“The idea that he was doing this in a family newspaper – that is not just groundbreaking,” Gaiman reflects. It “smuggled in all sorts of themes” – hook-up culture, everyday drug use, gay bathhouse sex, transgender identity – while remaining a frothy, funny narrative with characters for whom readers felt a deep affection. In the film, Maupin’s friend Neil Gaiman recalls how Tales of the City began in 1976 as a daily serial in the San Francisco Chronicle, and was “almost a Trojan horse”. This shiny stuff is also on display in a new biographical documentary, The Untold Tales of Armistead Maupin, directed by Jennifer M Kroot.

As Maupin’s stand-in character Gabriel puts it in the roman à clef The Night Listener: “I’m like a magpie, I save the shiny stuff and discard the rest.” Given that he’s an author who has “looted his own life for his fiction”, an autobiography of some kind was all but inevitable: “I’ve been anecdotalising my life since I was a child,” he chuckles. I wanted credit for overcoming the influences of my childhood.” He also wrote it, he has said, to “get over the fact that I was cross with myself for waiting so long to come out”. He wanted to write a memoir, he says, “to show that I had made a journey from a position of darkness and narrow thinking to quite the opposite. And, from his late 20s, the open-hearted ambassador of homosexuality, a writer who, in his own words, revealed “the gay experience” to a readership of millions (and the even bigger audience of the 1990s Tales TV mini-series). There have been two Maupins: the young, virginal, arch-conservative Vietnam volunteer who shook Nixon’s hand and kept his sexuality a secret, desperate to impress his white supremacist, homophobic father.

Armistead maupin