This year’s TWIST: Seattle Queer Film Festival opens with a documentary about one of the most famous gay writers of the 20th century, Armistead Maupin. It is called The Untold Tales of Armistead Maupin. It tells the story of the author’s rise and immortalization. He is now a living monument of a San Francisco that was very interesting (the second half of the 1970s). At that time, it was the gay capital of the world. Michel Foucault, the greatest French philosopher of the 20th century, made sure to get teaching appointments in and around San Francisco during the years Maupin’s Tales of the City was running in the San Francisco Chronicle. Foucault was gay. This was the city to be in if you were gay. And the fact the Chronicle could successfully publish writing by a gay writer about a city that was, for its time, sexually radical—this was something new to the world. Maupin, whose roots are in the South and its plantation aristocracy, has lived what can only be described as a charmed life. His romance with Rock Hudson is the stuff of dreams. by Charles Mudede