{"id":17023,"date":"2014-01-23T02:19:44","date_gmt":"2014-01-23T10:19:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/barbarafalconernewhall.com\/?p=17023"},"modified":"2014-01-23T02:19:44","modified_gmt":"2014-01-23T10:19:44","slug":"armistead-maupin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/armistead-maupin\/","title":{"rendered":"Armistead Maupin: The Man Who Wrote the Quintessential San Francisco Novel — On a Newspaper Deadline"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Tales<\/a>
Armistead Maupin at Book Passage<\/a> on Tuesday — as witty and kind and generous with his fans as he was with his San Francisco Chronicle co-workers. Photo by BF Newhall<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Armistead Maupin’s assignment was to show up at the offices of the San Francisco Chronicle every weekday morning and produce seven hundred words, give or take. But unlike most newspaper journalists, Army did not sit \u00a0down to his Selectric typewriter fortified with a reporter’s notebook fat with stats and quotes. <\/p>\n

That’s because Army\u2019s job was not to report the story. It was to make it up.<\/p>\n

A biggish challenge, but Army met it with grace, most days.<\/p>\n

It was 1976 and Army had been hired by the Chronicle to write fiction in the form of an ongoing serial, \u201cTales of the City.\u201d He had no facts to work from — only his imagination and what had transpired the night before in his life as a gay man in the fun-loving, free-spirited, dope-smoking, pre-AIDs-epidemic San Francisco of the seventies.<\/p>\n

How do I know? Because I was a copy editor in the People department (what used to be known as the Women\u2019s section) where Army worked, and one of my many tasks was to edit Army\u2019s copy.<\/p>\n