Barbary Lane Dispatches Podcast

Here’s a transcript of the video: My dear old friend David Hockney—we just lost him, and we wanted to find a way to celebrate his life. It seemed that we were already in the perfect place for it: in the South of France, beside a swimming pool. It’s as if his ghost is here. I knew David Hockney for many years because my friend Christopher Isherwood and his partner Don Bachardy introduced me to him....

First, an apology for being a little quiet lately here on Substack. We’re currently on a three-week road trip through the South of France with Zeke, soaking up beautiful villages, good food, and a slower pace of life. Rather than our usual mini-documentary-style videos, we thought it might be nice to bring you along for some informal conversations from the road. In this first chat, we talk about g...

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 o...

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 S...

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 f...

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 o...

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...

Here’s a transcript of the video: When I was a little boy, I had a terrible recurring nightmare. It wasn’t about a specific thing—it was just a kind of feeling, a sort of thrumming in my head that scared the hell out of me. And inevitably I would end up going into my parents’ bedroom and crawling in between them to feel safe from that nightmare. Then I developed the technique of telling myself a s...

Here’s a transcript of the video: When I was a teenager, my best friend was a guy named Eddie Russell. My parents didn’t approve of him, and I always assumed that was because he was a Yankee. He’d come from elsewhere and had lived in Miami, so he was very suspect. But I didn’t fully understand until my mother pulled me aside one day and said,“I think you should hang out less with your friend Eddie...

Here’s a transcript of the video: I moved to San Francisco in 1971. I got a job with the Associated Press. They first offered me Buffalo, and I had several people tell me that Buffalo was one place you don’t want to shuffle off to. So I turned them down. I was very disappointed, but I didn’t think I could handle Buffalo. A few days later they came back and said, “We’ve just had an opening in San F...

Here’s a transcript of the video: “I lived with a secret, but didn’t know it was a secret. I didn’t even know I was living with it for many, many years. My grandfather died about ten years before I was born, and the circumstances of his death were so not discussed that I simply assumed he had died of cancer or something. It wasn’t until I was a teenager that my friend Clark Crampton told me what I...

Here’s a transcript of the video: “Well, I’m back. As some of you may already know, I fell down those stairs over there on Christmas Eve — fifteen stairs — and it’s taken me a while to recuperate. I had three weeks in the hospital — the lovely hospital, NHS care — and then another nine days in the Cotswolds. Chris was scheduled for a ski trip out of town, and I didn’t want him to miss out on that....

Here’s a transcript of the video: “Hey there. I just want to give you a bit of an update here. I know Chris let you know that I fell down the stairs on Christmas Eve. I don’t do anything halfway. I fell down 15 stairs and landed on my back, fortunately. I think that’s better than landing on your face. And I was out for about two minutes. I was in the hospital for a couple of weeks, receiving care...

Here’s a transcript of the video: Well… it’s that time of the year again, when we’re all being forced into a state of jollity and merriment, whether we like it or not. I have done that myself in Tales of the City , celebrating a Christmas spent at Barbary Lane. I’m less likely to do it nowadays because I see it as the myth that it is. It’s not… it’s not what I need. What I need is what I get right...

Here’s a transcript of the video: I want to talk to you today about Anita Bryant. That name will mean everything to some of you, probably a small minority of you. Most of you don’t know who she was, so let me tell you. She was a Florida beauty queen who sold orange juice publicly, who decided in 1977 that she was going to oppose a resolution in Miami-Dade County supporting gay people. She was horr...

Here’s a transcript of the video: “Hey there. I recently read that the Marina Safeway in San Francisco is about to be demolished—not by Trump, who seems to be a specialist in this—but by an equally greedy corporation that wants to put up a 790-unit apartment building, 85 of which are designated for low-income people. That’s good news. But the plan they’ve put in place is this enormously high thing...

Here’s a transcript of the video: This is the third Ask Me Anything feature we’ve done. So I’ve got some questions here from people who are asking me anything. This is from John Hemm. Oh—hi, John. I know this person from many years ago. “What is yours and Chris’s favorite holiday, and how do you spend it?” Well, we don’t really have favorite holidays. I’ve found that living in England—if you ignor...

Here’s a transcript of the video: Today I’d like to tell you about my friendship—relationship, whatever you want to call it—with Rock Hudson. It began, as many gay stories begin, with a friend of a friend introducing us. I had met Jack Coates in the desert in Palm Springs when I went down for what I thought was a gallery opening in which Rock would be in attendance. A friend of mine and I thought...

Here’s a transcript of the video: “Well, it looks like there’s some possibly good news on the horizon. Most of you know that Marjorie Taylor Greene has left MAGA, which is really indicative of a rift that’s occurring within Trump’s administration—within MAGA itself. I saw a piece by Rachel Maddow the other day where she couldn’t stop grinning because she was reading Trump’s numbers at the polls, w...

Here’s a transcript of the video: Welcome back to our second Ask Me Anything feature. The questions we didn’t get to the first time around, I’m going to try to answer now. This one comes from Steve Zack: “I’d enjoy hearing Armistead recount a bit his experiences/memories/thoughts on being young and living in San Francisco in the heyday of gay pride and dating and sex and fun and friendship.” Well,...

Here’s a transcript for Armistead’s introduction before the reading: Today I’m going to read to you from one of my favorite books. It was when I was a boy—or a teenager, rather—and it still is. I love it very much, and I think you can see the ways in which it influenced my writing of Mona of the Manor . It’s by Dodie Smith, who was a twentieth-century—well, her life spanned the twentieth century—E...

We weren’t able to answer all of your questions in this first segment, but we’ll get to more in next week’s AMA video. Stay tuned Steve, Richard, Pablo, Philippe, and Michel — your answers are coming soon, with even more to follow the week after (Joseph, Mike, Randy and more). Here’s a transcript of this video: We’ve started a new Ask Me Anything feature on the Substack thingy, and we’ve gotten so...

Here’s a transcript of the video: “About fifty years ago — I can’t believe I’m saying that — when I started writing Tales of the City for the San Francisco Chronicle , I created a chorus of men, obnoxious gay men, that I called the ‘A-gays.’ They were definitely meant to be obnoxious. When we came around to filming it for television, I insisted that only out-of-the-closet actors play those roles —...

Here’s a transcript for Armistead’s talk: “The inspiration for Anna Madrigal was initially a trans woman I discovered while living in Charleston, South Carolina. Well, I didn’t exactly discover her—she was a local character—but that’s where the concept first came to me. When it came time to actually create the character, though, I relied on someone else entirely: my grandmother, Marguerite Barton,...

Here’s a transcript of Armistead’s talk: ”When I graduated from Officer Candidate School in the late 1960s, I was stationed in Charleston, South Carolina — which I had actually requested, because I always thought Charleston was the most beautiful American city. Lucky me, I got sent to a destroyer tender based there. I didn’t count on how hot it would be, or how stinky it could get down at the ship...