Meet Armistead Maupin
A few weeks ago, writer Armistead Maupin headlined at The Make-Out Room’s “Writer’s With Drinks” night. His passage was from recently published (and very X-Rated) “Michael Tolliver Lives,” number seven in his “Tales of The City” series of books.
The series is an on-point observation of The City and Its People during the explosive decades of the late 70s and early 80s; with the latest book alluding to a mid-2000s update. The volume’s framework spans social classes, sexual orientations, and genders — all in third person prose. This framework centers around the lives and careers of a small group of people who meet while renting individual apartments at the fictitious 28 Barbary Lane in the Russian Hill sector.
The first entries in the original book were initially published as a daily column, which was eventually picked up by The Chron in 1976 and later produced as a multi-season mini-series on PBS.
Mr. Maupin currently lives in Noe Valley with husband Christopher Turner.
I heard Armistead being interviewed on the radio about a year ago — he is pretty outrageous alright…
And I never could figure out what exactly went on inside “The Makeout Room” in the Mission District — my dirty mind has been working overtime on that one for quite some time now…
Hey, you met him, good for you!!! He’s a legend all over the world, you know!
Some of my friends here remember reading the original articles in the Chronicle when they first came out. I read a couple of the books, didn’t finish the series, though, but watched the PBS series with Olympia Dukakis.
I came to SF for the first time right at the end of that era, so I didn’t really see all that happening but it’s not too difficult to fill in the blanks. When I first came to SF (pre-AIDS days), SF still had bathhouses and there were guys walking (hustling?) down Market practically bare buttocks… then came the early/mid-80’s: no more guys, and all these homeless people instead. Clearly, fun time was over, you could kind of tell.
Things certainly have changed in SF, and some say, not for the best.
@ Donald Kinney: maybe people used to make out at The Make-Out Room, but its pretty low profile in there these days…