Dansapp, writes Maupin, decided it was time to change: While the church “never completely excluded black people from its services,” they were required to sit in the balcony that once served as a slave gallery, and then only on particular occasions, “if they were, say, the beloved family maid of someone getting married or buried.” And black people were never allowed to approach the rail for communion. Dansapp, preaches one Sunday for racial equality.

When Maupin is a teenager, his father orders the whole family to walk out of their church because the minister, Rev. Some of the most affecting scenes in Logical Family are those in which Maupin remembers his father’s unapologetic bigotry with uneasy clarity. Having spent many of his young years in and around Raleigh, Maupin was in many ways a product of his time. When Maupin first arrives in San Francisco, he displays a framed photo of the president shaking hands with him in the Oval Office.Īlthough Maupin makes no excuses for his early conservatism, he does help us understand it.

His early conservatism, he explains, “found its most strident voice in Student Legislature,” where he “rallied against socialists and peacenicks in the Students for a Democratic Society and the National Student Union.” In his work, he crosses paths with none other than Jesse Helms and Richard Nixon. The son of a lawyer whose 2005 obituary read, “he’d always been sorry he’d been born too late to fight for the Confederacy,” Maupin is forthright about his own embrace of right wing ideologies. Maupin spends a good deal of Logical Family bringing to life his early years in North Carolina. While Maupin’s latest book is a memoir and therefore can never be a complete picture of the here and now, his personal stories, especially those about growing up in a racist, segregated South, could not have come out at a more relevant time. The words “here-ness and now-ness” feel so like Maupin, a perfect description of the snapshot quality of Tales of the City, stories that could only take place in San Francisco in the 1980s. He goes away for the weekend anyway, and vows to take in the “here-ness and now-ness” of it all. Maupin hesitates because the newspaper has requested six weeks’ worth of Tales columns, and he is short the requisite number of copy. About the same time, the author is invited to a gallery opening in Palm Springs. Halfway through Armistead Maupin’s timely and engaging new memoir, Logical Family, we learn that the San Francisco Chronicle has approved Tales of the City as a daily column.

Armistead maupin new book