Logical Family: A Memoir

by Armistead Maupin

My mother must have changed the subject as soon as the truth was known, distracting me with a Little Golden Book or an antiques store. (I enjoyed antiquing at a revealingly early age.)

She was in her late thirties; in another fifty years she would be dead. As it turned out my figures were off considerably.

shaky and doty, delicate shorthand for Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

I GOT OFF easily, I guess, as Southern boyhoods went, since my father never insisted on guns or sports.

Eddie was “a little bit sissy,” and if we were close friends, “people might get the wrong idea.” I had never had that idea myself; I just thought he liked movies.

It’s hard for the South to get things right from the start, because, ever since the Civil War, it has taught itself to equate righteousness with losing. We must be on the right track, y’all, because everyone else is against us.

Oh, what a prissy Aunt Pittypat I was.

the lonely spinster, Miss Alma, whose yearning for love would always destroy the chance of it;

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.

spring was exploding across the street in a riot of pale-green buds and pink dogwoods. (Were they actually pink? I don’t remember for sure. They felt pink.)

It’s an old trick of mine: banish every thought from your head except the one that’s tormenting you and you’ll soon grow weary of it.

EVERY ASPIRING WRITER knows the drill: you take a lackluster office job because you need to eat and pay the rent, but the writing you do at work (if you’re lucky enough even to be doing that) drains you so much that you don’t feel like writing at night.

my mother, despite her occasional contradictions, should have always been my guide. I had wasted my youth trying to be my father.

“Not until my mother dies,” he said. I laughed, because there was truth in it. We queers can be so afraid of losing our mother’s love.

Then Rock said: “Well, I should be over there, or you should be over here.” I wondered how often that line had worked for him, since it was certainly working now. One of us joined the other.

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.

The truth is that back then there were many such homegrown eccentrics still tucked into the nooks and crannies of San Francisco. Hard to imagine, I know, in a time when quaintness is just another selling point on an Airbnb listing. I cringe when real estate agents today describe any property with wooden back stairs and a bit of shrubbery as “a real Tales of the City charmer.” There is nothing charming about those prices. And the people who might have lived in such a place once upon a time, myself included, could not even contemplate living there today.

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. When jealousy arose, as it inevitably did upon occasion, Isherwood took it as proof he wasn’t indifferent. “It’s so French,” he once told me not long before he died, “that thing of not being jealous.”

She remained single throughout her twenties and recommended that course of action to everyone. “Just wait, Teddy,” she had told me many times. “You don’t know who you are until you’re thirty. You’re in no position to judge anything.”

He claimed—as my brother, Tony, would later claim—that his political beliefs were independent of his love for me. 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.