{"id":15865,"date":"2017-08-30T15:42:36","date_gmt":"2017-08-30T22:42:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/independentlens\/?post_type=films&#038;p=15865"},"modified":"2025-05-20T11:07:12","modified_gmt":"2025-05-20T18:07:12","slug":"untold-tales-armistead-maupin","status":"publish","type":"films","link":"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/independentlens\/documentaries\/untold-tales-armistead-maupin\/","title":{"rendered":"The Untold Tales of Armistead Maupin"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Untold Tales of Armistead Maupin<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> examines the life and work of one of the world&#8217;s most beloved storytellers, following his evolution from a conservative son of the Old South into a gay rights pioneer whose novels have inspired millions to claim their own truth. Jennifer Kroot&#8217;s documentary about the creator of <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Tales of the City<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> also gets by with some help from the author&#8217;s friends \u2014 including Neil Gaiman, Laura Linney, Olympia Dukakis, Sir Ian McKellen and Amy Tan \u2014 along with Maupin himself to offer a disarmingly frank look at the journey that took him from the jungles of Vietnam to the bathhouses of \u201870s San Francisco to the frontlines of America\u2019s ongoing culture war.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Maupin was born in Washington, D.C., in 1944 but grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. A graduate of the University of North Carolina, he served as a naval officer in the Mediterranean and with the River Patrol Force in Vietnam. Maupin then worked as a reporter for a newspaper in Charleston, South Carolina, before, as fate would have it, he was assigned to the San Francisco bureau of the Associated Press in 1971. In 1976, he launched his groundbreaking <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Tales of the City<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> serial in the <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">San Francisco Chronicle<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, and his world and ours were never again the same. Maupin became one of the first gay writers to attain crossover status, authoring nine novels, including the six-volume <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Tales of the City<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> series, as well as a memoir, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Logical Family<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Untold Tales<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> is his own tale told in both playful and poignant fashion, reflective of the author himself.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Untold Tales of Armistead Maupin examines the life and work of one of the world&#8217;s most beloved storytellers, following his evolution from a conservative son of the Old South into a gay rights pioneer whose novels have inspired millions to claim their own truth. Jennifer Kroot&#8217;s documentary about the creator of Tales of the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":16020,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"topic":[1288,1249],"class_list":["post-15865","films","type-films","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","topic-lgbtq","topic-literature"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>The Untold Tales of Armistead Maupin | Groundbreaking Tales of the City Writer | Independent Lens | PBS<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Untold Tales is the colorful story of writer Armistead Maupin, whose Tales of the City series inspired millions to claim their own truth.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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