By Christopher Potter
PGN Contributor
© 2007 Christopher Potter

They say you can never go home again. Luckily “they” are either liars or have no idea what they are talking about. After 18 years, the man who taught us the curious etiquette of both straight and gay baths, dragged us to singles’ night at “social Safeway” and, in a stroke of genius, highlighted similarities of the rituals of a women’s music festival and a Republican-dominated male-only retreat has resurfaced with a vengeance.

In a return to his iconic series “Tales of the City,” San Francisco-based writer Armistead Maupin brings back his beloved characters in “Michael Tolliver Lives.” The latest in the series is a celebration of life in general, but even more so the lives of a family — Michael, Brian Hawkins, Shawna Hawkins, Mary Ann Singleton, Anna Madrigal and Mona Ramsey — that readers have wondered about for years.

Maupin’s groundbreaking novels first appeared as a newspaper serial in 1974 and were later made into a miniseries by Britain’s Channel 4 starring Olympia Dukakis, Laura Linney, Thomas Gidson, Parker Posey and Marcus D’Amico.

After he stopped writing the “Tales of the City” series, ostensibly so he didn’t have to kill off his HIV-positive lead at a time when AIDS was an unavoidable death sentence, Maupin wrote two other novels: “Maybe the Moon” and “The Night Listener,” the latter of which was made into a movie and released last year.

For the initiated: Be warned; Maupin is at it again at full throttle. To the young and sheltered: You’re several volumes behind — it’s time to catch up.

While Maupin never actually returns to the mythical Barbary Lane in “Michael Tolliver Lives,” the longtime reader feels at ease on the first page through Maupin’s warm style. It’s that casual, personal viewpoint that made the readers feel part of “the family” all those years ago. The details — the pet rocks, trolleys vs. cable cars, the rock widows who feel threatened by the presence of Yoko Ono, the fundamentalist Christian puppet shows and that intoxicating pot-growing elderly trans woman whose name is an anagram for A Man and a Girl — they are all present and accounted for.

PGN had the pleasure of speaking with Maupin about the latest chapter in the lives of some of his “children,” as well as the most recent chapter of his life and his new (much younger) husband, Christopher Turner.

PGN: You’ve said that this is not a sequel to the previous books. Why do you feel the need to distance this project from the rest of the series?
AM: I’m not distancing it from the storyline. I’m distancing it from the format. The first six books are third-person novels that are sort of a tapestry of a lot of different characters. [This] is a more intimate novel told from the point of only one character, and I wanted to make that clear from the beginning because I didn’t want people who’d read all six books in one gulp to be derailed once they hit “Michael Tolliver Lives.”

PGN: That said, after struggling a little bit with “Maybe the Moon” and more so with “The Night Listener,” on the first page of this book, I immediately felt a sense of being at home that I haven’t felt since “Sure About You.”
AM: Thank you, I think it’s my first-person voice. It has a certain rhythm to it. Maybe it shouldn’t when the characters are as different as Gabriel [from “The Night Listener”], Cady [from “Maybe the Moon”] and Michael. But it’s all me underneath there.

PGN: For the second time in the series, a major character has died “off screen.” It was understandable, given the times [of the earlier books], that one of the primary family members had to die of AIDS. Was there a personal motivation behind this most recent death?
AM: Well, if I tell you the motivation, it’ll probably give away the character, won’t it? My mother died of [cancer] in 1979. I didn’t kill off that character because I was trying to beat the drum about [cancer], I killed off that character because that’s what happens in life, you know? Eighteen years pass and you lose friends as you’re getting older. And you lose them to lots of things other than old age.

PGN: It was the first time I ever had to put one of your books down.
AM: (Laughing) [Sir] Ian McKellen told me the same thing! He said to me very sternly, “I may never forgive you for that.”

PGN: Given that we’ve lost 18 years in the lives of people you’ve made feel like family to us, is there any chance of going back to the past with future novels to fill in the void?
AM: I don’t know what I would do in future novels. It’s occurred to me, not the blanks so much but maybe the early years ... I don’t know. My whole specialty is observing the moment, and I think that much of the reality of the novels comes from the sense that they’re living in the here and now. So, to go back to a period and try to remind myself of what was going on then would be somewhat awkward.

PGN: So it would be safe to say that during those periods you didn’t find yourself observing events and saying to yourself, “What would Brian have to say about this?” or “How would Anna react to this news?”
AM: I’ve done that for 30 years. These characters are all fragments of me and, most of the time, they’re as alive for me as they are for anybody else. They have a life beyond me. I remember watching a little tiff happen on my Web site [www.armisteadmaupin.com] because someone wrote in asking if I was going to hire Olympia Dukakis after she had taken her controversial stand on the war in Iraq. And I wrote back and said, “No one I know thinks that was a controversial stand, and besides, Mrs. Madrigal would have taken the exact same stand.” The guy, totally indignant, writes back, “How the hell would Armistead Maupin know what Anna Madrigal thinks?” I don’t think he noticed that we have the same initials.

PGN: I remember reading somewhere that long after you’d stopped the series, people were still speculating on the lives of the family. One in particular even described Anna’s rescue after the October 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.
AM: Yes, I think they said that somebody spotted her purple cloche amongst the rubble and that led to her rescue.

PGN: Due to the life these characters have generated on their own, were you concerned about taking them to film and did you feel the Channel 4 productions were true to your original vision?
AM: I was very, very happy with what they did because they were extremely faithful to the novels. There are always things you can complain about but I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a faithful adaptation of anything. You can practically turn the pages of the novel as you watch the miniseries.

PGN: There have been rumblings of television production of the fourth novel, “Babycakes.” Any news?
AM: I’ve tried, but Showtime isn’t in the miniseries or movie-making business anymore. They’re just doing series and I don’t think that’s going to happen, to be honest with you. There’s a certain amount of time, you know ... as Laura Linney said the other day, “We aren’t getting any younger.”

PGN: We’ll have to thank Laura for reminding us. Back to this book, I don’t ever recall Michael mentioning a brother in the earlier books. Is this a recent invention or am I forgetting something in my advanced age?
AM: No, no, you’re not forgetting anything, but I never said he didn’t have one either. And Mrs. Madrigal actually remarks on the fact that he’d never talked about him, so I tried my best to cover my ass.

PGN: Another continuity issue: I was really glad that in this book you clarified Michael’s father’s death. Because originally ...
AM: Oh no! I was hoping no one would notice that.

PGN: In one book he had died of a heart attack and then years later, [Michael’s mother] Alice was telling Michael not to worry about his HIV status, “because the worrying killed your father more than the cancer ever did.” Did you realize you had to cover your ass with that one, too?
AM: Oh, absolutely. I realized it halfway through writing “Michael Tolliver Lives.” Oh my God, I’ve had him die of two different things! I need to clean this one up. Somebody also noticed that the epigraph at the beginning of the book, “People like you and me ... we’re gonna be 50-year-old libertines in a world full of 20-year-old Calvinists,” is credited to Michael when it was actually Brian who said that to Michael in 1976, so now I have to apologize profusely. Several fans have noticed this on my Web site but it bugs me more than anyone. I’m such a perfectionist with that kind of stuff but I do trip on my own lore and I probably should have read my own books all over again before writing this book. I’ve noticed a lot of people on their blogs are saying they’re reading the six previous books in preparation for [this one] and I guess I probably should have done that too.

PGN: For the second time, Michael has fallen for a man who works with his hands. Is there a history you have with tradesmen that you’d like to share?
AM: (Hysterical laughter.)

PGN: OK, that didn’t come out right, but is this an unfulfilled fantasy or just a coincidence?
AM: No, no. Well first off, who was the other one?

PGN: When Thack [Michael’s boyfriend in “Sure of You”] pulled out a hammer to fix the Barbary steps in “Significant Others,” it was pretty clear that Michael fell in love with him on the spot.
AM: Oh, that’s right. And I guess Jon [Fielding, Michael’s boyfriend in the earlier books] technically worked with his hands too, since he was a gynecologist.

PGN: Seriously, is that trait something you’ve always admired in your personal life?
AM: Yeah, I think it’s very attractive when people actually know how to do something physically, because I don’t.

PGN: I was a little disappointed that we don’t know more about Thack’s departure. For all we knew at the end of “Sure of You,” Thack was Michael’s happy ending. In this book, his departure is reduced to little more than a paragraph. This might be a little personal ...
AM: I’ll bet it is and I bet I’m not going to answer it.

PGN: Was it important to have Michael’s last relationship be a clean break because since the last book, you had one in your own life?
AM: Well, yeah. The books do roughly follow the ups and downs of my own life, but not completely. I’m not HIV-positive, for instance. There was an awful lot of catching up I had to do with the major characters, so to spend a whole lot of time with a character that was no longer there just didn’t seem to make sense to me. I wanted people to know what his status was but there’s a balance I had to achieve in terms of writing a novel that would stand on its own and one that was simply catch-up with the past.

PGN: At one point in the book Michael refers to the 9/11 terrorist attacks as being four years ago. How long has this book been in the works?
AM: I can’t even remember when I first took money for it! I think it was about four years ago or something. Most of the writing occurred in ’05, so I decided to make it happen in that year but I don’t think I stopped writing until ’06. I figured there would be somebody out there who could figure out I screwed up the chronology so I tried to be vague enough so I couldn’t be held accountable. My chief concern was to capture a moment in history when the country was so divided because of the Bush administration.

PGN: I’ve given these books as gifts over the years and everybody always sees themselves as on character in particular. Even though you’ve said that all of the books’ contents are pieces of you, is there one character that most embodies the person you’re most comfortable with in your own skin?
AM: You’re going to be surprised at this, but Mona. She’s a bit blunter about the world.

PGN: She did teach us that “life is a shit sandwich.”
AM: I believe that too, and I believe that’s why I behave like Michael. That’s why I insist on being grateful for every day. I think it’s precisely because life is a shit sandwich that we have to cultivate love and put it first and foremost in our lives. That’s the only respite that we have.

PGN: Since you just talked about cultivating love at all times, can we talk about Christopher and your relationship?
AM: Sure.

PGN: Start at the beginning; all I have is the framework. He was running a Web site [www.daddyhunt.com] and you recognized him on the street ...
AM: Yep, I didn’t know he was running the Web site, I just knew he was the most gorgeous guy on the Web site. We saw each other for maybe three months, I’m not sure exactly. I’ve lost track of that. We were married this February up in Vancouver on the 18th.

PGN: Having dated only one man who was significantly younger than me, I remember the pain of having to explain who “The Banana Splits” were or the fact that “Josie and the Pussycats” was a memorable cartoon long before it was a forgettable feature film. How do you and Christopher navigate the disconnected chronology of your respective pop cultures?
AM: There’s nothing to navigate, really. He informs me about what he knows and I inform him about what I know. And most queers are clever enough to span the decades when it comes to pop-culture. There are plenty of times when he draws a blank over something I’ve said but that doesn’t stop me. You know Michael says in the book, “I feel it’s my job to tell him everything he missed by being so young.”

PGN: As a gay man of a certain age, the fear of AIDS has been a part of our adult lives for some time. Now, as part of a sero-discordant couple, whose future concerns you more?
AM: It’s bad taste to complain about getting older when you’re gay, especially when you’re a member of my generation. I’m a lucky bastard that I’m 63. Maybe in a sense, [Christopher’s positive status] kind of evens out the intergenerational difference.

PGN: I guess what I’m really asking is whose shoes would you rather be in: a 63-year-old’s or a 35-year-old’s who’s HIV-positive?
AM: I wouldn’t trade my life for anything. It made me who I am and I’m happy with who I am and it brought me Christopher, so there really is nothing to complain about. Remember, there are no requirements of a gay man. We broke the big rule and now we’re free to do what we want.

PGN: Could you tell us about any projects other than the books that you’ve been working on over the years?
AM: Well, three miniseries and a feature film, if you hadn’t noticed. On a side note, it might interest you to know what I’m doing in Washington today. I’m speaking to the Public Library Association’s annual meeting. I was given the gig three weeks ago and I was told I was replacing Elizabeth Edwards [wife of presidential candidate John Edwards], and my initial reaction was worry that maybe she’d gotten ill. I saw online that she was actually in San Francisco at gay pride, addressing the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club. I think there’s wonderful irony in the fact that the queer from San Francisco can go to Washington to talk to the librarians so that the candidate’s wife can go talk to the queers in San Francisco. It’s definitely progress, don’t you think?