 Is there anyone in the house who hasn't read Tales of the City? Oh, good. So there's new fans all the time. Excellent. Have them taken away. I was trying to figure out if we had to worry about spoilers, but do you have to worry about spoilers for a 40 year old novel? You do. It's really, it's strange. You do, depending on who's in the audience, you know, I think it might be, we can probably let go of the spoiler alert tonight. I'll try to be careful. But it is a really good question because it does happen when people stand up in the middle of the room and say, how could you have done that to Mona and three other people look around and what happened to Mona? And then they get really mad. You ruined it. Well, we're going to talk all about San Francisco, but first, before we do that, I have to just say North Carolina. Who knew North Carolina would be letting same-sex couples get married? I know. Wow. Wow, yeah. Oh, Jesse is a rotisserie right now. Here's a secret. It's not a secret. I would like it to be, but it's not. That I was a young conservative in North Carolina. Oh, don't start hissing like a bunch of... Already? I worked for Jesse Helms at... He's dead, relax. He's dead. Jesse Helms sent me off on assignment to cover a Ku Klux Klan rally in Raleigh. He was executive vice president of the local TV station. That's how he came to power. He started doing these little five-minute editorials where he had a very sugar-coated version of all that is terrible. About the land that I loved back in those days. And so he sent me off to a Klan rally. He was doing a roundup the vote. Well, he wasn't a senator yet. He was just this mean little guy who drooled out of the side of his mouth in a very disturbing way. And who, I have to say, he took a very, very avuncular interest in me as a budding young conservative. That was both kind and just a tiny bit creepy. But I remember coming back, let me just spring onto this story, if I may. Absolutely. It's your day. Imperial Wizard told me that there was controversy at the time in Raleigh, because Dean Rusk, the secretary of state, had a daughter who had just married an African-American man. It was all the buzz. And I asked the Imperial Wizard what he thought about that, trying to be a provocative reporter. And he said he thought that Dean Rusk was a liberal and he didn't see any reason in the world why this shouldn't happen to his family. And besides, what else would you expect from a man who was a practicing homosexual? So I came back to the station and when I was thinking, boy, I've got a great story for tonight, you know. Completely disconnected from my own reality. You know, fantasizing about men knowing I was gay, not having acted on it ever, or sex with anybody. And I told Jesse that I had this story that the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan just said that the secretary of state was gay. And Jesse kind of blanched and said, oh, it's not a story. You can't. That's the worst thing you can say about anybody. That's the worst thing. We could never do that to that man. That's the worst thing you can say about anybody. So when you were told by the AP that you were going to be a reporter in San Francisco, were you just like, jackpot? Yes, I was. I was very excited, especially since they had previously offered me Buffalo. Tales of Buffalo. Yeah, doesn't quite work. I was living in Charleston at the time, a city that I absolutely love, a beautiful, beautiful romantic city that has all the trappings of San Francisco in terms of that of lore and architecture and all those things that cause gay men to settle in those particular areas. And so when the offer came, I went up to New York to interview for the AP. And so I went into this thing. It looked like an isolation booth on an old-fashioned TV show, you know, and it was a glass all around. And they put me in there with a typewriter and some paper and all of the details of at least Lucille Ball's recent wedding to Gary Morton, her wonderful husbands. And I had to make it into an AP story. And I wrote, you know, Bowsons throng the sidewalks as America's favorite redhead, blah, blah, blah. And they deemed to me acceptable and said, well, you'll get our next opening. So I got a call in Charleston when I was working the paper there and they said, we're happy to offer you the Buffalo office. And I talked to this woman, this old-timey woman in Charleston that I knew and she said, honey, no matter what they tell you, Buffalo is no place to shuffle off to. And so I turned them down and then they called back and they said we had an opening in the San Francisco Bureau. And I had seen it on my way to and from Vietnam and had, you know, tried to see myself there. So how long before you in San Francisco before you like met a really hot guy and got to go home with him? And got stoned with him? Well, I said go home with him. Oh, go home with him. But probably stoned is just as important in this particular moment. I only asked because the stoning came a little later. First you get laid, then you get stoned. Well, first you get laid, then you get hepatitis. Then you have to go back to North Carolina to live with your parents because, you know, you have to need someone to keep an eye on you while you have hepatitis. Some things never change. Some things never change. Then you come back and the doctor says you can't drink for a while. And somebody else said, oh, I have just the thing for you. And it was. I've preferred it to drinking never since. I sort of have this image of you, you know, you're writing this serialized story for the Chronicle. And I'm thinking, so are you sort of just running around San Francisco like looking everywhere you can for details to put into the serialized thing? Or is it sort of coming to you? Are people saying, well, I've got a story. I was running around getting laid. You hit it right earlier. I mean, I was just, I was in my glory. I was discovering, you know, I found bathhouses when I first got here. And I remember early describing them to people. It's amazing. It's like a Minoan bath in there. Except they have, you know, nine grain bread with sprouts and sandwiches at the bathhouse that you can eat on the big velvet puff thing in the quarter. I thought that was glorious. I didn't think about that being at all icky. And they don't serve that sandwich at blow buddies. They don't serve that. There was a time, wasn't there, when the culinary aspect was removed from the sexual arenas, wasn't it? Yeah, they just cleared out all the sandwiches and put poppers bottles. Well, that's how you know when a bookstore is going downhill, you know. When you see the poppers by the cash register, you know they're diversifying. I'm such a bad old man. I should just shut up. No, we've still got an hour or so. So, yeah, talk a little about how the tales of the city were born in the newspaper for people who remember newspapers in the audience. Yeah, where did it start? Was it your idea that somebody say to you, young reporter, why don't you give us some fiction? How did that happen? The short version, I was writing for the Pacific Sun, which is still there and doing feature stories for them, sort of around the town column. A woman friend of mine said, you will not believe what happens down at the Marina Safeway on Wednesday nights. And so I went down and I observed this extraordinary heterosexual mating ritual of the women in the rhinestone-studded brush denim pantsuits with like two items in their cart, chatting up similarly duded up guys in the vegetable department. I'm told that it still goes on. I've talked to some young people who say they call it dateway. But I'm just imagining them there standing there, you know, looking at their cell phones in the vegetable department. But I couldn't write a nonfiction story on it because I couldn't get anybody to admit that they went to the grocery store to get laid. So I made up Mary Ann Singleton and in a one-off, Mary Ann Singleton goes to the Safeway. It's the thing that's still in the miniseries with Connie Bradshaw and the carts. And she meets the guy that's finally meets the guy that's not a creep and he's there with his boyfriend. And it was sort of struck a nerve in 1974, I guess it was, and they asked me if I'd keep on writing it. So I did like five episodes for the Pacific Sun bouncing around the things that I knew about. So there was like a bathhouse chapter and I had to introduce a gay male character. Well, he was already there from the Marina Safeway and it started to grow. And then I had always had an address in mind, a sort of fantasy address that I would write about one day. It was 28 Barbie Lane. And Charles McCabe, I don't know how long to make this story, but it's kind of interesting. Charles McCabe, if you remember the grand old columnist from The Chronicle. Oh no, just dead out there. Oh, Charles would hate that. But he was a big red faced, homophobic, misogynistic, drunken Irishman who thought all homosexuals in the world were bad except for me. The summaries and he took a liking to me and he had read the thing in the Pacific Sun and said, I think we need something like this in The Chronicle. So he brought me in to meet the Terriot family and the whole thing started. And then they started figuring out there were queers proliferating in this day to day column. Was it every day? It was five days a week. Any writers in the house shivering at that idea? Five days a week? I didn't know enough to be afraid of it as I would be now. They just plowed in and then let things, you know, things started happening. And then they started coming to me. You know, somebody said, if you think the Marina Safeway is something, you should go to the laundromat down at, it's down in Calhalla somewhere. And I went down there to check it out because it was supposed to be a big single scene. And it was called the Come Clean Center. It was a gift, you know. So it was, you know, then I'd seek things out. I'd hear that there was a coed bath house opening on Valencia Street called the Sutro Baths. Coed meaning that men and women would go there. I guess it was sort of largely, it must have been a big, it must have been our early bi-population, as well as a certain number of women who just wanted to fix a fag. And I thought, wouldn't that be funny if Brian, my raving heterosexual character gets all excited about this and goes down to the Sutro Baths to get laid and meets this total babe who's ready to hop in the sack with him. And she begins with, how long have you been gay? And he goes to, I'm not gay, it's okay. So this is whole, he ends up having to scrounge up some experience at camp when he was 13 years old to certify his homosexuality to this woman. And I thought, I was kind of proud of having that twist on, that sort of twist on things that early. Brian is a big character in the first book and all the way up to the ninth book. I mean, Brian, spoiler alert, Brian survives. But I love him, I love him. He's a fabulous character because when I just reread the first book and I thought, he's kind of a dick. And I sort of think of all these characters fondly, but when you actually go back and sort of reread some of the books they're actually quite complex. And one of the great moments is when Brian and Maus, Michael, who are living in the same rooming house, wind up sunbathing side by side. And I imagine that must have been a very novel thing at the time to have an out gay guy and a non-homophobic straight guy hanging out. Talking in generic terms about going out to get laid. And then they go out somewhere where they can both pick someone up, or pick separate people up together. Split up a couple was what Michael said. But it was, yeah, I was just celebrating that thing that sustains me to this day, which is some very tender heterosexual male friendships. You know, these guys through no accident also are, you know, great husbands and to their wives. And I wanted to celebrate that. I wanted to actually sort of crack the notion that it was utopian to suggest that the people who lived at 28 Bar-Bri-Layne would never have lived there for real because I saw it happening all around me. There's a moment where Michael's dating John, who's a gynecologist. Or maybe it's the moment when they're not dating quite so closely. But John goes off to, you know, what I guess we'd call the a gay group. Now a lot of the things in the book seem like they're still very current. But there was something about that moment where I thought, does this still exist where there are these sort of wealthy, closeted men who get together, and I mean, do you think the closet exists in the same way? Not in the same way. Those men still exist. God knows. I don't get invited to their parties. Well, I called it the decorarchy in the books because it was ruled by some very, very, you know, high-flown queens of fashion and design who were extraordinarily racist, you know. The maid would come in and lay the food down at the table. And if they were talking about something they didn't want the maid to hear, he would go. Meaning, brown skin in the room. So a character like Michael Tolliver, who's really the main gay protagonist in the first book, was he someone that you modeled after anyone in particular? Or was he a little of yourself and a little of friends? A little of me and a little of what I wanted to go to bed with. I spilled it enough to fantasy to give him life and then used, you know, tried to use some of my own foibles. I certainly didn't. I would never have gotten into a jockey-short stance contest. I would have in a million years. But I did meet a guy at the Twin Peaks one night, very handsome, preppy guy who was really coming on strong who, when we got to his house, said, you know what really turns me on about you? Your Ouijins. That's the old penny loafers we wore in the old days. It was like a preppy signifier. And boy did he like Ouijins. I got to his house and he had framed pictures of Ouijins on the walls. Just the Ouijins, you know. He had an ad in the ad for years that said Bass Ouijins. This is not news to people who've read the novel because it's there in the novel. But the detail that I didn't have at the time that I wish I'd had was that he was the desk, he was the night clerk at the Huntington Hotel, which was the last hotel at the time that would shine your shoes if you left them outside the door at night. And this guy would prowl the hall looking for Ouijins. I don't know what surprises the owners found in the morning. I can't even begin to imagine. And that's your Halloween story for tonight. Costume idea, the clerk at the Huntington Hotel. Did you have a sense when you were writing, I mean you're writing for the Chronicle, which goes out to everyone in the city, and yet you're also writing about fetishes and you're writing about underground nightlife. Did you have a sense of how you were supposed to balance those things, or did you just wait for the editors to tell you you can't do that? Yeah, I pretty much waited for them to tell me. So you would push it as far as you could? Yeah, and it would vary it all the time. And I'd have these ridiculous conversations, what do you mean I can't say shit? I said shit last week. That was part of a word, that was shit-kicker. I personally think shit-kicker is much worse than shit, in the scheme of things, but yeah, it was a constant battle with them in that regard. But I sort of knew, and I ended up using a lot of, because I couldn't do fuck as an expletive, I ended up using a lot of Jesus and God damn it, more than I would ever in my own life. And there were people who finally wrote and said, have you got anything against Christians? And I thought it was a fair enough question. I'm because of your Calvinist lord in our culture. I can't say the word fuck, so I have to say the name of your lord. It's funny how that worked out. Yeah. So you started out writing really just following these leads like the Safeway and the Come Clean Laundromat, and then at some point was it like, I'm writing a novel in pieces, and what was that sort of realization for you? Did you have to think, oh boy I gotta think about where this is all going? The computer was adjusted basically, is what happened. By the time I'd gotten to Baby Cakes, no, yeah Baby Cakes, the English American one. Which is the fourth in the series. Yeah, the fourth. I knew what I was doing, and I realized that it would take like four daily episodes to make one chapter, and I was thinking in terms of both the novel and the daily column as I was writing. And I had, you know, in all of the books I've had a real shot at working on it when it was done. It was my first draft, and people sort of say reverentially, I want to go out and print out all your early newspaper columns as I think, please don't. Right. I don't want you to see that mess. Let's talk about perhaps the most beloved character in the books, Mrs. Madrigal. I was really interested, okay so maybe this is a spoiler, I was interested to learn that Mrs. Madrigal's identity is not fully explained or revealed in the first volume of Tales of the City. Yeah. You know, they also blur together. I think we can say transgender because I'm proud of it. Yeah, so in the first book when you read it, she's just Mrs. Madrigal, she's Anna. Yeah. And there's this hint that a black male plot is afoot. Right. That someone knows her secret and it doesn't come out right away. But it was interesting to me that it didn't come out in the first book. Was that a conscious choice? You know, I owe that to the chronicle, the pristiness of the chronicle. Because I told, I said Mrs. Madrigal is a transsexual, I think was the term I used at the time. And, oh well you can't, you cannot do that. Not the first year. You can't do that for the first year. It, here's my favorite part. It will upset the people in the sunset. I lived on Russian Hill, but that was kind of frightening sounding, the people in the sunset. They sound like a twilight hoard. Really? Yeah. But that's exactly the way, that's exactly the way they demonized the readership. And they had very little idea of what was happening in the city. So when I introduced, when I responded to Anita Bryant the day after she announced her campaign in the San Francisco Chronicle through my character, they were fighting me like crazy, saying why does anybody in San Francisco care what's going on in South Florida? They didn't even have a dream that, you know, we were riding the crest of an enormous movement. And that was my exhilaration. I have to say, I really want to stress that since I've been given this wonderful opportunity by the library. Thank you very much. This is crazy good to see yourself up in a bus shelter like an Amsterdam whore. It's just a, it's, it's intensely satisfying. I have lingered on the Muni platform far longer than I should have. So how many selfies have you taken with you? Oh, just a few. How do I keep that x-lax ad out of the side though? It's been very satisfying. And, and, and I'm most, I'm, what I'm really proud of is that I feel that I have been part of a revolution. I've been a literary component of a revolution. And, and I've, that's what's mattered to me the most throughout my career. The first it wasn't that obvious because I was having such a good time. It was just my life. And then, you know, having to, having, vowing when AIDS came along to just follow come hell or high water. I kind of chickened out in 1989 with Michael because he was HIV positive and I thought he was going to die. And I didn't want to write a story in which the gay man died at the end. And so it was, it was the most thrilling thing in the world was to realize what I wanted to write a new novel. Then I wanted to be about an HIV positive man in his fifties and who's living in San Francisco today. Sort of something that might echo in Christopher Isherwood's a single man, you know, because we all love that book, everybody, every writer I know does. And, and then I realized I had such a guy in Michael Toliver and that he would be alive. And so, you know, it wasn't, it was wonderful to be able to hop back on board the train after my big share exit in 1989. You are the share of writers. Like you've had a hit every decade, right? It's like, for like five decades or something. I know, I don't think. I've been very lucky. I've been very blessed. So let's talk about AIDS because it, you know, you start writing this book in San Francisco during the golden age of promiscuity and everybody is having sex with everybody else in the first book. You know, it's, it's even to, even to, you know, our liberated eyes today when I read the book, I was like, wow, everybody is fucking everybody else in this book. That's why it's so warm. The 70s are so friendly. But of course you didn't know, none of us knew that AIDS was coming along. And I'm not sure what that moment would have been like. I'm a little too young to sort of remember the exact beginning of the epidemic. But do you want to talk about that for you? Well, it was a single thing in my life as it is with most of us in the beginning when the epidemic came along. It was just personal. It was someone you knew or maybe a headline on New York magazine that said the gay plague and had everybody talking. But I had a little brother in my extended family who was 25 and had moved to New York to work for Perry Ellis and was just the sweetest guy. He was loved by so many people. And he got one of the first people to die of pneumocystis pneumonia and went very quickly. And we were just gobsmacked, the people in our little household that knew this guy. And then of course it was happening all around us. We were seeing it everywhere. It's so hard to encapsulate this thing, isn't it? It really is. The panic and the fear and the horrible, horrible dread that we were going to lose the liberation we had earned because we'd been found out to be naughty boys and they were going to punish us for it. All of the residual Calvinist guilt that so many of us had to shake off when we came from somewhere else and came rushing back in the midst of terrible suffering and all of that. So I resolved that I was going to have one of the characters die off screen and then show the response to it. It was my version of the death of little Nell in Dickens. I mean people were furious. How dare you spoil my light morning entertainment with your political campaign. That's when I realized that so many of my brothers and sisters were not fully connected to their own true good selves yet. We could so easily miss that connection. But this was the city that rallied really. That's when one more thing San Francisco can be proud about. This city really rallied in every direction. The women, lesbians came in and were ready to roll in terms of caring for people and all of that. Some things are constants and then some things change and I just want to read a line from very early in Tales of the City. Marianne is looking for an apartment quote. She wanted to view a deck and a fireplace for under one hundred and seventy five dollars a month. You're laughing but I wept. One hundred and seventy five won't even get you a bad hotel room. I haven't got any of those things right now. I have a cornice. I'm getting off on Edwardian architectural details. But we can do it with everything. I'm kind of loving living in our modest abode because it is taking me back to my Marianne years and I love being able to have. It's the greatest thrill and one of the reasons that the Castro is so expensive is it offers village life in its purest, most wonderful form. You can get to everything. You can buy what you need. And there are many such neighborhoods like that in San Francisco and we find them. And that all adds up to something that makes a city and was what we were missing when we were living in the most beautiful Adobe house in the middle of the desert. The thing we missed was that dynamic. I'm going to put you on the spot. Rainbow crosswalks in the Castro thumbs up or thumbs down. They're better than anybody else's rainbow crosswalks. I looked them up. The ones in Sydney. I don't think they made them take them up actually the city council said it was distracting to people. You notice how I'm not answering this question. It wasn't a fair question. L.A. ones are big wide among those things. Yeah, I think it's actually used as a reference point the other day. There were two women from from Australia who were saying now we're we're the bars along here where the stuff. I said go down to the rainbow crosswalk and walk off in any direction for two blocks and and then wander out from there. So yeah, they help they're okay. I don't know what I'm scared about is the new street lights. They have some sort of festival lighting or something that comes out of. So we'd be maybe twinkling like a spaceship by this time next week. I have no idea. Well, it's way up at the top. They can do rainbows with them apparently. But I think you can handle lighting because you've been to Burning Man now a couple of times. Yeah, I know. I think we have some burners in the house here. Yeah. Yes, I love that lighting. Very becoming. So in the in the most recent book which just came out this year, which is the days the days of Anna Madrigal, which is a beautifully written book. And thank you. Oh, it's just it's I mean, it's so nostalgic because it's announced as the last of them and Anna Madrigal is quite old. But this is the book where Michael who now has a younger husband named Ben is going to Burning Man. And he's sort of dragged there in a bit of a grouchy mood. Is this is this autobiographical? Imagine that. Yes, it's completely autobiographical. We're going to need the earplugs for what? We have to have earplugs to sleep? How close is the rave? No, I'm not going on the naked bicycle pub crawl. Why not? Okay, one naked. My big fat white ass on a bicycle seat. What was the other pub drunk and naked on a bicycle? I mean, we really did have sort of really comic battles over it. All the while, Chris was just patiently sewing away, making outfits for me and saying, don't worry, it's going to be okay. The reason you have to have lights on you at night when you ride across the playa. And by the time I'd been there for two days, I was already yelling dark wad at people that weren't lit. I was a little bit afraid, and this is reflected in the book, that it would be sort of wonderful but kind of mean, like a summer camp in the same way. And that there would be rules and, you know, of that oppression. I'm not very good at communal stuff. I certainly loved Burning Man, yeah. So you got dragged kicking and screaming the first time, but you went back. So you did find something there. Oh yeah, oh yeah. A landscape like you've never seen in your life, we'll never see again anywhere but there. And it's the land of serendipity. Anything can happen because nothing can be fully regulated. You don't have your fucking cell phones for starters, so you don't know how to, you have to communicate with people. And that becomes just a great adventure. I would wander out from our RV, yes we had an RV. Oh there we go. There they are. Oh listen, the RV is leaking as we speak. Put some air in those tires. See that's what... That's the mean Burning Man thing. But where was I? Oh wandering out. I ended up, I didn't have a Playa name the first year. That's the name you give yourself when you go there. And what is your Playa name? Mine? I know you've got one. Pinko. I like that. Yeah, it's sort of a Kami Pinko reference, but also because I just turned... And your coloration when you're... I just turned pink in the sun. That's me too. I just wandered around looking for sofas, so I called myself Sofa Daddy. And strangely there are sofas. Sweetest young people. Yes, oh we have a sofa. Of course, the completely naked young beautiful woman with jewels on her... Everything. On her everything. On her all together. It's magical. And I knew it would be great for the book. I use a lot of this in the book. I use... Michael gets called Sofa Daddy. And precisely because it worked the way San Francisco did. That a lot of really varied people could bump into each other in this place. That Marianne could go for instance. And there's everything from boho to high tech and the twain is always meeting. So I want to veer off a little from the Tales books just for a moment because you've written some other books as well. And in fact, you wrote something as a series of magazine articles that I had a part in digging out of the archives for you that you've recently republished called Jackie Olds. Everything for that Carl. I'll take it. Right here. I'll take it. I credited you in the forward... It was the greatest thrill to have this old piece of this work from 32 years ago and you set up and read it at a Litquake event. And the audience was laughing. And I was laughing because I could barely remember what I'd written. I had that distance on it. So it's a great piece that Armistead had mentioned at a cocktail party and that's when I did some research and dug it out and surprised him with it. But he wrote about a futuristic San Francisco in which Jackie Kennedy is sort of like kind of a gray gardens character. Yeah, she's Edie Beale. I wrote it in 1980 and it's imagining 1999 when Jackie would be... Oh my God, Jackie would be 70. The earthquake, the big earthquake, has happened in the city and people are forced to live in tents in the park. Something that agrees enormously with the gay population in the context of this story. And Jackie... God, I'll tell the whole story and then they can't spend $1.99 on Kindle and read Jackie Old. $1.99 on Amazon people, you can afford it. Well, it's actually like you've imagined Burning Man because there's all these people living in tents and these fabulous... that they've decorated gorgeously. I've always been fascinated by those configurations. That's why the Bohemian Grove intrigued me and significant others and why I butted it up against a women's music festival called Womenwood. I realized when I was writing about Burning Man, oh my God, it's all the same thing. There are social constructs with certain pressures that people are nervous about when they approach them. Another one of your works that I really love is The Night Listener if anyone is familiar with that novel. And it was made into a movie starring Robin Williams. I understand you got to get close to Robin Williams. Oh, I've known Robin since the 70s. I've known him since pre-nanu-nanu. I knew him. I didn't know that. I had my 40th birthday party up at his ranch. He grabbed my little toy poodle and did like 15 minutes with the poodle. I mean... He made the poodle talk. He talked back to the poodle. He had huge fights. Precious and... You know, a man of enormous intelligence. Yeah. So wonderful to be around. And everyone I know had loved him, had the slight feeling that they were doing something wrong because they couldn't get him to stop being on. You yearned for that moment where things were quiet and you could do that. I had a few with him on the set of The Night Listener. Because it's late at night. And it's a special little community, a movie set. But yeah, I was so excited when he called and said that he wanted to do it. So excited. And I think he did a beautiful job. The movie I'm to blame for because I was one of the writers. And the pressure comes suddenly to thrillerize everything. And I knew that the big problem with The Night Listener being a movie is the reason it works as a novel is that there are a lot of phone calls in it. And if you read a phone call in a novel, you picture who's on the other end of the line. If you watch a movie where you're not seeing who's on the other end of the line, you have questions immediately. And that destroys a major spot. I'm trying to talk about it but not without giving it away. But I'm very proud of that. Thank you for your compliment about it. I'm really proud of that book. Oh, it's a wonderful book. I really urge people to read it. And since you're mentioning movies, let's talk for a minute and then we're going to turn it over to questions about the wonderful productions that they made out of Tales of the City. Among other things, the world got to meet Laura Linney and you got to develop a great friendship with her. Wow, yeah, that was one of the big, big blessings of Tales. Meeting her and becoming close to her and realizing how alike we are in a lot of ways. That's why she was so instinctive about Mary Ann because Mary Ann Simois. I mean, a lot of me goes into that character. And yeah, it's been special with Laura. We were between husbands at the same time. We went antiquing together as some men and some women do. Did you go out and try to break up a couple together? No, no, no. We sat around and we got acted depressed and listened to Amy Mann records together. And Amy was, I mean, Laura was so excited when she got to be in an Amy Mann video like a year ago where Amy Mann had a robot and it was played by Laura Linney. You can find it on YouTube at Amy Mann, Laura Linney. We're going to take questions from the audience and I think there's someone from the library who has a mic. Hello. So raise your hand and I'm sorry, what's your name? Jennifer is going to come to you so that you can ask Armistead a question. Here's someone over here. Yes, where did the 28-barber year lane come from in terms of the idea that sort of space that you always wanted to write about it or set your characters there? Well, I lived not far from McAndre Lane on Russian Hill and I knew a lot of other similar places. I lived for many years on Telegraph Hill and there was havens down there when you go down the Filbert steps and you have the notion of the way the city makes these little walkways into city streets and people carry their groceries down to go home and have to move their furniture down to live there in the first place, but it just intrigued me. So I kind of used McAndre, the visual, the staircase and then I described it as being where havens is which is off of up at the crest of Russian Hill anyway. There's a little narrow Barbary lane like alleyway there so it just... I've always had a real strong sense of home and I always loved it when addresses and locales became famous that so much so that you wanted to go visit them. When I was 15, I went to Atlanta with my parents and I said, I know it's fictitious but where would Tara be if it were here? I want to figure out where to whirl my mental skirts. I think it's fun for the writer to connect with the physical geography of it. It helps you, it's an aid in a way. You don't have to sit there and remember all of Narnia because you made it up. Narnia is just outside the door, you know. Thanks. When you were talking earlier about how they wanted you, the chronicle wanted... we're trying to edit out certain words like shit kicker and all the rest of that kind of stuff. Did it go beyond just words though? I mean were there episodes or things that you had written that you couldn't actually use in the series? Yeah. There were? No, they didn't get away with it. They tried. I got a call from one of my cohorts in the people department and she said they're going to pull tomorrow's column. This was after whatever the referendum was in Dade County happened and basically the gay folks lost and they needed Bryant won. I actually talked to people who said, well, basically they were saying time to go back in the closet. Right. I asked, I was wondering if perhaps there were scenes like that. I'm sure we all would love to read the scenes that were cut out of the... Well, I don't know how interesting it would be but the particular line that set them off and that seemed like it must be most offensive to people in the sunset was Michael saying making basically the speech I was making. I don't care, you know, how that referendum went when I came out of the closet. I nailed the door shut and that was considered to be too provocative and firebrand. It's really easy to forget that when I started Tales of the City it was a year after homosexuality had stopped being a mental illness according to the American Psychiatric Association. I think it was 75 when they took it off the list of illnesses and the silence imposed on just being gay was enormous. I mean, I had a wonderful advantage with Tales of the City because I could report on things that people weren't even talking about happening. Randy Schultz came a couple of years later and dug in with a journalistic angle on that but it was there. It was this beautiful blossoming, burgeoning thing that you could see. Well, the short version is I called up the editor and said, if you pull that, I'm quitting. And he said, you don't really mean that and I said, yes, I do. I hung up and thought, oh, fuck, I've just totally killed the goose that laid the golden egg, you know? But he called back half an hour later and said, well, all right. And I had the power from that moment on. I could pretty much do what I wanted. It was your Joan Crawford moment. It was, wasn't it? Don't fuck with me, fellas. You know, thank you. I just want to hear you say don't fuck with me, fellas again. That was just too good. Don't fuck with me, fellas. The sad, gay thing is the minute you said your Joan Crawford moment, I knew what Joan Crawford reference you had. Well, I wasn't accusing you of beating anyone with a wire hanger. Yeah, yeah, yeah. More questions. I'm sorry I'm going to do a little spoiler. In one of your later books, Mary Ann and Michael sort of have a falling out and I was just curious about what led you down that path because that's always been a story that's really kind of stuck with me falling out. You know, it's funny. A lot of that is just psychologically tied in with the fact that I was in my own head. I knew that I was leaving the story. So I had a storyline that I could sort of psychologically work with because Mary Ann was going to leave San Francisco and go to New York and was thereby sort of deserting her family in more ways than one. Not just a husband and a child but a best gay friend and all the dynamics of that. So I sort of moved towards that. If the question is why did Mary Ann... The question that I never use the word, not in this context, but the question that I'm asked most often all around the world is why did Mary Ann become such a bitch? I take it really personally because she's a part of me. I have to ask myself exactly how bad was she, you know? Anyway. It's storytelling. What can I tell you? I mean, we are portrayed by our friends sometimes. We, people die. We lose our innocence. It's storytelling. Wouldn't... Say la vie? Say la vie. Say la vie. That's the answer, short answer. Well, it's one of the things that I really admire about these books and why I think they're so great to go back to and why you should buy some copies out there and support the library is because they really do reveal all kinds of nuances. You think you know the story and then you go back and you see seeds are planted early and, you know, in some ways, you know, you think Mary Ann's going to become the ultimate San Franciscan at the beginning and in a way she's the person who never leaves Cleveland entirely behind. Yeah, that's right. And there are those among us who do that, who don't fall in love with San Francisco, but who resist and go back home. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I would like to say that I had all this psychologically parsed out from the beginning and nothing close to the truth. It's all just fragments of my own emotions and things that I was thinking of the time relationships I was having. We were talking earlier about this great Tennessee Williams biography and by John Larr that's out right now and it's really worth the if you just want to climb in with an enormous book. It's wonderful, but you realize that every crisis in his life, everything that ever knocked him off his feet is there in the next play, not literally, but the emotional content of what's going on. By the time he's got people eating each other alive and suddenly last summer he's doing it to himself. He's self cannibalizing. He's used his life and his miseries to such a degree that it's killing him. Rather scary. Well, luckily known in your books eight anyone else. I didn't get that bad. Oh, people did eat each other. No. All right. No. And not just in that way. There was a cannibal cult if you remember correctly. I blocked that out. That was one of the plot lines. Grace Cathedral. When the serious high church Episcopalians who are literally taking the body and blood of Christ too seriously, they're stealing body parts out of a local hospital and consuming them on the catwalk. You thought this was a delicate little story, didn't you, Carl? You know, the 80s were really fucked up. Well, I was doing that was my response to all those cults at the time. I went into a comedic direction with it and tried to look at it in that way. It came home to Rooster when we were actually shooting the miniseries up in Canada, the second one and our French-Canadian director said, though, that was the perfect place for me to have a cameo was to be the priest saying the mass and I was to wait for the dismembered foot to fall from the ceiling and land on the altar. I was to be surprised by it and I was just doing all these you know, completely hammy, I've got an actorly bone in my body. I had the two altar boys who both had Canadian Oscars, genies, I guess they're called, giving me acting tips trying to teach me how to and to make matters worse, the foot had rubber in it so it would actually bounce. But that's one of the trippy things about making something up of the moment and then seeing it come to life. Going out and finding the cliff it lands in the big climax of Tales of the City which I'd actually scouted out before I wrote about and then I could take the film crew back there 17 years later and say that's where he goes over. I don't think you're a bitch. Oh, thank you. In fact, you're on the top of my fantasy dinner guest list and I have his number if you want. And I want to know who's on yours. Oh, I Who comes to your dinner part? Your fantasy dinner part? Oh, God, I can't do that on the spur of the moment. And most of the ones that I revere I wouldn't want there. I would not like to have Alfred Hitchcock for dinner. But Maybe Tennessee Williams before the second all. That's a pretty good one. That's a pretty good one. I don't know. I'd like to I'd like to dinner with Jan Struther, the woman who wrote Mrs. Miniver which was serialized in the Times of London during the Second World War. It was a series of little domestic vignettes that are just they're beautifully written. It's just a beautiful, beautiful stylistically these little essays just couldn't be more gorgeous to my high and ear. And of course they made kind of a hammy patriotic movie out of it that won the Oscar with Greer Garson. She was apparently very small and beautiful and witty and I think she'd be interesting. Was that a model for you? A literary model? Or were there others? It was. It was one of the inspirations. And Mrs. Madrigal, it was Mrs. Miniver. There are a lot of those unconscious things. You must recognize it yourself where you have this sparkling line and then you see it in you watch Bell Book and Candle again and you see there's a line in there. Oh, I stole that. I didn't know it. I remember the first time I heard of your books I misheard what someone said about the character and I thought her name was Mrs. Madrigal. And I wondered if that was the secret subliminal message I was supposed to get. No, it wasn't. People have said that. Have used that since then. She has a little bit of a kind of psychic intuition about things. My grandmother had that. She was a suffragist in England and she was the biggest influence on me when I was the best influence on me. Probably not the biggest. I probably took all the bad shit first. She was there always. She thought I was the reincarnation of her cousin Curtis. Her bachelor cousin Curtis. Her extremely artistic bachelor cousin Curtis. And she, you know, we were working Ouija boards and she was very theatrical and a lot of Anna's spirit went into her. But she never taped a joint to your front. No, alas. That came with it. Olympia Dukakis. Well, she didn't tape it. She gave me pot for my birthday and I thought, I love this woman so much. She knew exactly how to be Anna when the moment arose. She's going to be in town shortly, actually. First, I have to say, every time I eat Fakasha bread, I think of you. Thank you. Secondly, I was in the Marine Corps when I started reading your books and you gave me the strength to get out and come out and I was wondering how does it feel to be an inspiration? Oh, thank you very much. It feels great. I hear it a lot and I never stop loving it. I never, never stop loving it and I can't think of a better purpose to have had. It makes me really happy and it was tied up really with my own self-worth. I was feeling better. There was nothing. I wasn't selling anything. I was just reporting on that joy, you know. I still am. We're trying to even in this advanced state. Well, I think we're done. So let's give Mr. Moppin one more round. So much fun.