Summer reading: Armistead Maupin on aging. love, and the search for community

In Armistead Maupin’s new book “Michael Tolliver Lives,” the gay and straight characters who oncecrowded into the baths South of Market or gathered for “singles nights”at the Marina Safeway are now deep into their 50s. They’ve survived thescourge of AIDS but are frightened by the first rumblings of mortality.Although they talk a good game about sex, food and pop culture, theiryouth has vanished, like a cloud of fine Colombian.  “I’VEalways written about the moment,” said Maupin, whose career took off in1976, when his pioneering daily serial about sexually liberated men andwomen began appearing in the San Francisco Chronicle. “And it was clearthat, just as I have taken people on a guided tour of my hedonisticyouth, I would have to do the same thing now with my contentedseniority…. Everybody who gets older thinks about dying anddeterioration, the permanence of love and all those haunting questions.It was time for me to get down to the nitty gritty.”  If earlycritical buzz is any indication, Maupin’s new novel may once againreach a large audience. He is a brand name in a gay literary marketthat is growing but still struggling for mainstream success. LauraMiller, Salon’s fiction editor, wrote that his earlier San Franciscostories are “perhaps the most sublime piece of popular literatureAmerica has ever produced.” Although some critics have sniffed that hiswriting trends more toward breezy pop than literary heft, there is nodoubting his nationwide appeal; three versions of his San Franciscostories have been broadcast on PBS and Showtime.

Read the rest of this review in the LA Times, http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-ca-maupin15jun15,1,2524019.story?ctrack=2&cset=true