In a new interview, out author-activist
Armistead Maupin (Tales of the City) talks about his strained
relationship with his brother.
Maupin's brother Tony supports
President Donald Trump, voted against same-sex marriage in North
Carolina and refused to attend a ceremony awarding Maupin a Doctor of
Letters degree.
The 73-year-old Maupin's tell-all
memoir, Logical Family, arrives October 5. A documentary on
Maupin's life, The Untold Tales of Armistead Maupin, premiered
in March at South by Southwest (SXSW).
“I look at it as a failure of
intelligence, not a deliberate act of cruelty on his part,” Maupin
told Winq. “My brother has inherited my father’s mantle in his
own mind. And part of that is to carry those attitudes along with
him.”
“I’m sort of really beyond being
hurt… I wrote books that offered the first sympathetic transgender
character in literature forty years ago and my brother’s family is
on Facebook talking about protecting their little girls from the men
who want to go into the public toilets. They’re that far removed
from any kind of rational understanding of transgender life, not to
mention pure compassion.”
“Part of the reason I coined the term
‘logical family' is you can really beat yourself up thinking that
you should be of one heart with members of your biological family.
Many people aren’t. Many people look around them and think, ‘Who
the hell are these people? Why am I supposed to go spend Christmas
with them?’ So why not create that family yourself?” he
added.
(Related: Netflix
developing new installment of Armistead Maupin's LGBT drama Tales
of the City.)