It sometimes seems as if believers in nominative determinism might be onto something after all. At least, in a vague sense. Because if your name is Benedict Cumberbatch, it seems unlikely that you're going to eke out a career as an accountant for the local county council.
And similarly, if your name is Armistead Maupin, surely you have to end up working in show business to some degree? Or maybe you've invented your own stage name to seem destined to work in the arts. Not the case for the celebrated author of Tales of the City, as he told Derbhail McDonald – sitting in for Brendan O’Connor – as he’s actually Armistead Maupin Junior:
"I’m junior. I took it off my name because my father and I were so unlike each other, but, yeah, it’s a French last name and Anglo-Saxon first name that means hermitage. That sort of makes sense right now and during lockdown I thought, 'Well, it’s finally come true.’"
The Washington, DC-born writer was raised in North Carolina by staunchly-conservative parents and he’s not shy of calling his upbringing how he saw it:
"It was a very racist family, misogynistic and homophobic wasn’t even an issue because I was hiding so well, but, you know, I had a Confederate general ancestor... He was a defender of slavery in Congress and we had his picture over our mantelpiece, so, that was the life i was born into."
Maupin senior was a vocal conservative and his son became one as well to please his father. Armistead told Derbhail that he thought he would be loved if he could be as conservative as his father, so he worked on it very hard. This despite the fact that he knew that he was different, he says, from when he was 6 years old:
"I mean, my attitude about everything was different from that of most boys that I knew... And, you know, astute, my grandmother noticed that I wanted to go see Singin’ in the Rain five times."
Armistead was in the US Navy when he was younger and – as well as having an awkward meeting with then-US president Richard Nixon – Maupin's boat was the last American vessel to pull out of Cambodia and the young GI was determined to be the last American to leave the country.
He worked out that if he could station himself on the fantail of the boat, he would physically leave Cambodia last. But he wasn’t going to have it all his own way:
"The only way I could do it was to get naked because there was a hose back there that we used for showering. So I went back there and pretended to be showering and a lieutenant-commander, who outranked me majorly, went back and climbed onto the anchor winch and we had a competition. And he gave up eventually."
And that’s how Armistead Maupin was literally the last US serviceman to leave Cambodia. Of course, he had no idea at the time that he would become much more famous for writing his Tales of the City books and the TV series that arose from them than for being the last GI in Cambodia.
The books began as a daily column Maupin wrote when he moved to San Francisco in the mid-1970s. The column quickly became popular and Armistead was able to write about the experience of being gay in the city and when AIDS arrived in the 80s, Tales of the City chronicled its devastating impact on the gay community in the city.
Armistead Maupin will be interviewed by Panti Bliss at Liberty Hall, Dublin on Friday 22 April. Details here.
