Logical Family: A Memoir

by Armistead Maupin

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 know this feeling and line of reasoning only too well.

they were seized in 1984 by Maggie Thatcher’s customs agents as part of “a conspiracy to import indecent material.” That’s when I knew I was on my way.

a former running back in the National Football League and the first professional athlete to come out of the closet.

He got a huge laugh from all of us, owning the moment completely, showing my friends he wasn’t nearly the stuffed shirt they’d imagined him to be.

I looked again and saw my parents about forty feet away. They were holding on to each other in the midst of all that heartbroken humanity. They had not taken a cab to their hotel after all but followed the river of light to its destination.

He never dodged his sexuality with coy semantics, the way Gore Vidal did, or equated it with decadence like Truman Capote and way too many others. He was sassy in his public presentation, but never bitchy. Kindness, in fact, seemed important to him.

Chris and Don distinguished fidelity from monogamy, preferring, as my Chris and I do, the durability of the former to the folly of making sex the deal-breaker in a union between men.

“life gets so much simpler once you’ve narrowed it to one other person.”

I remember thinking at that moment: This is how it should be. This is how the camaradarie of queers can span generations, offering solace between young and old, bonding us through friendship and sex and art.

Your tribe, as Isherwood called it, becomes a source of great sustenance. A terrible weight that you have borne for years becomes apparent by its sudden absence.

Our friends were dying, and we had lost patience with people whose silence perpetuated the notion that there was shame in being queer.

I had been consumed with my new life in San Francisco, tethered to the golden shore by carnal self-discovery and a never-ending story in the newspaper that demanded my attention on a daily basis. Or so I had always assured myself.

“You’ll feel a little breeze in the room,” she said. The Madwoman’s eyes were dancing as she built the drama. “And when you turn around . . . there will be no one there.”

To me that meant that his love for me simply wasn’t important enough to make him challenge the relentless fag-bashing of his party.

I should be grateful for his tolerance, he seemed to be saying, since I was the one who wasn’t playing by the rules. So I withdrew.

To me this was just one last chance to be hurt,

It was just an instruction, delivered almost brusquely, but in that moment of our last goodbye, it felt like a benediction.