The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop

Born in the mid-20th century and raised in the heart of conservative North Carolina, Armistead Maupin lost his virginity to another man ‘on the very spot where the first shots of the Civil War were fired’. Realising that the South was too small for him, this son of a traditional lawyer packed his earthly belongings into his Opel GT (including a beloved portrait of a Confederate ancestor), and took to the road in search of adventure. It was a journey that would lead him from a homoerotic Navy initiation ceremony in the jungles of Vietnam to that strangest of strange lands: San Francisco in the early 1970s. Reflecting on the profound impact those closest to him have had on his life, Maupin shares his candid search for his ‘logical family’, the people he could call his own.