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. 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
