It all started in 1978 with a novel by Armistead Maupin, which was originally serialized in The San Francisco Chronicle. Although it spawned more novels, spinoffs, and a couple of television adaptations - all incarnations of Tales of the City shared one thing: a group of people, finding their way in San Francisco, finding and making new bonds, creating their own version of family. This week, we’re joined by Lauren Morelli, showrunner of the Netflix limited series Tales of the City and Armistead Maupin, author of the original series, for a cozy conversation in a hotel room in San Francisco as they talk about their experiences with the Tales, San Francisco and each other.
It all started in 1978 with a novel by Armistead Maupin, which was originally serialized in The San Francisco Chronicle. Although it spawned more novels, spinoffs, and a couple of television adaptations - all incarnations of Tales of the City shared one thing: a group of people, finding their way in San Francisco, finding and making new bonds, creating their own version of family.
This week, we’re joined by Lauren Morelli, showrunner of the Netflix limited series Tales of the City and Armistead Maupin, author of the original series, for a cozy conversation in a hotel room in San Francisco as they talk about their experiences with the Tales, San Francisco and each other.
[Music]
Lauren: Welcome to Tales of Your City, an exploration of queer identity and community across America brought to you by Netflix. My name is Lauren Morelli. I’m the showrunner of Tales of the City, a new show on Netflix and I’m also the host of this week’s episode, San Francisco. Each week we are working with independent queer storytellers to shine a light on the cities we inhabit, the ways we connect and the moments in which we find space to be our true, authentic selves.
Speaker: I came out simultaneous with Tales. I was out to the city. I wasn’t out to my family or the world. I was out to anybody who met me at the baths certainly.
Lauren: It’s been such an honor to bring Tales of the City to Netflix especially since the origin of Tales has such an incredibly rich history that began long before our series which is out now. It all started in 1978 with a novel by Armistead Maupin which was originally serialized in the San Francisco Chronicle. Although it spawned more novels and several television adaptations, all of the incarnations shared one thing, a group of people finding their way in San Francisco and creating their own version of family. When I first got the phone call to come in and consult on Shana’s storyline, a young queer woman who would be played by Ellen Page, I was thrilled. At the time I’d never heard of Tales of the City and I had no way of knowing that working on the show would become a healing, profound safe space. One that was filled with queer people both on the screen and off. To say I’m honored to now be sharing that safe space with a global audience is the understatement of a lifetime. For this week’s episode, I sat down with none other than Armistead Maupin, the warm, generous man who started it all. I personally owe so much to Armistead and getting to know him over the past couple years has been a dream but it was more special to sit down with him for the one-on-one conversation you’re about to hear. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Hi, I’m Lauren Morelli, the showrunner and one of the executive producers of Netflix’s Tales of the City. I should say, Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City and I’m sitting here with the one, the only, Armistead. Hi.
Armistead: Hi. So good to be here with you, Lauren.
Lauren: I have a question that I’ve been wondering. Are you Mary Ann?
Armistead: Oh my secret is out. Yes, I am Mary Ann. That’s why Laura Linney and I get along so well.
Lauren: Yeah.
Armistead: She understands that character.
Lauren: It took me a long to realize it because everyone thinks you’re Michael for obvious reasons.
Armistead: They all—they obviously think I’m Michael. Michael is partially me but mostly who I would have liked to go to bed with and couldn’t.
Lauren: Yeah. Would we all?
Armistead: You know?
Lauren: Yeah.
Armistead: Mary Ann—yeah a lot of my conservatism and caution and the way her—you hear her internal thoughts in Tales. She’s always saying something sweet but she’s thinking, “Oh what an idiot.”
Lauren: That’s the fun of Mary Ann.
Armistead: Yeah. And I do that a lot and Laura and I got close I think because we—I realize how much we were alike.
Lauren: What year did you move to San Francisco?
Armistead: ’72.
Lauren: And were you out then?
Armistead: No I came out simultaneous with Tales. I was out to the city.
Lauren: Right.
Armistead: I wasn’t out to my family—
Lauren: Right.
Armistead: …or the world. I was out to anybody who met me at the baths certainly.
Lauren: Well, that was sort of what occurred to me actually was thinking about that and that when you moved here you gender aside would have very much have been a Mary Ann.
Armistead: Yeah my innocence about the place.
Lauren: Yeah and have your world expanded and…
Armistead: I came out to a women friend of mine who called me Babycakes and I stammered it out. I mean, I got—had got really drunk on Mai Tai’s before I went to her house and I said I’m—I have something to tell you, “I’m homosexual”, and she came over and took my hands in hers. She knelt in front of me and took my hands and said, “Big fucking deal.” And that freed me.
Lauren: The joy of San Francisco.
Armistead: Yeah, yeah and then I was coming out to everybody.
Lauren: Were you?
Armistead: Cab drivers.
Lauren: But it couldn’t have been—did it feel safe to come out in that way?
Armistead: Yeah
Lauren: Yeah.
Armistead: The town felt very safe.
Lauren: Yeah.
Armistead: My mother didn’t—when she realized that I was coming out to everybody she worried about me as mothers do sometimes.
Lauren: Yes.
Armistead: And she said, “Well I just don’t want it to hurt your career.”
Lauren: Hm-hmm [affirmative].
Armistead: And I said, “You don’t understand Mama, it is my career.”
Lauren: That’s pretty remarkable that you knew that then.
Armistead: It just—I don’t know I think it’s—you have to have a big enough ego. Harvey Milk understood it when he was—
Lauren: Right.
Armistead: …running for office and he—
Lauren: Right.
Armistead: …said, “I can do this. All I have to do is not be ashamed of myself”, you know? He got killed for it but—so maybe that’s what my mother was worried about too but I—it seemed to be, to be—to work to my advantage. I was so glad that I was in on the ground floor of something.
Lauren: I mean how, how long had you known do you think that you were gay?
Armistead: Since I was six years old and played with my dollhouse. First time I ever had 28 Barbary Lane. I could totally little dramas in the dollhouse.
Lauren: So a part of you was aware of moving toward your community when you moved to San Francisco?
Armistead: Yes. I remember someone saying to me, “Oh you’re going to love it there. They’ve got 50 gay bars.” And I just drew myself up and said, “I would never go into one of those.” I did on my first night in town. I was scared because there men slow dancing to Streisand.
Lauren: Still a terrifying proposition.
Armistead: Still terrifying. If this is what I have to do I’ll—actually now I crave the—I would love to slow dance with my husband somewhere. I would love there to—
Lauren: Yeah.
Armistead: …be a club where I can—
Lauren: I know.
Armistead: ..I could slow dance to Cole Porter.
Lauren: I was saying this earlier about body politic which is the bar on the show. I wish that existed. I wish there was this like magical queer place that I could go.
Armistead: Many ways Body Politic is like the fantasy of Barbary Lane. That was a brilliant creation. Was that your idea?
Lauren: Oh it was the—it came out of the writer’s room.
Armistead: Hm-hmm [affirmative].
Lauren: Yeah, yeah. I mean, we knew we wanted Shawna to work in like a really queer bar and, and yeah I think it does represent what San Francisco used to be by everyone’s estimation, right? Like…
Armistead: Except that it’s better. It’s the—it would be through the lens of today where there—
Lauren: Yeah.
Armistead: …it’s men and women, all kinds of queer, an inventive theatrical place.
Lauren: This is one of the things that surprised me about San Francisco. I had visited a lot but I hadn’t spent much time here before this. Is the way you write it in the books in terms of the coincidences and how often people are running into each other.
Armistead: That’s one of the things I love about it.
Lauren: Yeah.
Armistead: It’s not big and coincidence is highly achievable here.
Lauren: Yeah I really love it. It adds to that sort of like sparkly, magical quality here.
Armistead: Yeah. I mean, I’ve felt when I started writing that given the fact that I was going to be doling out cliffhangers that I was living in the perfect place for that to happen. I mean, I met a guy at the Baths one night sort of dreamy preppy guy. The next day he showed up at Beach Blanket Babylon, the show that I worked on—
Lauren: Yup.
Armistead: …with his nine months—not nine months, seven months pregnant wife holding a big Gucci bag and that’s how DeDe was born. DeDe and Beauchamp and I felt such sympathy for her.
Lauren: Yeah of course.
Armistead: And thought what kind of a jerk was—he wanted to dance with me behind a column just to get the thrill of treating his wife badly and so a character grew out of that and I killed him.
Lauren: And that’s the joy of being a writer.
Armistead: That’s the joy of being a writer. You can wipe out the assholes real quick.
Lauren: Yes. While we’re—you know, there are moments where I’m like oh I’m a total hack and then I just kill people and I feel better. Okay. So you moved to San Francisco, you become Mary Ann.
Armistead: I become Mary Ann.
Lauren: You start writing Tales.
Armistead: Yeah.
Lauren: And it takes off very quickly.
Armistead: Yeah I didn’t quite know if it was because they were not telling me in the front office. They didn’t want me to ask for more money because I was paid a starter salary as a reporter which is kind of great if you’re writing fiction. You can survive on writing fiction. But after the first year, one of the women that worked in the office with me, which by the way was an all-female space called, The People Department, and that was a euphemism for the old women’s department. The guys were on the other side of the filing cabinets, you know.
Lauren: Oh my god.
Armistead: And this woman came up and said, “Let me—I want to show you something but you can’t tell anybody I’m showing it to you.” And she took me to a back space somewhere and showed me three garbage cans full of letters from readers saying, “Why did you stop Tales of the City?”
Lauren: Wow.
Armistead: That gave me confidence and then I charged them a little bit more.
Lauren: Yeah. Someone said to me recently about this new iteration of Tales like, you know, the estimates are all over the place but let’s assume that gay people comprise three percent of population, queer people. Someone was like, “Well that means three percent of the world is going to watch this”, and that’s a huge…
Armistead: Right. I’ve—
Lauren: Right?
Armistead: …already thought that. I have to tell you.
Lauren: Yeah it’s just—I mean, it’s the same way that like before the dedicated audience was the whole city because you had a paper—
Armistead: Yeah.
Lauren: …and now it’s like we’re still so starved for queer content I think.
Armistead: Yeah.
Lauren: Portraying characters like this that everyone hopefully will watch.
Armistead: That’s my evil plan. Thank you for aiding in it—
Lauren: I…
Armistead: …it’s so brilliant.
Lauren: Thank you for allowing me to contribute. That’s what I mean. But, you know, I said this to someone the other day and I don’t know if I’ve said it to you before, there’s a kindness and warmth and generosity to your writing that I find in my own writing or at least strive for in my own writing and I think that in many ways it what allowed me to be successful. And I remember you saying it very early that like there’s just kindness at the center of it and as long as anything we wrote, yeah there’s difficult scenes, there are I think scenes that require a lot of nuance but if you come back to kindness, you’ll know that you’re in the right world.
Armistead: And there have been shows that offer queer content when Christopher, my husband and I will just say, “I can’t take this. These people are awful.” They go in the wrong direction every time.
Lauren: Every time.
Armistead: Somebody thinks drama is making everybody in the room a bitch.
Lauren: I mean, I’m maybe going to get myself in trouble but I’m going to say it anyway. This is what started to drive me crazy about so much television that’s being made. I feel like at some point we started to go in a direction of like if this person is a bad person they’re interesting and I’m bored by it.
Armistead: Yeah me too.
Lauren: I’m as bored by someone making the wrong decision all the time as I am by someone making the right decision all the time because I don’t know those people. I don’t know the like housewives that are murdering their next door neighbor. You know like…
Armistead: It’s not—
Lauren: Yeah.
Armistead: …just all goody two shoes because we are—
Lauren: No.
Armistead: …you know we have a script where people are flawed and make the wrong decisions and—but they’re trying to be good people.
Lauren: I believe that everyone’s doing their best.
Armistead: Yeah and whatever they think that is.
Lauren: That’s right.
Armistead: They might be wrongly informed.
Lauren: Right. The crux of it is, they’re best might not be your best or your idea or your wish for what best means.
Armistead: Yeah.
Lauren: But I think if you come to people that way it kind of roots you in empathy.
Armistead: We’d stop a lot of wars if we developed that—
Lauren: It really—
Armistead: …attitude.
Lauren: …would. Yeah. I think you have some pretty radical politics and I think that’s what surprising about you. Do you think so?
Armistead: I do.
Lauren: Yeah. Because—and that’s—I mean, we all have our edge, right? And you are so warm and so generous and so kind but you also are rabid in your activism. Because I—and tell me if I’m speaking out of turn. I feel like you have a real anger about people who haven’t come out. Tell me why?
Armistead: Because I lived through a time when all my brothers were dying and they were—had a stigma on them that could have lifted, little bit if famous people hadn’t stepped forward. I knew Rock Hudson as you know and when he—when it—his AIDS diagnosis became announced to the world, there were very, very few of his friends that would say anything, who say, “Of course he was gay.” We all knew that. We all loved him” Nobody wanted to be tainted by that and that’s kind of why I said what I said at the time because I knew that I was going to be even like making life easier for him. He got lots of letters from people saying, “We don’t care what you are. We love you.” So it’s—maybe it helps to have—or hurts or whatever to have lived in that time when the fear was do great—
Lauren: Yeah.
Armistead: …to see people dancing around the subject, you know. It annoyed the hell out of me.
Lauren: We’ve talked so much about the dinner party scene and I came into this season thinking a lot about the rage that exists within the queer community. I personally, my own personal opinion, think there’s a lot of anger that we’re not talking about and so we had that conversation in the writer’s room and all the various ways that that anger presents itself and the directions that the anger gets shot in and so much of that dinner party scene in 104 came out of talking to men specifically of the generation that had to live through AIDS and the rage that has come out of the fact that I feel like grief has still not happened and it’s so interesting because as a younger queer person I can have a lot of judgment about like well you outed that person but I also have the privilege of getting to be careful about who gets outed because it’s not life or death right not. I mean, it is in certain countries not because of AIDS. We happened to be privileged enough that like my queerness at least in an urban setting because I am white, because I’m all of these things is not life or death but for everybody for a long time it was life or death.
Armistead: And I have—it’s not, you know, I am for outing so therefore I run around talking about everybody. I’ve always been circumspect. But when there were major, you know, movie starts making millions of dollars and didn’t want to touch that subject, it angered me. That scene, by the way, I have to tell you here and before the world, is so powerful because it’s complicated.
Lauren: Yeah.
Armistead: Those men are essentially the modern counterparts of the A gays that were in the first series and they’re contemptable people in some ways so that when Steven Spinella does that diatribe about you can’t talk about this if you didn’t live through it. You can feel it and you can feel it equally when Ben tells Michael, you know, “You didn’t defend me”, you know? It examines the emotions on both sides in such a powerful way.
Lauren: Hm-hmm [affirmative]. That sequence of scenes was a real turning point I think for the show because in the room, Andy Parker, the brilliant Andy Parker—
Armistead: Yes.
Lauren: …wrote that episode and I remember him bringing the original scene in and we were talking about it and there were people in the room who had really divergent emotional experiences on opposite side of the table.
Armistead: Yes.
Lauren: There were people in that room who, you know, said, “Oh my god this—Steven Spinella’s character is named Chris too—you know, Chris two’s monologue made me sob”, and then there were people in that room that said, “I felt nothing because look at what he’s doing to Ben.” And fine tuning it to the point where you can walk away feeling empathy for both of them is the whole point especially within the community. There’s a lot of listening that we need to start doing in both directions, you know? I realized so much being in the room and talking to you and talking to Alan [phonetic 0:16:11.3] how much I’ve missed from the generation above me and how much I don’t understand about what that experience was and vice versa, right? The amount of like what do people want to be called now? The judgment around pronouns or the judgment around whatever the hot button topic is—
Armistead: Hm-hmm [affirmative].
Lauren: …that we’ve decided like no, no, no, we’re going to define queer as this.
Armistead: We have to go back to our humanity each time. Decency has to be the core of everything we do and that’s hard sometimes because you do want to make rules. I do want to make rules about—
Lauren: Absolutely.
Armistead: …say and do sometimes. I love that scene as much as anything in the show—
Lauren: Yeah.
Armistead: …of the two scenes
Lauren: Me too. I feel like it just really got to what we were trying to do, you know?
Armistead: Yeah.
Lauren: This inner generational conversation that you started with the books and we get to now continue. Did you have a Barbary Lane?
Armistead: No. I mean, I lived in the little house on the roof where the twins live in the modern one.
Lauren: Did you have like a chosen family here?
Armistead: Various people—
Lauren: Hm-hmm [affirmative].
Armistead: …that were part of my chosen family. Steve Biery [phonetic 0:17:14.3], a guy I met, he sat next to me at Harvey Milk’s funeral and he had been Harvey’s last boyfriend and didn’t know anybody at the funeral. And he held my hand through the ceremony and was sobbing and I met him on the street several weeks later and he was suicidal basically because he didn’t thought—if the world can kill Harvey Milk what’s going on, you know?
Lauren: Yeah.
Armistead: And we sort of dated but we weren’t compatible in any romantic way but—
Lauren: Yeah.
Armistead: …we just were total friends and traveled the world together for 15 years and I thought of him as family during—
Lauren: Yeah.
Armistead: …that period. I didn’t have the boyfriend that I was looking for. That took a few more years and a few more mistakes.
Lauren: Well, that’s how you get to the good ones.
Armistead: Yeah you have to really—
Lauren: Make a lot of mistakes first.
Armistead: …have to get to the good ones.
Lauren: Yeah. Because I think that’s—I mean, we talk about it so much with Tales about chosen family obviously. It’s become such an important part of your entire career but I think it’s really—I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently that what I love about Barbary Lane is that it’s not—I mean, yes there’s the fantasy of it and like I want to live at Barbary Lane but I think it also is teaching people a lesson to like look for theirs—their Barbary Lane, right?
Armistead: Yeah.
Lauren: Look for their safe space.
Armistead: Well, for years I’ve heard from people that—some guys down in L.A. had named their apartment building Barbary Lane South.
Lauren: Even in my very short time living in the Tales world, the amount of women that tell me they are Mary Ann is—
Armistead: Yeah.
Lauren: …amazing. Everybody thinks they’re Mary Ann.
Armistead: And they can’t be because I am.
Lauren: Right? Well, I’m glad we’ve established that. But it’s that also because we also feel like he outsider? Don’t you think that’s why?
Armistead: That’s the appeal of Mary Ann. I mean, she’s smart. She’s not dumb. She’s a very smart women but she’s in a strange new world and that’s why it’s easy to sympathize with her and because she’s Laura Linny she can look up that stairway at the beginning of the show and you see everything—
Lauren: Everything.
Armistead: …on her face. You know, fear—
Lauren: Yeah.
Armistead: …about what’s about to happen and nostalgia and—
Lauren: Yeah.
Armistead: …it’s all there.
Lauren: What does it feel like to have had the last 40 years of your life defined by this world?
Armistead: Safe. Feels like Barbary Lane because I didn’t know what I was going to be for years. I was supposed to be a lawyer. I really was bored by that and my early journalistic jobs were just—I thought I can’t—and I tried being a—working in ad agency including one that inspired Halcyon Communications in the beginning. I was the mail boy Halcyon Communications and, you know, I was somebody who in his early 30s thought I haven’t got anything to do.
Lauren: That’s an interesting thing that we should highlight for a certain percentage of whoever is going to listen to this because I also had no idea what I was going to be and I think there’s this feeling that you’re supposed to know and you’re supposed to be sure very early and I talk about this a lot as much as I can that like, you know, I got hired on Orange when I was 30 which now sounds very young but at the time I felt behind. I felt like I was surrounded by people who had graduated from better schools than I, who were going to law school, who were going to med school. Everyone seemed further ahead than me and I didn’t even find writing until my mid-20s, you know?
Armistead: You need to celebrate that with other people—
Lauren: Yeah.
Armistead: …because you can—
Lauren: Yeah.
Armistead: …you can start late and get on the—
Lauren: Yes.
Armistead: …right thing.
Lauren: Yeah and that’s okay to take a while to find it because you only get better, I think.
Armistead: Especially if you’re writing.
Lauren: Yes. Oh my god.
Armistead: You got more truth to tell the—
Lauren: Yes.
Armistead: …long you live.
Lauren: Yes. Yeah and you need stories.
Armistead: Yeah.
Lauren: You don’t have stories when you’re young. Yeah. I have to tell you I had—someone today asked me, you know, what is the moment that has stood out beyond any other moment? And I said, “Any time I look into Armistead’s eyes I feel so overwhelmed." There's something about looking at your that helps me understand the magnitude of your work and being invited into your work and being trusted with your work and I can sort of project myself 30 years into the future and be like oh even 30 years from now this is still going to be one of the greatest honors of my life.
Armistead: Thank you so much. I’m glad that that feeling allowed me to have you in this story.
Lauren: Right.
Armistead: We all need people. I mean, especially—I mean, we’re an intergenerational couple really.
Lauren: Yes. Yes we are Armistead.
Lauren: Christopher Isherwood was the person that told me that—and I know that he was addressing specifically my own doubts about my work.
Lauren: Hm-hmm [affirmative].
Armistead: And he said, “My boy it is possible to commit art and entertainment at the same time and don’t you let anybody tell you otherwise.” And that gave me the confidence just to keep on doing it and I ended up writing the four to the Berlin Stories when it was reissued.
Lauren: Do you still, in terms of your creative process, do you still doubt yourself? What does your actual, when you sit down to write, what’s your process like these days both practically and emotionally?
Armistead: It’s still terrifying. I don’t know any writer that doesn’t find it terrifying.
Lauren: Me neither.
Armistead: You just have to get on the road and do it, you know? I’ve decided on my next novel that I’m going to get back to the terrors that I would inflict upon myself when I was writing the serial which is just to put them in a room with each other and let them talk and see who lies down the street and it—you will find your way to the story.
Lauren: If you let them talk they teach you.
Armistead: Totally thought that was bullshit for years.
Lauren: I mean—
Armistead: It’s not.
Lauren: …no I believe in all sorts of like—my grandmother is rolling over in her grave, my Italian Catholic grandma when I’m like no, no, I believe that like the universe is like telling the story through me. I believe that my characters talk to one another.
Armistead: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Lauren: I have so many more questions about your process. So, you’re about to start writing again, a new book.
Armistead: This is what I can say. It’s a deep dive into the center of Tales.
Lauren: Oh.
Armistead: I’m going to England to write so there’s a—
Lauren: Yeah.
Armistead: …clue there. But a lot of readers have said, “You didn’t pay enough attention to that character—
Lauren: Yeah.
Armistead: …and I want to know what happened.”
Lauren: Yes, I had that question also about this thing that we’re talking about.
Armistead: Yeah.
Lauren: You know, I’ve been meaning to tell you and we can end here. The amount—do you find this with Tales because it’s been in your life for so long, even like the two or three years it’s been in my life, it starts to seep into real life like I feel like all these very strange coincidences started happening and, you know, my writers would go out to dinner and they would run into each other at dinner—
Armistead: Yeah.
Lauren: …randomly. Right? Like it just sort of…
Armistead: I find it too. I’m glad to hear I’m not the only crazy one.
Lauren: Yeah it permeates.
Armistead: You see them. You see it happening.
Lauren: Yeah. It sort of changed my lens that way where when something happens I’m like oh that’s a very like talesian coincidence—
Armistead: Yeah.
Lauren: …that just happened.
Armistead: Yeah, yeah.
Lauren: It’s really fun.
Armistead: It is fun.
Lauren: Yeah. Maybe we’re just trying to convince ourselves that we live at Barbary Lane.
Armistead: Maybe. Maybe I do.
Lauren: I’ll see you there.
Armistead: Okay.
Lauren: Thanks Armistead. Love you.
Armistead: Love you too darling.
Lauren: All right friends and family. Thanks for joining us this week on Tales of Your City. This show is produced by Netflix with Pineapple Street Media. Our music is by Hansdale Hsu. You can find us every Monday wherever you find your podcasts. Special thanks to Lila Day. If you enjoyed hat you heard, spread the joy and tell a friend. Your family whether biological or chosen. Also, don’t forget to rate and subscribe to Tales of Your City on Apple podcasts, Spotify and wherever you get your podcasts. Also, don’t forget to check out Tales of the City now streaming on Netflix.
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