Armistead Maupin is just where he wants to be. But that’s not where you might expect. The writer who made his name as the bard of San Francisco – or at least an earlier incarnation of it, featuring gay jockey-short dance competitions, weed‑smoking landladies and, crucially, affordable housing – is now happily ensconced in south London. A 1930s terrace in Clapham feels so much like home that he looks at me wide-eyed when I say that my trip to see him in SW11 met with not a few gasps of surprise. “Oh, get over it,” he snaps, before a reassuring peal of laughter. “Get over your fucking self!”
We sit across from each other in his unfussy living room, the only suggestions of Americana being a large painting of redwoods along the Russian River and various mementoes from TV adaptations – including a street sign from Barbary Lane, focal point of his beloved Tales of the City series. Maupin, almost 80, still has a full head of creamy-silver hair, his trademark moustache, and looks relaxed in his dad jeans and a dark green corduroy shirt.
In fact, he and husband Chris Turner – a photographer in his early 50s – have been living in England for nearly five years, after leaving the city he immortalised back in 2019. “I love San Francisco as much as anybody else, but I had sort of done it,” he says. “We wanted a new adventure. And we’ve had it here.” He’s mildly incredulous when I ask him what the appeal is: “Look at your country! It’s amazing.”
“There’s so many things about the culture that I relate to and enjoy. We go to the theatre all the time. I never did that in San Francisco. We only had one theatre to go to. It’s the land of Dickens and Christopher Isherwood. Well, he moved to California, but never mind.”
If he were forced to choose something he didn’t like, it would be our substandard marijuana: “That’s the irony – the thing that I’ve been promoting for years has now been [effectively] legalised in America. They finally realised what its value was, and I’ve moved away.” Mainly, though, it’s our collective failure to appreciate how lucky we are. “God, you grumble grumble grumble about everything,” he sighs. With some justification, when it comes to the weather? “The weather isn’t terrible to me. English people think that I moved from a land of constant sunshine. I did not. San Francisco gets fog. It’s very chilly most of the year. I’m not averse to rain at all. I actually enjoy it.”
There were push factors, too, of course. “It was depressing to see where our own country was headed. And it’s more depressing today than it was five years ago.” His voice dips: “I think that monster’s gonna get back in power.” A second Biden victory feels unlikely, then? “He’s looking feebler by the hour. I say this as an 80-year-old, who sympathises with everything he does.”
Then there’s the extraordinary fact that the man who did more than anything to sell the San Franciscan dream was essentially priced out of it. Maupin’s joyously soap-operatic, sexually liberated Tales were published in instalments in the San Francisco Chronicle in the 70s and 80s, before being repackaged as bestselling novels. They follow a vivid cast of characters – gay, straight and trans – through ups, downs and outrageous twists, and made him into an icon of the city, a human equivalent of the Golden Gate Bridge. But turbocharged gentrification caught up with him in the 2010s. “We sold the house and then moved to Santa Fe, and then came back for five years to rent in [the Castro district], a place that had not nearly this charm,” he says, gesturing to the house around us, and the leafy street outside. Before long, the cost of living got “out of control”.
I point out that though we don’t have as many tech bros pumping up prices, London isn’t exactly inexpensive. “We’re still having to scramble,” he concedes. Among many things he enjoys about England are the free prescriptions (a delivery from his local pharmacy arrives while we’re talking). He explains that though he’s sold more books than most authors dare to dream of, it was all spread out over five decades. Not only that, but “I’ve been very careful not to do anything I don’t want to do. So, I suppose I would have made a little bit more money if I’d not done that.” He chuckles: “Chris said today, he said when [the interviewer] gets there, are they going to be disappointed, because they imagined some grand house?”
In truth, it’s a very nice house and, given the location, far from cheap. But it remains a bit incongruous to find this spirit of California installed behind an Arts and Crafts garden fence and suburban stained glass. Until, that is, you consider that Maupin is neither Californian nor entirely American. He grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina, scion of a grand southern family (and great-great-grandson of a Confederate general). But his grandmother, Marguerite Norma-Smith, was an English suffragist, emigrating to the States with her married lover after the first world war. “I have cousins here, actual relatives in London.” They include singer Sarah Jane Morris, who duetted with Jimmy Somerville on the 1986 gay anthem Don’t Leave Me This Way.
Marguerite herself is no vague ancestral figure. A photo of her, looking for all the world like Gloria Swanson, takes pride of place on the bookshelf to Maupin’s left. “She was the most important thing in my life, really, because she gave me permission to be me at a very early age,” he says. “I’m not sure she knew exactly who I was, but she told me it was OK, whatever it was.”
In his remarkable 2017 memoir, Logical Family, Maupin writes about how, as the first of her 19 grandchildren, he quickly fell under the spell of this palm-reading, Ouija board-bothering English eccentric. Though he was never out to her in so many words, “she often theorised that I was the reincarnation of her beloved cousin Curtis back in England. Her bachelor cousin Curtis. Her extremely artistic bachelor cousin Curtis.” She died when Maupin was in his 30s, soon after the publication of the first Tales book, promising at their last meeting that “I’ll be coming back to visit you, you know.”
Though spectral encounters have been hard to come by (“I haven’t felt [her presence] yet in Clapham, but I’m working on it”), the idea of her has lived on, and not just in Maupin’s memory. Marguerite was the model for his most famous character, Anna Madrigal, the landlady of 28 Barbary Lane, mother hen to a series of transplants and oddballs, who was also given to gnomic advice and the odd premonition. Unlike Marguerite, Madrigal was partial to a toke – and the housewarming spliff taped to the outside of new tenants’ doors became an emblem of the Tales’ bohemianism. Maupin describes Madrigal as his “proudest achievement”, writing that the San Francisco Chronicle’s nervousness about introducing a trans character (her identity was kept “mysterious” for some time) allowed him to “establish Anna Madrigal’s humanity, before readers – or some of them, anyway – could dismiss her as a freak show”.
She appears in every Tales book, including the 10th, Mona of the Manor, which is out in March. I point out that, since 1989’s Sure of You, each new book in the series has been billed as “the final instalment”. “I lie,” Maupin admits, “I lie through my teeth.” The most recent one to bear the warning was 2014’s The Days of Anna Madrigal, in which the matriarch, now aged 90, takes a trip to the Burning Man festival. “What can I say? Sometimes I find a reason to come back.” Why does he return to the same characters? “I don’t feel that they’ve said enough yet. Or explained themselves enough.” This time, is it really the end? He emits a machine-gun-like burst of laughter, then says, “Um, yes,” before the doorbell rings, letting him off the hook – it’s his dog walker, and Zeke, his golden labradoodle, bounds in.
Fittingly, the new novel is set in the heart of England, where the titular Mona – an ex-Barbary Lane tenant who, in an earlier twist, was revealed to be Madrigal’s daughter from before her transition – is chatelaine of a grand Cotswolds house. She inherited it from her husband, Teddy, now dead from Aids, whom she had married so he could get a green card and be “sexually free” in San Francisco. Mona makes ends meet by renting the manor out to tourists, with her gay British adopted son, Wilfred, serving as a kind of butler. The action, which takes place in the early 1990s, begins when a Christian couple from the deep south arrive expecting some traditional English hospitality, but get an entirely different experience. In Mona’s words: “You thought you were getting a Barbara Cartland novel and ended up with a house full of mouse shit and queers.”
“It was my effort to replicate books that I have loved in the past that were set in English manor houses,” he says. “The main one is I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith. It charmed me as a teenager. It’s still very easy to pick it up and get charmed all over again.”
He loves the idea of the house itself being one of the characters, its limestone facade “darkened with weather and age to a variegated orangey-gray, like the hide of a tiger”. This being Maupin, the country manor plot is subject to a “twist”, he says, “in terms of it having everything from cottaging to a weed farm”. The cottaging actually takes place on a trip to London and involves, somewhat bizarrely – but entirely in the spirit of Tales, which once featured a thinly disguised cameo from Rock Hudson – a masked George Michael on Hampstead Heath.
The book also reveals a level of familiarity with British politics, with references to Clause (later “Section”) 28 and “Tory twats”. In a nod to more contemporary preoccupations, Mona dumps a girlfriend who takes offence when she sees a trans woman go into a public toilet. It was a very deliberate choice, explains Maupin, who says he was shocked when he arrived in England to be told that “a lot of reasonable people had objections” to that kind of thing. “And that made me very upset.” He’s particularly annoyed about progressives who aren’t on board with trans rights. “You don’t divorce that portion of the movement. You simply don’t. Trans people got us here in the first place, and you don’t leave them in the dust simply because you’ve become a bourgeois … whatever.”
“It feels very familiar from the old days when they worried about whether gays would be using the bathroom, you know, all the old arguments about ‘the children will be affected’.” And that fires up a sense of solidarity? “Completely – with my trans brothers and sisters. Yeah. I felt it from the beginning, actually, you know, from a long time ago.” Accepting his own gayness meant he “bought the whole package”, embracing difference of all kinds. “It seems to me that’s the issue. If you can’t handle that in one form or another you’re not the kind of person I’m gonna be with.”
Nods to Section 28 aren’t merely the result of dry historical research. Maupin has been au fait with left-ish politics in Britain for decades, partly because of his friendship with Ian McKellen, which began in the early 80s when he showed McKellen and his then partner Sean Mathias around San Francisco. Later that decade, a soul-searching conversation with Maupin persuaded McKellen that he needed to come out, and he did so at the next opportunity. (That happened to be during a Radio 3 debate with Sunday Telegraph editor Peregrine Worsthorne – “a perfect name for an asshole”, Maupin once told an interviewer.)
Maupin is less militant about the closet than he once was, though he says, “I’m never going to change from the position that if you show such shame about being gay, you’re less of a man.” He famously outed his “buddy with occasional benefits” Hudson to a reporter after the star’s Aids diagnosis was made public in 1985. If that seems callous, it was done out of a conviction that the scandal didn’t lie in his sexuality, but in the collusion of Hollywood and the press in denying reality and perpetuating the idea that being gay was shameful. The result, in any case, was an outpouring of love: Hudson’s hospital room was inundated with letters of support from fans.
Given Maupin’s own staunchly conservative upbringing – he describes his father, a member of the ultra-rightwing John Birch Society as a “fascist” – did he never feel any residual shame, shame that might have made him think twice about coming out? “Once I had a dick in my mouth everything became clear,” he says mischievously, though he admits that a supportive environment made all the difference. “In San Francisco there were always glorious men around me, and women. And there was strength in numbers, and that emboldened me to act on it, in my writing, in my life, and to get it done with.”
Does he miss his sexually liberated days? Or perhaps he’s still out there, cruising the common? “Look at me!” he laughs. “It would be too embarrassing. I reminisce fondly about those days. I’m glad I came out alive. I wouldn’t say I miss them exactly, because I’m living with the most wonderful man in the world.”
His London life is pretty much “home and hearth” and that’s how he likes it, although he says he and Chris go to the Royal Vauxhall Tavern “a lot”, and then there’s quiz night at The Grapes, the pub McKellen co-owns in Limehouse. McKellen forms part of a group of friends that includes Russell Tovey and Graham Norton, and he wants to reconnect with “inspiration” Miriam Margolyes, with whom he had a pre-lockdown date that never happened. He says Labour peer Michael Cashman, a friend since the 80s, helped him and Chris get visas, and also took him to the House of Lords, where he met Keir Starmer (“I liked him. He was a little bit deer-in-the-headlights”).
In part because of his English grandparents, Maupin was able to become a British citizen at the end of last year, though he didn’t have to take the infamous Life in the UK test because he’s over 65 (“poor Chris is going to be studying up soon”). “The ceremony was very moving,” he recalls, “because it was full of people of every nationality, and [the officiant] said it was their intention to celebrate that. I couldn’t imagine ever hearing such a speech being made in the United States.”
So, will he stay here for ever? “I think I will.” And, because of Marguerite, does it feel a bit like coming home? “It does. Yeah. That’s the simple answer.”
• Mona of the Manor will be published by Doubleday on 7 March (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. To see Armistead Maupin at a Guardian Live online event on 7 March at 8pm GMT book tickets here.
