Professor Richard Canning Meets Armistead Maupin
On Sunday 29th October 2017 Professor Richard Canning of the English and Creative Writing team celebrated the launch of the American author Armistead Maupin’s memoir, Logical Family, at Gay’s the Word bookstore.
The venerable shop, which featured in the film Pride as the headquarters of the Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners movement (which numbered UoN Chancellor Reverend Richard Coles amongst its members), hosted Maupin on his whistlestop UK tour. It is one of the oldest LGBTQ bookstores in the UK, and one of very few to survive across the planet.
Canning commented: “It is always a pleasure to meet Armistead. His Tales of the City novels transformed my life and that of millions of other readers… Who wouldn’t enjoy a walk down Barbary Lane, and who hasn’t wanted a landlady like Anna Madrigal?
Maupin was decades ahead of his time in the social politics found in his novels, and they have changed millions of lives — LGBTQ and others! — for the better.
My first academic article was on Tales of the City, and Armistead also featured in my first book of Conversations with Gay Novelists, Gay Fiction Speaks. We chatted for a whole afternoon almost exactly 20 years ago at his then home in San Francisco. Time flies when you’re having fun! And talking to Maupin is almost as much fun as reading him! I can’t wait to read the memoir.”
