Armistead Maupin
I was seventeen when I first saw Breakfast at Tiffany’s at a movie house in Raleigh, North Carolina. Looking back, it’s easy enough to see why a fledgling queer would fall for it. There was Audrey Hepburn, to begin with, so delicate and witty and spritelike that she seemed somehow…beyond sex. Here was a girl you could talk to all night without being expected to put out. I loved her apartment, too. That half-bathtub sofa, and the common fire escape, and the way that Audrey, when depressed, would climb through George Peppard’s window and sleep with her head planted chastely on his well-muscled chest. What I loved, in effect, was a gay boy and his girlfriend.
Peppard, after all, is playing the writer character from the novella—the Truman Capote character, for heaven’s sake—so despite the film’s heterosexual intentions, the easy intimacy and candor and (yes) love between Holly Golightly and Paul Varjak somehow suggest two people who aren’t out to fuck each other. I melt over that final wet-cat-in-the-rain kiss as much as the next person; I just can’t imagine what comes next. More shopping on Fifth Avenue, I guess, more breezy banter and true confessions.
A decade later, I recognized the same chemistry between Liza Minnelli and Michael York in Cabaret, another story about an urban apartment house and its polyglot residents, though (I’m embarrassed to admit) I was just as ignorant of its queer creator, the great Christopher Isherwood, as I had been of Capote at the dawn of the sixties. Isherwood’s writer alter ego in Goodbye to Berlin—the 1939 source material for Cabaret—remains coy about his own sexuality while tracking his platonic friendship with the quirky Sally Bowles. The film, of course, makes it clear that its handsome hero likes boys and that Sally adores him for it, though this revolutionary concept is eventually blunted by a drunken tryst between Minnelli and York that left me, frankly, a little queasy.
By then, I was already living in San Francisco and had girlfriends of my own. One was a struggling actress like Sally/Holly; another a rusty-haired mother of two who called me Babycakes, and who, upon receiving my quavering confession of homosexuality, snorted “Big fucking deal.” With both women I shared everything: my exploits at the baths (largely joyful) and the heartbreak that inevitably followed when I tried to turn playmates into lovers. I was almost thirty by then, but I was braving the masculine wilderness for the first time, so it helped immensely to have women on my side. And since sex and romance were not factors in our relationship, we were free to open our hearts—or spill our guts—when joy or catastrophe demanded it.
Such friendships were rarely celebrated back then, so I knew they would make perfect fodder for Tales of the City, the daily serial I launched in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1976. In my own variation on the urban apartment house—28 Barbary Lane—a young queer named Michael Tolliver takes devilish glee in scandalizing his friend, Mary Ann Singleton, a bright young naif fresh out of Cleveland. Inhabiting both these characters came naturally to me, since, if the truth be known, I was both of them. I was a wide-eyed newcomer like Mary Ann and a randy gay blade like Michael, though the decadent poses I struck for my straight girlfriends were often a cloak for my own insecurities, making me, I suppose, more akin to Sally and Holly than their more sensible male companions. Michael, therefore, would need someone to call him on his shit, someone older and less blindly sentimental. Enter Mona Ramsey, a world-weary lude-popping lesbian who’d tried a few men and found them decidedly lacking. Both Mary Ann and Mona would hold a mirror to Michael’s dreams, just as he would do for them.
That was over three decades ago, so the notion of women bonding with gay men is far less exotic than it used to be. Which is not to say that the experience is any less rewarding or complex or richly amusing as it always was. The essays in this book, as widely varied as life itself, stand in vivid counterpoint to the clichés that popular culture has already codified about gay men and the women in their lives. They remind us once again that neither gender nor sexuality can ever fully dictate the tenants of our hearts.