Barbary Lane Dispatches Podcast

Here’s a transcript of the video. Still, we hope you’ll watch the episode if you can — the video version includes more archival images, video clips, music and plenty of humor that doesn’t quite come across in the written version:
Today I want to tell you about my first writing job.
It was a friend of the family who offered me a position — very generously, I thought at the time. As the years wore on, he became my mortal enemy. And you’ll see how that happened.
My father never liked it when I would say that I flunked out of law school, but that’s essentially what happened. While I was at Chapel Hill, I was so bored by all the intricacies of the law that, on any given afternoon, you could find me down at the Carolina Theater watching the latest Fellini matinee.
So one day I went in to take my equity exam at the law school, and I realized with a flash of insight that I not only did not want to spend the next two hours answering the question they’d given me, but I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life concerning myself with it.
So I wrote in the blue book something very quaint and ’60s-ish: “My mind just blew.” And then I hitched a ride back to Raleigh on the old highway to tell my father that I wasn’t going to be joining him in the law firm. I dreaded that moment.
But he was remarkably big about it. I remember him saying, “It’s all right, son. You know, it bores me too sometimes, and I thought you’d just make it more interesting for me.”
I think that’s one of the times he really rose to the occasion in a big way.
So, having dropped out of school, I was eligible for the draft. And so I immediately signed up for Officer Candidate School in Newport, Rhode Island. My father was happy about that because it meant I would be going into the Navy, where he had been.
It seems I was always trying to duplicate his career — or he wanted me to duplicate his career — and one by one, the opportunities for that fell away.
My father always said that there was a war for every generation, and so lucky me, Vietnam was going to be mine. My mother helped me fill out the application form, which asked about various medical conditions — cancer, epilepsy, you know, the usual lineup — and then at the end of it said: “homosexual tendencies.”
I’m glad she filled out the form for me because I didn’t have to lie. Of course I knew very well at that point that I had homosexual tendencies.
I ended up getting a job for the summer before I went off to Officer Candidate School with a family friend who ran a TV station in Raleigh. So I got a job at WRAL-TV.
The host ran a show called Viewpoint, and he had praised me on the air for my conservative activism in Chapel Hill. I was trying very hard to be my father at that point, and it impressed this man.
So the day I reported for work at WRAL, I remember it was oppressively hot, as only the South can get. And I was listening to the radio in my car, to Jim Morrison singing, “Come on baby, light my fire.”
I liked a lot of music that was not attached to conservative values. Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, the Beatles — all of them had this strong humanistic message. It took me a few years before I could open up to what they were trying to say to me, and to let my heart make me into a full-fledged human being.
So it’s ironic that I was there in the car listening to Jim Morrison when I was on my way to meet this man.
So I walked into the studio and my new boss, Jesse Helms, opened the door.
It’s always a shock when people hear that — that I worked for this man who was so famously homophobic and racist. But he was doing a kind act for me and for the family by giving me a job. He was a friend of my parents, Mr. Helms.
My mother and his wife formed a chapter of the SPCA in Raleigh. His daughter Jane was in several of my classes, and we were friends. We had connections with his family.
So when my new boss saw me, he smiled. It wasn’t the best smile, I have to say. His teeth were crooked, and a sort of pearly residue formed in his mouth when he talked. But he welcomed me into the place and said, “We’re glad to have you on board.”
He told me that I was the hope of the future. He knew that I was a good writer, and he compared me to James Jackson Kilpatrick, who was a very prominent conservative at the time. I loved hearing it.
So I was hired as a reporter in the newsroom. It wasn’t a very glamorous job because I covered flower shows and Kiwanis Club meetings and things that didn’t stimulate me tremendously. But I had a job as a newsman at a television station, and I wrote little pieces describing what was happening.
But it wasn’t until I was sent to cover a Klan rally — the Ku Klux Klan, on the edge of town — that I really felt I had something juicy.
My father and Jesse both didn’t approve of the Ku Klux Klan because, my father said, “It’s just a bunch of common folks.” But they kind of agreed with them in their racist attitudes.
While I was at the rally, I interviewed the Imperial Wizard, who was a kind of a leathery, country-looking gentleman.
So I brought up Peggy Rusk, who was very much in the news at the time because she’d been on the cover of Time magazine with her husband, a Black man. And I knew that would set the guy off — and it did.
But he sounded kind of reasonable about it. He said he wasn’t surprised by it at all because everyone knew that Dean Rusk was a liberal and that he was a practicing homosexual.
Well, I thought I had the scoop of all time because he was the Secretary of State, and I was going back to tell Jesse that Dean Rusk was a practicing homosexual.
But when I brought it up with Jesse, he looked horrified. He said, “We can’t say that. He’s a terrible man, but that’s a terrible slander. We cannot say that about him.”
He said, “You can’t say that about anybody because… it’s… it’s an a-a-abo-min-ation.”
It was hard for him to get that word out of his crooked mouth, but he did. And the message came home very loud and clear to me as to what he thought about gay people.
I began to realize that this was deeply personal to him. I couldn’t imagine why it was, but it was deeply personal. He certainly didn’t have any idea about the abomination who was standing right in front of him. He didn’t learn about me until I came out publicly in Newsweek magazine.
By then he was serving his first term as a United States Senator, and he was holding forth on the subject in a very loud way. He was the loudest opponent of gay rights anywhere.
Excerpts from clips shown in the video of Jesse speaking in the US Senate:“Many homosexuals average sixteen different sex partners every month.”“How can you engage in sadomasochism, homoeroticism…”“In fact, it would authorize the expenditure of funds that would encourage and condone sodomy.”

I condemned him publicly on a number of occasions.
Several years later, I actually had to go to WRAL-TV on a book tour in Raleigh and got this chirpy female reporter who was talking about my book and nothing else. So I sort of said, “Well, you know, I used to work here.”
And she said, “Oh really?”
And I said, “Yes. I was a reporter here at WRAL, and I worked here when Jesse Helms was here. Now he’s out running around talking about militant homosexuals, and I’m out running around being one.”
The poor thing — she didn’t know what to do with that. But it was my finest hour. I felt like I got to undo so much with that one line.
Excerpt from KQED San Francisco interview of Armistead by Randy Shilts in the late 1970s (shown in the video):You know, I’m a North Carolina boy. I grew up thinking that there were three queers in town and they hung out at one end of this crummy little bar.
That’s one of the most difficult things about being gay — that you believe all the myths that straight people believe about being gay, even when you’re going through it yourself.
And until you meet someone, straight or gay, who can just sort of say, “You’re okay. You’re not insane. This is the way I feel, and I’m going to make it into something beautiful.”

In recent years, Jesse has been in my life in other ways, or been a presence in some ways. He showed up at my father’s funeral to pay his respects at the house, and I missed him. I wish I hadn’t, but I did. Chris and I arrived at a later time.
Jesse, it turns out, has a lesbian granddaughter.
It’s ignorance, really, that causes people to be such bigots. They simply don’t have the information — partially because we stay hidden as queers, partially because other people don’t listen to us.
I grew up as a young conservative, so I feel like I understand that mentality better than most people. It wasn’t until I got to San Francisco that I actually opened my mind and my heart to liberal ideas, and that made all the difference to me. That’s why my work is the way it is, because I had finally seen the light.
Life is so much easier when you’re open to other people, really. When you agree to accept other ideas that are different than your own. That’s the whole message of Tales of the City, and it’s the thing that I’m so happy to pass along because I’ve actually made the journey from that bigoted, narrow-minded way of thinking to a more illuminating view of the world.
Obviously Jesse had no idea when he gave me that writing job all those years ago — my first writing job — that I would go on to write something that was diametrically opposed to what he stood for. That amuses me. It makes me happy.
Thank you for coming along. It’s been nice having you here, and we’ll see you the next time.



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Here’s a transcript of the video:1969 was a very memorable year for many of us who lived through that time.
The main thing, I think, was the moon landing, which had us riveted to our television sets and fascinated by what was happening with Neil Armstrong as he landed on the moon. The whole nature of space exploration was ignited in that moment.
There were other things, of course. There was the Stonewall riots in New York City, although it wasn’t widely known at the time—but it happened then, in that year. Woodstock. A lot of things that we think of as culturally significant in America — and in the world, really — happened then.
What happened for me was I had sex with a man for the first time. That’s what made it memorable for me. I was living in Charleston. I was in the Navy at the time. I had been on a tour of duty in Naples on a destroyer tender, which just goes somewhere and parks.
I came back to Charleston and got a little carriage house on the Battery, down at the tippy end of Charleston. It was an old cottage filled with charm, and it put me next to the Battery, which was where the first shots of the Civil War were fired. So it made sense that that’s where I fired my first shots.
I went down to the Battery one evening, the last time I ever did that in all innocence. I was sitting on a bench admiring the moon when a man approached and began chatting me up, for want of a better word.
He was a little bit country, a little fae, and rather nervous talking to me. I finally said, “I’m sorry, I don’t think I’m what you’re looking for.”
He apologized profusely and beat a quick retreat away from me.
I thought about that for a while, sitting there admiring the moon not far from the Confederate monument, and I thought, “You’re crazy. You’re exactly what he’s looking for.”
So I went back to find him. He was on another bench chatting up someone else, and I said, “I have to apologize for the way I behaved back there. Can I make it up to you and fix you a drink at my house?”
Somewhat baffled by what I was doing, he followed me back to my carriage house, and it was there that we did the deed. I don’t remember it lasting very long or being much of a hit in any direction, but it was significant to me because it was the first time I’d ever had sex with anybody.
So that moment of semi-passion in my bedroom was stuck in my head when I came back to the ship the next morning in my little Sunbeam Alpine. “Morning Girl” was playing on the radio.
If you’re old enough, you remember that song by the Neon Philharmonic, which is about a young woman, I think, losing her virginity. It was:
“You’re several ages older now,so go out and find your manwhere the wild wind blows, Morning Girl.”
I didn’t have a sense of camp at the time — well, I must have had it, because it seemed campy to me even then — but I had been waiting. I was not officially gay until that moment, and I had been waiting for a sign that I was. And that was pretty much all I needed… to hear that song.
I felt like a freshly minted human being for the first time. I’d finally held another man’s body against mine, and the world had not come to an end. I was full of the joy of that when I boarded the ship. The officer of the deck saluted me, welcoming me aboard, in effect, as we did.
I wasn’t an idiot about this. I knew there were consequences for a naval officer to be caught in such a situation as I had been in the night before. I had sat in on a court-martial, as a matter of fact, where a fellow enlisted man was drummed out of the Navy. I remember watching him leave the ship in ignominy.
This wasn’t a dishonorable discharge as such. It wasn’t honorable either. It was just a way for the Navy to get it over with as soon as possible without any embarrassment. But the ignominy was there.
So I made up my mind to keep sex strictly confined to shore, and that had some consequences that weren’t entirely pleasant.
I went home one time with a guy who had an epileptic fit in the middle of going to bed with him. He peed all over himself, and he was hugely embarrassed and humiliated and shooed me away — just got me to leave. The next day I saw him. He was a checker at a local grocery, and he wouldn’t even acknowledge that I was the person he’d been with the night before.
On another occasion, a married man was blowing me in my Sunbeam. I can’t say that phrase without laughing.
And then a cop car pulled up. He was very drunk, the man that was with me. So I said, “Let me handle this.”
I pulled myself together and stepped out of the car to speak to the police officer, and thought I was doing a fine job of seeming innocent.
He just said, “Be careful, Ensign,” and went on his way.
I looked down and realized that my shirttail was hanging out of the front of my fly like a little cotton penis, and that I hadn’t fooled anybody. It was a hilarious and humiliating moment at the same time.
On another occasion, I went home with a guy who had porn magazines scattered all over his house. I’d never seen anything so shameless before. He played me a song from a Broadway show about sodomy and fellatio. Years later, I would realize that it was the soundtrack of Hair, but at the time it was just unimaginable.
I figured he was the one who gave me crabs, but I had no idea how to treat them. I was worried that if I went to the ship’s doctor he would know the difference between gay crabs and straight crabs.
So I tried Mennen Skin Bracer. Not a good idea. I was screaming in agony the first time I threw that pure alcohol onto my crotch. Next, I tried soaking in a hot bath, hoping that would drown the little f*****s. They just enjoyed that bath. It didn’t do anything at all, so I was finally driven to go to the doctor, who didn’t flinch. He’d seen this all the time. Apparently, the ship was riddled with crabs.
So that summer of ’69, I had a grand old time down on the Battery. I wasn’t in any way becoming an evolved gay man. I was just finally enjoying myself with my sexuality. It wouldn’t be until years later that I became really comfortable with being a gay man. San Francisco made that happen.
And it’s interesting to look back on that summer of ’69 and think of the moon landing, because I actually had occasion to meet Neil Armstrong years later. Chris and I were invited to a small event in Santa Fe, where we were living at the time, and Neil Armstrong was the guest speaker.
We were all just flabbergasted. It felt mythic to meet that man, and he was very kind, very sweet. He had timed his speech in such a way that at the end of it, the moon was rising over the mesa, as if he had summoned it. It was an amazing, extraordinary thing, and kind of a witty comment on his responsibility as far as that orb was concerned.
He was very fond of saying that he was just a technician, that he didn’t do that much really — he was just there to perform certain functions technically. But he felt very personally involved in it at that moment, and we loved it.
That evening, I got to introduce him to Chris and describe Chris as my husband, and I realized how far I had come from those early days in 1969, when this man landed on the moon, to being a happy, well-adjusted gay man. It felt so good.
To have him there as a kind of witness to that fact made it even more special. He was such a kind man, and I’ll always remember that about him. He didn’t flinch when I told him what my relationship with Chris was. We were just overjoyed to be in the presence of this iconic man.
So that’s my story of the summer of ’69 and how it changed me — and changed a lot of us in different ways.
So thank you for coming along this time, and I hope I’ll see you next time.



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Here’s a transcript of the video:I want to talk to you today about my experience in the bathhouses of San Francisco. To do that, I need to back up a little and talk about the way they first started in San Francisco. The biggest, most famous one was the Sutro bathhouse, which was out at the beach. It was a huge temple, really. It was built in 1896 and burned down in 1966.
It was a notorious spot for men to meet each other. It was that simple. Whatever terms they wanted to meet on, they could meet there. It was open to everyone, but apparently there were private changing rooms which were frequented by gay men.
There are several letters from that time where a straight man was hosting a gay man who was visiting town and wanted to entertain him, and he was told to go to the Sutro Baths.
The ruins of the Sutro Baths are still a popular tourist spot in San Francisco. About the time they burned down in 1966—when I was graduating from college—I suppose that’s when the other bathhouses began to open
The one I remember is Dave’s Baths, which was there when I was a young man in San Francisco. The first time I ever went down to it, I’d caught a cab. I was too embarrassed to tell the driver where I wanted to go, so I said, “Just Montgomery Street.”
And he said, “The whole street?” And I said, “No, you know.” And he said, “Where do you want to go?” And I finally said, “Dave’s Baths.”
And he said, “Oh, why didn’t you tell me so? I take a lot of people there.”
He took me there, and I checked in at the desk. You had to sign your name in those days to say who you were. So, with a perverse sense of humor, I suppose, I signed mine Elloughby Branch. My great-great-grandfather was a Confederate general whose name was L.O.B. Branch, and I turned that into Elloughby like a first name, and signed that at the desk.
I was given my towel, and I went off basically in search of cock—and found one. I can’t remember which one, appropriately enough, but it was a delightful thing to be able to do what I wanted in that regard, and to be in a place where I felt safe.
I hadn’t been out of the closet that long—or even properly out. I can’t officially say I was out at that point, because I was still operating under cover, as it were. It was an amazing thing to be in this place where I knew it was other gay men. It was safe. It was freedom like I’d never experienced before.
Dave’s Baths was a wonderland. I never found out who Dave was—never met him—but I have to thank him for creating the environment where my world changed.
There was every race in there, all sorts of experiences that I’d never had before—mostly ones that involved being human with fellow human beings. It was extraordinary, really. I might look at it today and not think that at all, I suppose, but it was at the time. I was captivated by the freedom of the place.
It drove me on to look for other horizons when I discovered there was a place called the Ritch Street Baths on the other side of town that was even more elaborate. I suppose I imagined it would be people I didn’t know, simply because it was across town.
Ritch Street featured what they called a Minoan temple. I still don’t know what that was, but it was a pool at one end of the place with a slightly Grecian motif going on. And at the Ritch Street Baths, you could get a nine-grain sandwich with turkey only steps away from the Minoan Temple, so you could sit there and munch on your sandwich while you were waiting to get your cock sucked.
I was in love with that place, and it opened up such wonders to me that I talked about it with several people that I knew, including my woman friend Jan Fox.
She was captivated by the fact that I had such a place. She said, “Oh God, I wish I had something like that that girls could go to.”
I tried going home once or twice with guys from there, but I learned that that didn’t work out. It was meant as a temporary pleasure, and I couldn’t go marry someone that I had met at the baths. I became resigned to that.
Later, I discovered the Glory Holes on 6th Street, which was very basic. It was just a room with cubicles that had holes in them where dicks would come through… to my great astonishment and pleasure. That became my regular habit.
I was working at the Chronicle by then, which conveniently was only two or three blocks away. So I would go over there on my lunch hour, while I was writing Tales of the City, and have fun.
It was referred to publicly as the Good Health Club—GH, it said outside—so the joke was that stood for good health. I would go there and then go back and report to work as soon as I was done.
One day, the editor of the Chronicle, this very distinguished elderly man named Charlie Thieriot, asked me to come up to his office.
I don’t remember what he wanted to talk about, but as I was sitting there talking to him, I looked down and realized there was a big wad of bubble gum stuck to my knee. So I had to subtly move my hand over it so it could not be seen. I’m not sure he ever registered it, but it sure did with me. I was in a panic.
I was able to mine my experience of the gay baths in Tales of the City. It’s referred to repeatedly—people saying so-and-so went to the baths. I didn’t get graphic about it. I couldn’t. But I acknowledged that they were a thing.
There was also a place called the Sutro Baths—not the original ocean one, but a small place on Valencia Street—that was co-ed, if you can imagine such a thing.
For a while they invited men and women to come there. It was mostly gay men, but some women. I don’t know how this worked, because I would run in terror from any woman who came into the place—it wasn’t what I was familiar with. They must have been brave souls. I have to give them credit for that. Or knew where to find the fun—I don’t know.
Of course, I knew about the bathhouses in New York, which had their own reputation. It was not exactly like that of San Francisco, which was more raw sex. Bette Midler sang at the Continental Baths to a bunch of men in towels, accompanied by Barry Manilow. I’ll never figure out why people were shocked to discover that he was gay many years later after he had been working in that environment.
It was where Bette got her start. For a long time she didn’t like to talk about that, but I think she’s over that now. It’s part of her history really. It’s part of what makes her special to us today.
In San Francisco, once the AIDS crisis hit, the city decided to close down the bathhouses. Interestingly, they didn’t close down the sex clubs. I never quite understood the reasoning behind that.
I always felt that was wrongheaded, because they could have used those spaces to educate people about AIDS—to have posters up, to inform people. The places that were left open had no communication at all. People wanted to do what was right and didn’t quite know how, as usual.
That didn’t stop me from going completely, but what eventually stopped me was that I became too well-known. I didn’t have the joy of anonymity anymore. That came to me in full force when one day I was at the glory holes and some guy came up behind me, put his arms around me, and said, “I really love your work.” Talk about a boner killer. That sent me screaming out of the room. I had to stop and be polite, but it was more than I could handle.
I suppose it was time. Sooner or later you have to realize that you’re not that person anymore. That didn’t come to me rapidly, but it came eventually. Your body tells you that, and a certain vanity comes into play because you don’t want to be seen as a ridiculous old man. There was some element of that for me.
And I learned to have sex with the person I love. It came late in my life, and I was glad when it did.
There’s so much shame attached to sex in our world, especially around gay sex. I realized that I needed to get rid of that, and the baths helped me do that—to eliminate my shame and become matter-of-fact about sex.
I’m so glad that I had that experience, and that it occurred at a time before there was a dangerous epidemic to make people stop.
It was worth it to me—more than worth it. It’s a fond memory. And while I don’t remember many of the people who were in those dark rooms with me, I do remember what it felt like—the communion you felt with your brothers.
It gives me a warm glow even today. I’ll always be grateful for having had that youthful bacchanalia. It made every difference to me. It opened me up creatively, among other things, and made me accept who I am once and for all.
I credit that to my time at the bathhouses. I really do.
And I wish the same thing for you—not necessarily a bathhouse, but a chance to feel yourself once and for all.
So thank you for coming along today and listening to me say lewd things. It was fun, and I hope I’ll see you soon.
Correction: Armistead realized after shooting the episode that Dave’s Baths were on Broadway (not Montgomery Street).
The wonderful music in this episode is by Michael Hearst.https://www.michaelhearst.com/


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit armisteadmaupin.substack.com/subscribe

Here’s a transcript of the video:
I want to tell you about the first time I fell in love—and the amazing connection we shared that I didn’t fully realize until years later.
I was living in Charleston at the time. It was 1970, and I had rented an apartment at the house of Elizabeth O’Neill Verner, who was a very famous artist—or at least in Charleston. She was an older woman who sold her work out of the house itself, so customers and tourists would come in to see her paintings. I was living in her attic apartment, but I would come down to the ground floor, where all the drawings and paintings were, and hang out. It was just a fun place to be.
One day I was down there, and in came a couple—a man and a woman. She was a striking brunette, and he was a beautiful blond. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. I chatted them up—their names were Curt Dawson and Barbara Caruso. I tell you this because they became permanent parts of my life in ways I didn’t expect.
Curt Dawson had the most romantic name I’d ever heard. It sounded like something out of the Old West—Curt Dawson. And he was gorgeous to look at. They were both so friendly, and so kind to me.
It turned out they were actors from New York City, on their way to Atlanta to be in a Chekhov play together. I assumed they were a couple because they were so intimate—so jokey and familiar with each other.
I invited them out and gave them a little tour of the town. I took them to Middleton Plantation. I remember being there, and a couple of times when I was alone with Curt, I felt—well, I won’t say he was coming on to me—but he would smile at me in a way that was, at the very least, distracting. Mostly, though, it was just three friends getting to know each other.
They invited me to come see their play in Atlanta. I didn’t know what my lodging situation would be, but when I got there, it turned out I’d be staying at Curt’s apartment.
He had a party while I was there—a cast party, for The Cherry Orchard. And I remember being struck that night, watching people gather, by what a rare and wonderful thing it was to see actors in their natural habitat. They laughed together—men and women all having fun. It was nothing like anything I’d ever seen back in North Carolina. They felt connected to each other in a way I couldn’t quite fathom. They worked together, played together, and loved each other.
I still wasn’t sure whether Curt and Barbara were a couple until that night, when he very gently took me into his bedroom. Up until that point, I had only had random, anonymous encounters on the Battery in Charleston. I wasn’t comfortable with my sexuality. It was something that happened in the dark of night, and that was that. Curt was the first man who made me feel like it was something to celebrate. And he did that very effectively that night in his bedroom.
After that, Curt and Barbara invited me to go with them to a cabin in North Georgia. I can’t remember exactly where it was, but it was a sweet, private, wooded place. Curt had an amazing appreciation of nature. Not in a scholarly way—he wasn’t a botanist—but he would stop and really look at something beautiful and absorb it. I saw him do that many years later in California as well.
I realized I was really falling for him—seeing him as someone who could be permanent in my life. I had never felt that way about any man before, certainly not the ones I met on the Battery.
So I fell head over heels. And he had to let me down gently. He said, essentially, “We’re having fun—but you don’t love me.”
He then said something to me that has stuck with me since: “Don’t worry about it. You’re just a young queen, and I’m an old queen.” He was 33 and I was 27—it was ridiculous, really. But I understand now what he meant. He had experience; he’d been in New York. I had none. So naturally, I thought the first gorgeous man who was nice to me must be the one.
I was heartsick for a while, but I got over it. I went to visit him in New York, and by then it was clear we were friends. I accepted that, because I wanted to know him. I wanted to be in his life.
Not long after, I moved to San Francisco. He came to visit me there, and we took a trip to the Russian River. We stayed in a lodge that was known for people parking up above and picking each other up. We had a great time—just hanging out as friends.
We stayed in touch over the years. I even saw him in After Dark magazine—a theatrical magazine with a very queer flavor. An older woman named Norma McLean Stoop interviewed him, and she was obviously as taken with him as I had been.
I found the magazine at my corner store in San Francisco, and it made me feel like he was still part of my life. We’d talk on the phone occasionally. I would get a report on what he was doing and the soap operas he was working in, as well as the serious theatrical ventures. He was mostly a stage actor, but he made his bread and butter doing soap operas.
Sadly, he died of AIDS in 1985.
Years later, I spoke with Barbara, who told me about the end. When he was too weak to get out of bed, she came to him and said, “Come on, darling, we’ve got to go to the hospital.” It was said in a very loving and resigned way that seemed totally like her and totally like him as well. I love knowing that she was with him—that he had a great old friend to be with him at the moment he left the world.
In 1994, I was at Stonewall 25 in New York. Ian McKellen was performing a show called A Knight Out, reminiscing about his life. I’d known Ian since the ’80s, so it was quite a shock when he spoke about Curt Dawson as someone he had fallen for when he was young.
Ian had met him when he was just out of Cambridge, and Curt was just out of RADA. They’d done an amateur production together. This was before Ian was getting any professional work. Ian really fell for this all-American boy from Kansas—Russell, Kansas—and said Curt had serenaded him with “Everything’s Coming Up Roses.” It had an effect. He’d been completely charmed by him and I think he fell in love with him for a brief time.
After the show, I went backstage and said, “I can’t believe it—Curt Dawson—we have that in common.” And Terrence McNally, the famous playwright who was there in the room too, said, “Oh yes, me too.” Meaning he had also been smitten with Curt.
After that, we jokingly referred to Curt as “Lover Zero,” because everything seemed to trace back to him. He broke a few hearts along the way, but never in a way that would be considered cruel. It was always done with love and tenderness.
I’m so grateful to Curt, all these years later, because he opened my heart to the possibility of love. The fact that he did that for others too only confirms what a wondrous soul he was.
I’m so happy he helped me move beyond the sense of shame, the thing that I had lived with since I was a boy. And of course, San Francisco helped me put an end to that once and for all when I arrived there shortly thereafter.
Thank you for coming along today and listening to me ramble. I really appreciate it—and I hope I’ll see you next time.
I don’t know the credit for some of the images in this post—if you know the source or are the photographer, please let me know. Thanks, Chris


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Here’s a transcript of the video:Today I want to tell you about one of my favorite people in the world. Judging from what I hear from fans, I think she may be one of your favorite people as well. So it’s a pleasure to talk to you about Laura Linney.
We met on the set of Tales of the City in 1992. As I recall, we were out at Land’s End in San Francisco filming an exterior shot of some sort, and I was totally charmed by her — not only by the way she treated me, but the way she treated the people who worked on the show. She was courteous to everyone. She seemed intuitive about what people were thinking and feeling, and that kind of kindness always impresses me when I see it. She had it in spades.
The first time I ever saw Laura was in a casting tape that was sent to me. She had come in to read for another role, but that role had already been filled, and they asked me, “Do you think this woman would work?” It was such a laughable question, because not only would she work — I couldn’t imagine anyone else playing Mary Ann Singleton. She grasped a lot about Mary Ann — about her naivete and her essential innocence — but also a kind of calculated way about her. She knew what impression she was making at all times, and the combination of those things made her irresistible in that role. I felt as if I’d seen Mary Ann Singleton come to life — she embodied that character so completely.
And the joke is, of course, that Mary Ann Singleton is sort of me as well, and so that instantly connected me to Laura. I felt that we knew each other really well, and her understanding of that character seemed to be an understanding of me. I hate to bring it back to myself, but that’s what it felt like.
I don’t know exactly when I realized that there was a serious friendship developing between me and Laura, but it came pretty quickly. We laughed about the same things. She had this sly little cackle, and at the same time that I was laughing about something, she would be. We just fit as friends. You know, we fit in the most beautiful kind of way. I was twenty years older than she was, but it didn’t matter a bit.
Laura adjusted to whatever set we were on. When we moved the show to Montreal, she was suddenly speaking in a Montreal accent and making me laugh like crazy. It was never malicious, but she heard people and she knew how to recreate their voices.
Laura is the kind of actor other actors come to for advice on how to play a scene. I’ve seen it happen many times on the set of Tales, and I’m sure it happens with every other production she’s ever been in because, one, she’s kind, and two, she’s knowledgeable, and she knows how to offer advice in a gentle way. It’s no surprise to me that recently she’s moving into a directorial role in some of her productions, like Black Rabbit with Jason Bateman. She directed several of those episodes because they trust her. Actors trust Laura, and that comes across in the performances.
Laura had a bit of trouble breaking into a movie career. She was in the famously awful Congo. She used to be very funny about that on the set because she knew when something was good and when it wasn’t. Her first major film role was in The Truman Show. She played this chirpy housewife who’s the wife of Jim Carrey. He’s in a reality show and doesn’t know it, and she’s part of the conspiracy to keep him in the reality show. But she gets very angry when he’s not playing along with the game. It’s great comedy stuff, and it works. She understood it on every level.
After that, in 2000, she got the first role for which she received an Oscar nomination, You Can Count On Me. In the movie she plays the sister of Mark Ruffalo. He’s kind of a hippie, kind of a ne’er-do-well who can’t keep a job. And she plays a really solid woman, and they are loving brother and sister. And the way in which they convey that is so brilliant. It breaks your heart before it’s over.
The biggest thrill of my life came when Laura asked me to be her escort for the Oscars when she was nominated for Best Actress. I got to go to that amazing event with her and I can barely remember what happened in it. It was really kind of hallucinogenic for me. But it was thrilling, and we went to the Oscar party afterwards, the Vanity Fair party, and I ran into someone I knew, Bud Cort, who’d played Harold in Harold and Maude, and a number of other people that were known to me but didn’t know me. It was such a treat that she gave me. She knew it would be.
She had broken up with a boyfriend, and she didn’t want to announce any new boyfriends to the world, and so she asked me. We had such a good time. We laughed so hard, which is always what we do when we have a good time. I was disappointed when she didn’t win. I think she should have won, but I don’t even remember who did win that year. For me, it was just a once-in-a-lifetime experience. So it sort of popped my cherry, as it were, to have that experience. And I could look at the ceremony from that point on and not see it as something too magical, but rather a very, very complicated act of artifice that everybody has to participate in.
Of course after that she went from strength to strength. She was in Mystic River. She got her second Oscar nomination for Kinsey. Of course she was in Love Actually in 2003. And it was a hard time, as I recall, because she’d had some romantic difficulties, and she was forced to play a love scene with the handsomest guy on the set — Rodrigo Santoro. Of course during that love scene, which is really hot by the way, she also accomplishes an amazing thing of letting her own emotions come through. She was feeling sadness at that point about her solitary state, and she used it in the scene. She made you feel what was in her heart and soul. She’s always been able to do that. She’s always been able to use everything she knows in her work, and it pays off time and time again.
Her third Oscar nomination was for Savages with Philip Seymour Hoffman… she was heartsick when he died. It really did affect her in a big way. Surprisingly, the most comments to her from the public come about Ozark, where she plays Wendy Byrde, a woman who is a very dark character, ultimately. It’s amazing how she can play anything, even a show that’s really dark. If there’s darkness in it, she can find her way to that darkness, and that’s why she keeps getting nominated for awards.
She absolutely loved working with Jason Bateman. They collaborated on scenes, and he wanted her knowledge, her expertise in that show, and he invited her back to be in a directorial position for another production. That’s Laura. She’s very useful to people because she listens and she has opinions, but not dogmatic opinions. And she makes herself invaluable to anybody on the set.
One of my more fond personal memories of Laura is when we were both Grand Marshals for the San Francisco Pride Parade in 2003. I remember it because Laura made up a little bit of nonsense doggerel that she sang in the car as we were driving along. She sang, “We’re two lonely people in the car, we’re two lonely people wondering where our boyfriends are.” It was the truth, but it was very funny. We would both eventually meet our boyfriends, our husbands, but it took a while, and she led me through that day in the sweetest kind of way.
I met Chris less than a year after that pride march. Afterwards, I went to visit her in Connecticut, and she was so sweet and kind. That was an important thing to notice — sometimes friends who meet someone else are rejected by their old friends because they’re no longer around. It was nothing like that with Laura. She was amazing. And she celebrated my finding someone. She celebrated it.
As luck would have it, she met Marc Schauer, her husband-to-be, only a few months after that.
After she met Marc, Chris and I were on a Southwest road trip, and we realized we weren’t that far from Telluride, and we knew that’s where he was living. Chris said, “Should we just drive in and surprise him?” We really wanted to meet this guy that Laura had fallen for, and let’s be honest, to inspect him, as gay brothers would want to do.
Marc was working at the Telluride Hotel at that point, so when we went to the front desk and asked if we could see him, he took a very long time to come out. We wondered if something was wrong. But he finally did come out and he was one sad puppy. He was depressed as hell because Laura had been there a couple of days before and was no longer there, and he was missing her. So we went on a little mini tour with Marc in Telluride and had the best time getting to know him. He was so intelligent and political and everything we like in a man… and so kind. I saw instantly why Laura had fallen for him and vice versa.
A few years later, Chris and I got married, and I asked Laura if she would be my best man. She read a poem that we gave her, “The Bliss of With” by James Broughton. It’s such a magical poem. Chris had read it to me not long after we met, and Laura loved it so much that she asked me to come and read it at her wedding.
Our wedding — the day, I’ll never forget it. It was a lovely day in Sausalito. We were at the home of Amy Tan. So many people that we loved were there in that bright California sunshine. It was a day I’ll always remember.
Speaking of magical days, in 2014 Chris and I were living in Santa Fe. We’d bought a house there in Tesuque. And I was in a dentist chair when a phone call came through for me. It was Laura. She had just given birth, and they had decided to name the child after me. His name is Bennett Armistead Schauer. I couldn’t have been more thrilled. I still am thrilled by that.
When Bennett was two or three years old, Laura and I were both in LA at the same time, and I invited her to come by Don Bachardy’s house where we were staying. And I wanted her to see the place. I wanted her to see Isherwood’s home base. It was important to me. And when we were there, Bennett spotted a portrait of Christopher Isherwood on the wall and went over and ran his hand down it, touched it, like he was connecting with him. And that was, for me, a really powerful moment because that was my past and my future connecting. I was very touched by it. It was a magical moment for me that I cherish, as I do with so many of my memories of Laura.
We still see each other from time to time. It’s not always easy because we live on different continents now, but I think I’m going to be seeing her in about ten days when she comes here. She’s been so important to me in my life, so I’m happy that I’m able to share some of our stories together with you.
Thank you for coming along, and I’ll see you next time.



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