Father Figures: On Armistead Maupin’s ‘Logical Family’
’s broke ground in perhaps the most satisfying way: sexually brazen and politically stealthy, with a healthy dose of humor. His recent memoir, , tells the tale of Maupin’s youth, and many of the personal stories behind his beloved . As Maupin remembers, fiction hadn’t run in a daily newspaper for more than 100 years when in 1974, the hired him for weekday installments of a series on avatars of local types, scheduled to run indefinitely. Maupin was a young journalist new to fiction, but he greeted the challenge. The saga quickly won plenty of fans, neutralizing the requisite scolding subscribers. Average readers soon became attached enough to the characters to sympathize with their loves, losses, and personal awakenings. The column also became a conduit to process collective hardships like AIDS, the killings of and , and anti-gay initiatives. The ran for more than 10 years and took on a life of their own—collected in books, adapted for TV, sometimes even set to music—and Maupin became an icon of queer storytelling. He continued the series through subsequent novels; the ninth and purportedly final volume came out in 2014. A documentary, , supplements the release of
