A Maupin Queen at the Opera
Colin and I went to see Tippett's Midsummer Marriage at Covent Garden last night. It was a dull experience.
Colin was far more enthused by the performance of The Magic Flute he had seen at the Coliseum the night before and urged me to go.
"I saw it last season," I tell him.
"But it really is a good night out."
"Still, it's a bit soon."
"Well, this cast is very special."
"Er, I went with David."
"Well, maybe it's about time you went to see it with someone else," he smiles. Sometimes, he is full of unremitting good sense.
I change the subject and tell Colin that I'm re-reading Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City sequence of books for what must be the sixth or seventh time now.
If I have to own up to being an Opera Queen of sorts then I suppose I should also own up to being a Maupin Queen. I know these books back to front, can quote chunks, can discuss plot, theme and character. I first read them back in 1983 when Barry brought the first two volumes back from a holiday in Toronto and a whole crowd of us used to get off on the similarities between the novels and our own lives - I lived in a funky sort of communal house with Gill as a landlady of Madrigal proportions, we had a cat called Boris, drank Red Zinger and, in our own ways, had extraordinary escapades.
"Yes," says Colin, "I should think that they'll mean an awful lot more to you this time."
And, of course, he's right. Like a lot of gay men who read these books, I identify strongly with the character of Michael Mouse Tolliver. The first time I read them, I got off on the wit, the energy, the pursuit of love, the indefatigable romanticism. Later, I saw more of the pain, the loneliness, the desperation, the fear of happiness and rejection. This time, Mouse's on/off affair with Jon and his difficulties in committing, Jon's death through AIDS and the impact of AIDS on all these imaginary lives emerge strongly and are viewed, inevitably, through the prism of my own experience of David's death last year.
"The thing that came over to me most strongly recently," observes Colin, "is the way that Mouse uses all of that wit and energy to keep people at bay and to deflect their affections for him. Even when he's in hospital with Guillain-Barré syndrome all of his humour is about 'Don't come too close'. He's quite the most approachable and yet the most distant of all of the characters."
"Yes," I respond eagerly. "That's exactly what Jon tells Michael at the end of Book Three. There's a whole thing where Jon just lays into him for not letting himself be loved." And then I realise that Colin is just sitting, quietly, looking at me.
I was still pondering whether Colin was talking about Mouse, me, himself or any combination of these when the house lights went down.