And when gay people lie about their sexuality, they condemn others - who are oppressed, or maybe sick - to death. 'Sex,' as he commented to me, 'is the last area of human experience where people think it's OK to lie. Not Maupin, whose sense of moral rectitude makes frankness mandatory. All writers are confidential in print, although most of them turn opaque or evasive when you confront them in person. Maupin is relentlessly 'in your face' even if what he presses into one's face is his private parts. This is the shock of California, where complete strangers insist on being psychologically intimate with you.
'These days,' he told me with a grimace, 'my sex life consists of me and the VCR.' Then he puffs back up the slope, armed with some food for dinner and a hard-core video for dessert. Maupin sometimes ventures down to Castro at lunchtime, passing a juice bar where his name is inscribed on a fresco of queer celebrities, and dodging tour guides who point to him as a mobile monument, like a greying, pudgy statue on leave from his plinth. Tucked away directly below his home, as if secreted in a bodily cleft, is Castro Valley, once the city's gay ghetto, now - as Maupin acidly observes in his new novel The Night Listener - a slick, commercialised 'theme park for homos'. In the distance is Macondray Lane on Russian Hill, a tunnel of regressive greenery straggling back into the secret garden of our shared childhood: here Maupin located the happy, communal Eden which he calls Barbary Steps in Tales of the City, his six-volume chronicle of frisky San Francisco in the Seventies and Eighties. He can glimpse the red span of the Golden Gate Bridge which triumphally subjugates the Pacific, and the pyramidal Transamerica skyscraper which optimistically straddles the San Andreas fault. The steep height is in San Francisco, and the city beneath his glazed, suspended chalet used to be Sodom. A rmistead Maupin lives on a mountain, vertiginously overseeing a city of the plain.
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