ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Armistead Maupin was born in Washington, D.C., in 1944 but spent most of his childhood in Raleigh, North Carolina. He was elected to every major honorary society at the University of North Carolina, graduating in 1966, before flunking his first-year exams in law school. Shortly thereafter, he applied for Naval Officers Candidate School, and, while waiting to be admitted, worked as a reporter at Raleigh’s WRAL-TV, then under the management of Jesse Helms.

After being commissioned an ensign, Maupin served as a communications officer in the Mediterranean and on shore with the River Patrol Force in Vietnam. He subsequently returned to Southeast Asia as a civilian volunteer to build housing for disabled Vietnamese veterans. For this effort, he was invited to the Oval Office of The White House by President Nixon and later was presented the Freedom Foundation’s Freedom Leadership Award, an honor won two years earlier by singer Anita Bryant.

Maupin worked briefly as a reporter for a newspaper in Charleston, South Carolina, before being assigned in 1971 to the San Francisco Bureau of the Associated Press. The climate of freedom and tolerance he found in his adopted city inspired him to come out publicly as a homosexual in 1974 in a “Ten Most Eligible Bachelors” feature in San Francisco magazine. Two years later, he launched his phenomenally successful Tales of the City series in the San Francisco Chronicle.

In 1992 the author was the subject of an hour-long BBC television documentary, Armistead Maupin Is a Man I Dreamt Up. The first volume of Tales of the City has been adapted as a six-hour series for British television’s Channel Four by Working Title Films of London.

He lives in San Francisco and New Zealand with his lover and partner, Terry Anderson.

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