Parenting & Family Quote by Armistead Maupin

There’s a quiet fury in the verb “slink” - not just disapproval but a demand for self-erasure. Maupin chooses a word that paints gay men as guilty by default, as if simple proximity to children requires stealth, shame, and retreat. The line lands because it doesn’t waste time arguing policy; it spotlights a social reflex, the everyday policing that happens in sideways glances and “just being careful” euphemisms.

His “it’s amazing” is doing double duty. On the surface it’s disbelief; underneath it’s indictment. The astonishment isn’t naive - it’s rhetorical, a way of exposing how ordinary and unexamined the suspicion has become. Maupin isn’t primarily talking about child safety. He’s talking about the cultural habit of treating gay men as a category that must constantly prove innocence, and about how quickly “protect the children” becomes a moral cudgel used to enforce heterosexual norms.

Context matters: Maupin came of age and built his career during periods when gay men were routinely linked, in public discourse, to predation - a smear that survived even as legal and medical consensus moved on. The quote speaks from within that history, but it’s aimed at the present tense: the persistence of soft bans, unspoken rules, and “appropriate boundaries” rhetoric that magically applies more harshly to some adults than others.

The intent is not merely to defend gay men’s friendships with children, but to challenge a broader demand: that queer life remain offstage unless sanitized, supervised, and stripped of intimacy.