Happy Birthday to gay luminaries Armistead Maupin and Alan Ball

Birthday wishes go out today to two men who have used their talent to provide a generation of gay men with with wit, insight, and intelligent discourse.

First up is Armistead Maupin, who turns 64 today. It was on August 8th, 1974 that he first brought us the hilarious, shocking, and Madrigal magical world of Tales Of The City when it began running as a newspaper serial. Four years later, the first novel was released, and throughout the 70's and 80's, we were treated to the continuing adventures of the gang from Barbary Lane. When asked why his writing seemed to resonate in such a meaningful way with readers, he said:

"One of the things that I saw different about what I was doing was that I was allowing a little air into the situation by actually placing gay people in the context of the world at large. Most gay fiction that I was reading when I was coming out in the early 70s made me claustrophobic because it only dealt with the life of the gay bar and everybody in it was gay. Often gay and male and there weren't even any lesbians in the picture. That didn't make me feel the way I wanted to feel about life and it didn't correspond with the life that I was living in San Francisco which was wonderfully mixed up in terms of the people that came and went in my life and that was part of the enormous exhilaration of it. It felt revolutionary."

Last year, after almost twenty years, Armistead revisited some of the characters with Michael Tolliver Lives!, and though at first hesitant to call it a "sequel", he now says he's looking forward to even further tales in the future. In the meantime, we can look forward to a musical stage adaption of Tales Of The City, to be written by Avenue Q co-writer Jeff Whitty and featuring music by Scissor Sisters frontman Jake Shears.

And happy 51st birthday to Alan Ball, who has given us the ultimate dysfunctional family and hot undertakers, and who somehow survived Cybill.

He started out writing for Cybill Shepherd's sitcom, and allegedly based the Annette Bening character in his Oscar-winning American Beauty on the volatile star. But to us he's best known for creating the HBO series Six Feet Under and introducing us to one of the great gay characters in TV history, David Fisher, played by Michael C. Hall.

Currently, Alan is working on another HBO series, the adaption of Charlaine Harris's Southern Vampire Tales. The series will be called True Blood, and will premiere this fall. Given his track record, we can probably expect something gothic, twisted, and almost certainly of queer interest.