He Still Has Plenty of Tales to Tell : Authors: Although he was unable to bring a ‘Tales of the City’ sequel to TV, Armistead Maupin remains a fighter for honest portrayals of gay life.

Armistead Maupin talks wearily about the long, losing battle to bring to television a sequel to the immensely popular miniseries based on his “Tales of the City,” a loving portrait of San Francisco in the freewheeling mid-1970s.

From his secluded redwood house high on a forested hill, Maupin has given up not only on further “Tales,” but on the network that brought the daring soap opera to homes across America.

What happened, according to Maupin and his business manager and longtime lover Terry Anderson, was that the Public Broadcasting Service caved in to conservative outrage. The series was considered a scandalous provocation, “the latest in an ongoing campaign by PBS to promote the homosexual lifestyle and agenda,” according to an Action Alert sent out by the American Family Assn.

This makes Armistead Maupin laugh. Wryly.

“People hearing a discussion of ‘Tales of the City’ must imagine it to be full of rampaging horn dogs who never stop screwing,” he says. “And there’s not one single sex scene in all of ‘Tales of the City,’ in either the miniseries or the books.

“It’s simply about the way people live and how they look for love and make themselves silly in the process,” he says, with affection for his characters, gay and straight.

He pulls out a report called Artistic Freedom Under Attack, produced by People for the American Way, which details censorship battles nationwide. PBS affiliates in Arizona and Georgia came under fire because of “Tales of the City.”

Then Maupin makes a statement that is startling, but which has a rugged logic to it: “If federal funding for PBS had been eliminated last year instead of this year, ‘Tales of the City’ would still be a viable project, because PBS would be answerable only to its viewers, and the viewers clearly loved ‘Tales of the City’!”

“Tales” seemed to generate controversy in direct proportion to its popularity. “In Georgia,” he says, “the $20-million PBS appropriation bill was axed because of ‘Tales of the City,’ yet calls to the local PBS affiliate ran 8 to 1 in favor of the show when it aired.”

In March, the University of Georgia singled out “Tales of the City” to receive a Peabody Award, honoring excellence in television.

The miniseries was produced by Britain’s independent television station, Channel 4, which sustained criticism for sending so many U.K. dollars abroad. Although a wholly foreign production, “It was essentially an American miniseries,” Maupin says. “American actors on American soil.”

The investment paid off, however, as “Tales of the City” garnered an Emmy nomination and many other awards.

“I’ve never been diplomatic about ‘Tales of the City,’ ” Maupin says. “It didn’t get made because I consistently refused to allow Hollywood to take on the property unless they would make it the way it was written. The chief value of ‘Tales of the City’ is that it is an honest observation about a time and a place and a group of people, and if I subjected it to the kind of sanitizing process that inevitably occurs on network television, the truth would never be told. So I was delighted when I was able to find a British company that told me right up front that they were willing to tell this story the way it was written.”

The possibility of a sequel to the televised “Tales” (which covered just the first of six volumes) was finally killed when no American co-financing could be found. Channel 4 was willing to put up only $4 million, half the amount needed.

“We spent a year beating the bushes and simply could not find an American network with the courage to take on the project,” Maupin says.

*

Despite constant attacks by conservatives, Maupin saves much of his rage for those with less starkly defined agendas.

“Principle matters,” Maupin says, a theme he comes to over and over. “I’m far more disappointed by Bill Clinton than by Newt Gingrich. Gingrich, after all, is only carrying out a plan he’s been fighting for for 20 years. It’s a plan I find abhorrent and anti-human--evil in many ways--but at least it’s something he appears to believe in. Clinton seems to be more involved in a popularity contest than in a battle for principles. That’s extremely depressing to people like me who believe in the principles of liberalism.

“What saddens me most about life today is that we don’t seem to have political leaders who are willing to defend liberalism the way Barbra Streisand did at Harvard recently. She basically said, ‘What’s so wrong about liberalism? We brought Hitler down. We defeated Stalin. We gave women the vote. We eliminated slavery. What’s to be ashamed of?’

“It’s that kind of humanistic thinking that has made life better for everyone in the 20th Century, and I don’t plan to abandon it any time soon.”

*

Armistead Maupin’s cheery righteousness was bred by a long process that brought him from tortured self-denial to freedom and revelation.

Growing up in Raleigh, N.C., he was immersed in a culture of discrimination. He learned early that he had different feelings toward members of his own sex and, in the repressed 1950s, he was terrified of being abnormal.

He became, in his own words, an “uptight, archconservative, racist brat” who worked for Jesse Helms for a time. He joined the Navy and served in Vietnam. President Richard M. Nixon invited him to the White House and honored him as a patriotic model Republican.

Everything changed when he got to San Francisco. Initially called out to work for Associated Press in 1971, he was overwhelmed by a city that did not consider one’s sexual orientation a significant impediment to joining society at large. Gay culture in San Francisco was just hitting its stride in the early ‘70s. Disco was the beat everyone was dancing to, and sexual adventurism was everywhere in this pre-AIDS era.

Maupin decided to come out of the closet.

“The great thing about San Francisco,” he says, “was that I had a clean slate. . . . I didn’t want to be simply a gay version of the person I used to be.”

Maupin had come out to a world split between people living free in the comfort of their true identities, and those who were still lurking in closets, closets of all kinds. He began serializing “Tales of the City” in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1976, becoming a sort of modern Charles Dickens.

Achieving instant fame with many levels of society, Maupin entered worlds he chronicled into what eventually became six novels of gentle amusement and friendship for the grand varieties of human nature. But he came to see ever more clearly the hypocrisy of those who hid from their true selves.

“It’s safe to say I’m hardest on closet cases. And by that I don’t mean just secret homosexuals, I mean anybody who’s presenting one life to the world and living another.”

*

Hollywood doesn’t escape his bitterness either. He’s particularly incensed with the way the film industry has usually dealt with gay themes. Maupin is writing the narration to an upcoming HBO documentary, “The Celluloid Closet,” produced and directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (“The Life and Times of Harvey Milk” and “Common Thread: Stories from the Quilt”). Tracing the treatment of gays from the Silent Era to today, Maupin half-humorously describes film history as having every gay character in a movie commit suicide by the film’s end.

“That made a big impression on me when I was 12 years old and beginning to realize I was attracted to boys,” he says. “I thought that was a pretty grim life that lay ahead for me.”

Maupin will have his chance to alter, even slightly, that skewed Hollywood history. He’s started work on the screenplay of his 1992 novel, “Maybe the Moon,” a comic masterpiece about a “dwarf actress in an interracial affair with a six-foot black man and her best gay friend.” Maupin concedes that he’s writing it because producer Robert Schwartz asked him to.

“I’m fully prepared for some studio somewhere down the line to sell me down the river when it comes to the story I want to tell,” he says. “I wouldn’t be writing the screenplay if I hadn’t been paid for it. Frankly, it wouldn’t be worth the agony to create something on spec and listen to people laughing, ‘You’ve gotta be kidding.’ ”

*

Maupin turned 50 this year, a “landmark at the half century.” It has caused him to reflect on a life that has seen enormous difficulties and enormous changes. It’s a life that, now, has its frustrations at the slowness of society to mature, but which also has the deep satisfaction of knowing he has believers and supporters and close friends, the closest being Anderson, his business manager, confidant and lover for 10 years.

His relationship with Anderson has provided Maupin with a solid base from which he can take off to deal with the demons, from creative dead ends to political struggle. It’s easy to see the gratefulness they both feel in having found each other.

“On the darkest days,” Maupin says, “when I worry about my ability to produce and the state of the world, and I become depressed about the meanness that has become institutionalized in America, I know that I have Terry Anderson. I know that we can shut out the rest of the world by the fact that we love each other.

“And that’s an astonishing gift.”