Logical Family: A Memoir

by Armistead Maupin

If you want to feel even more like a duck, try walking like a pigeon.

To this day I can conjure Mimi up by singing the song that Leslie Caron sang in the movie, the one about love and how sad it is. Mimi, I realize, must have found that all too true.

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.

“Any woman who is all woman or any man who is all man is a complete monster unfit for human company.”

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

I felt old because I had strangled my youth, and I could not for the life of me imagine what lay ahead.

I attended a memorial service during which a toothy coed with a histrionic streak recited the famous lines from Romeo and Juliet: “and, when he shall die, / Take him and cut him out in little stars, / And he will make the face of heaven so fine / That all the world will be in love with night . . .”

I felt listless and empty, a sorry impersonator of whatever it was I was trying to be.

I sat there on the bench for several minutes, berating myself for all the time I’d wasted running scared, the long, anemic nothingness of my youth.

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

Before spring was over he wrote me from New York on that sexy stationery and told me about the new play he was doing, the new soap. I combed his words for some tiny clue that he couldn’t live without me, but I sensed a de-escalation of ardor, the breezy banter of one friend writing another. Which is terrifying when you’re determined to be in love.

He endures mostly in the hearts of those who received his particular magic at a particular time, but he endures nonetheless.

when he was with you he paid complete attention, and sometimes, when you needed it most, that could feel like forever.

This was not a march or even a protest. It was a conscious act of love in response to a conscious act of barbarism. It was the very best of us made visible.

He didn’t try to push his way past the police barricades; he had come into Harvey’s life too late to be a part of his official history. He had just been in love with the guy.

He was so self-contained that he could snuggle in anywhere and make it home.

a gracious plenty,

His sleeping hours, tucked into bed next to Don, were the only ones that never felt squandered.

His mother had died when he was twelve, his father when he was twenty-two; he was more than experienced in the art of pressing on.

Such moments are all the god I’ll ever need.

“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.”

I had found a home out West that would love me for myself.

“How will I know you?” I asked.