his father, because, obviously, he was.

The lid was locked down for fear of what might escape.

a life of manly tenderness in the ocean air?

Without telling them the whole truth, I tapped into my wounded heart and let them see it for a full ten minutes, exactly.

That’s how I won the Mangum Medal for Oratory, the university’s oldest student award and the one of which I remain most proud to this day. It was my first real lesson in storytelling, in connecting intimately with an audience. Let them see enough of the truth to make them believe you.

It was the nicest lie he ever told me, since I knew how much he loved his practice and how much his heart was breaking.

That’s the worst thing you can say about anybody. It’s an abomination.”

In those days I was too filled with fear and self-loathing to read anyone’s signals with any degree of accuracy.

I had already gotten very good at using women to distract from my truth.

Mourning seemed a permanent state there, just as longing was for me.

I felt listless and empty, a sorry impersonator of whatever it was I was trying to be. Something had to change, and fast. And I knew what it was.

I felt like a freshly minted human being.

I had finally held another man’s naked body against mine and the world had not come to an end.

Yes, I had passed the point of no return, but it was not at all what I’d imagined, not the death of innocence, but the birth...

I had already been required to sit in on the general-discharge proceedings for a gay sailor who’d been caught in the act.

It made me feel as if I had family in this sandbagged corner of the world.

Vietnamese men had no issues with being tactile. They would link pinkies while walking in the street along the river, and the sailors out on the patrol boats would spoon with each other to keep out the chill when sleeping on deck at night.

Nothing in my life to that point had ever invoked such a bittersweet sense of love’s fleeting joy.

“We have got to call a spade a spade,” Helms said, “and a perverted human being is a perverted human being.”

Maybe he cringed at Zumwalt’s candor about Agent Orange because it suggested that a father’s love for his son was more important than anything else.

And every one of them, the beautiful Barbara included, seemed to accept, without a scrap of discernible judgment, that I belonged in that room with Curt.

It was then that I saw how life could be if you let it happen.

Which is terrifying when you’re determined to be in love.

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.

“Not until my mother dies,”

We queers can be so afraid of losing our mother’s love.

The disconnect was just impossible. And he understood this all too well. This wasn’t his first time at the lost boner rodeo.

I was losing all respect for the closet by then, including, of course, my own.

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.

Gay people could not reproduce, she argued, so they were forced to “recruit children” for their lifestyle.

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.

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.

as a choral piece by David Maddux that has become a standard for gay men’s choruses around the world.

It had been a love letter to them, after all.