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Good Reading : September 2007
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SEPTEMBER 2007 ı goodreading 9 Armistead Maupin is coming to Australia this month.The 63-year- old writer who evokes his love for libertine San Francisco in the episodic ‘Tales of the City’ series also loves the easygoing feel of Sydney, but he’s especially looking forward to the reaction of his husband, Christopher Turner, who has never seen this country before. You read correctly.Turner is Maupin’s husband.Their meeting sounds like a wickedly comical detail from a Maupin book: the author first saw the 44-year-old website producer and photographer’s picture on the gay intergenerational dating website Turner owns, daddyhunt. com (company slogan: ‘wiser, stronger, hotter’), and then chased him down Castro Street, the famously gay strip in the famously gay city.Their bond runs deep: Maupin and Turner married in Vancouver on 18 February this year. Life informs art. Maupin’s new book, Michael Tolliver Lives, marks a return to the key character, Michael, or ‘Mouse’, from the ‘Tales of the City’ series after an 18-year hiatus. Michael is 55, an HIV- positive man who never expected to live past 40 and is now married to a younger partner, Ben, 33, whom he met over the internet. But 28 Barbary Lane has long been sold to Hong Kong investors, and its inhabitants have scattered. Anna Madrigal, the transsexual marijuana- growing landlady whose name is an anagram for ‘a man and a girl’, is 85 and ailing, and there is a new female-to-male transsexual character, too, as well as cameos from old favourites. The author placed a third-person narrative distance between himself and his rainbow family of characters in his six ‘Tales of the City’ novels between 1978 and 1989, whose short, snappy chapters reflected the series’ original newspaper serial format.They translated beautifully to the screen when the first three books were made into three TV mini-series in 1994, 1998 and 2001, star- ring Olympia Dukakis and Laura Linney, with two actors, first Marcus D’Amico and then Paul Hopkins, playing Michael. This new book consists entirely of Michael speaking in first person, no longer being called Mouse. Maupin wanted to ‘inhabit Michael more’, he says on the line from San Francisco, the slight southern drawl of North Carolina where he was raised in evidence. Could there be a screen adaptation of this new book to follow, given last year’s film adaptation of Maupin’s 2000 novel The Night Listener? ‘I don’t think that’s likely to happen, but you never know,’ Maupin says.Why ever not? ‘Probably because of the inter- generational relationship in the book. It’s interesting; for Christopher and me that’s the least sensational part of the novel, but it’s amazing how many people see [Michael and Ben’s relationship] as courageous or even disgusting.’ Maupin sees a ‘shocking’ level of bigotry towards couples with a large age gap. ‘Christopher has been attracted to older men ever since he was a teenager. He’s always found that was an additional closet, you know? The assumption is money and power is exchanged for youth and beauty. There’s often no consideration that there might be a genuine attraction there.’ How important was it to portray Michael Tolliver, at 55, as sexually active? ‘It’s as important as it is for me at 63 to make that point,’ Maupin laughs. ‘One of the things I’m saying is that being HIV-positive is far from being a death sentence, but it does carry with it a tre- mendous burden, and a lot of men have resolved to live their life to the fullest, in spite of the pressures of that diagnosis.’ As ever with Maupin, it’s a book brimming with lovely surprises, coin- cidences and black humour, even as life gets more serious.There are no hocks for the true fans, of course, who, like his characters, make for rainbow audiences at Maupin book signings: gay men, lesbians, straight women and men, transsexuals travelling both ways along the gender line, and very tiny people (in 1992, Maupin wrote Maybe the Moon about a female heterosexual Jewish dwarf, a character based on his 79-centimetre tall friend, the late actress Tamara De Treaux). Does Maupin consciously aim to provide a subtle education on accepting difference? ‘I take things that are new and challenging to me and examine them, in the hope that other people do the same,’ he says. Or, as the wizened Anna Madrigal crisply puts it to the ageing Michael: ‘You don’t have to keep up, dear.You just have to keep open.’ The temptation with Maupin is to greedily gobble his tales, but the man also writes beautiful sentences that deserve to be savoured. ‘It doesn’t come easily,’ he says. ‘I spend a long time get- ting the rhythms right. It certainly doesn’t spill out of me in the first draft.’ The good news for Maupin fans is that there’s more: he’s just inked a con- tract to write a new book, a return to the dramatic potential of a large ensemble of characters. Michael will be there, and no doubt some other old favourites too. Michael Tolliver Lives is published this month by Doubleday, rrp $32.95. Journalist Steve Dow’s non-fiction book Gay, a collec- tion of essays on contemporary gay themes. was published in 2001. In 1997 he was shortlisted for a Walkley Award for magazine writing for ‘Jay’s Story’ in Good Weekend. American writer ARMISTEAD MAUPIN, of ‘Tales of the City’ fame, talks to STEVE DOW about his new book Michael Tolliver Lives. up close cautionary tales
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