There is an electric poignancy to the moments he describes, often when he is in the presence of the signals that led him into his own awakening as a gay man, an activist and a leftist. The story he tells is about what it is like to be raised inside of white supremacy and to survive it. If you ever knock up a little nigger gal, we can send her to Puerto Rico for the operation.” That sentence alone is like a gunshot held in a tea cup.

Or his father, as he went through puberty: “Don’t worry, son. He dutifully, proudly showed friends his grandmother’s sleigh bed, “made by the slaves in our family.” His grandmother assured him that you could not say the term “colored ladies,” because there were none. He grew up imagining himself a young conservative, despite the feelings he had at the sight of attractive men. Maupin begins in Raleigh, N.C., the son of a family so determined to keep alive the spirit of the Confederacy that his father frogmarched his family from the church rather than listen to a sermon that hinted, even lightly, at desegregation. The story is of a young man running away, not from home but, really, to it. “You may have already read some of these remembrances - in interviews and newspaper essays, or thinly disguised in one of my novels - so please know I reserve the right to plagiarize myself,” he says tartly in his acknowledgements. Now he turns his attention to the story of himself, with “Logical Family: A Memoir” (Harper). Maupin has seen his novels go from syndicated column, to award-winning books, to television miniseries.

Or, to put it another way, it was a guide to living in San Francisco.

The first in a series of nine - I did in the end read them all - this novel prepared me for how you can lose yourself there in order to find yourself, the better to be found by those who can really love you. I felt both like I was striking out on my own and following a path that others had taken before me - and to the extent that much of this was legible to me, it was thanks to a novel in that car: “Tales of the City” by Armistead Maupin. I found love and heartache there, activism and political awakening, friends and what I learned to call chosen family - the people I will still show up for, drop everything for, no matter what. In 1989, after I graduated from college, I jumped into my friend Karen’s car and drove west to San Francisco, like many young gay men before and after me.

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