Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 2007. My castaway this week is the writer Armistad Maupin, regarded as one of the great social satirists of his era, he made his name

with his tales of the city novels, chronicling the shifting cultural landscape of San Francisco

throughout the 70s and 80s. He's achieved widespread acclaim

for placing gay characters within a large cross-section of humanity, bound

together by the Universal Search for Love and Acceptance. He was also one of the first novelists to portray the devastating impact

of the newly emerging threat of HIV AIDS. His status as one of America's best-known

gay writers and political activists couldn't be further from his background.

Brought up in the Gentile-American South, he describes his father as the most hide-bound

arch-conservative neo-fascist Southern gentleman you could imagine, but he credits that same family

background with giving him the perfect tools to be a great storyteller.

The legacy then of your southern roots, what was it about that that has turned you into this wonderful

storyteller? Well, all of my family members were storytellers. My father remained to his death

a couple of years ago, a terrific storyteller. I realized it was just in our blood. We would take bits of

our history and spin it and maybe make it a little more colorful that it actually was in real life,

but it was part of our instinct.

You've said in the past that life is inseparable from work for you. Can you expand a bit on that?

Well I'm always gathering. In my last novel, I let the character say, I'm rather like a magpie.

I saved the shiny bits and discard the rest.

And I've done that my whole life in terms of just gathering the bits of my life and saving them and using

them in my fiction.

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