Parenting & Family Quote by Armistead Maupin

Maupin isn’t asking politely for tolerance; he’s insisting on visibility as a civic duty. The line’s most provocative move is its inversion of a familiar demand: for decades, queer people were told to stay away from children to be considered “safe,” “appropriate,” or merely acceptable. Maupin flips the script. If gay people are to be role models for all kids, that requires contact, not distance. It’s a direct rebuttal to the moral panic that treats queer adulthood as contagious or corrupting.

“Of every stripe and age” does quiet but important work. It refuses the sanitizing compromise where only the most assimilated, respectable, middle-class version of queerness is allowed in public view. He’s not arguing for a token gay teacher or a PG-13 celebrity cameo; he’s arguing for an ecosystem of ordinary presence: elders, eccentrics, couples, singles, the whole messy continuum. The phrase “very firmly” functions like a hand on the table in a debate that’s often conducted in whispers and euphemisms.

The subtext is pragmatic, not utopian: kids become less afraid of what they can actually see. In Maupin’s world - shaped by the AIDS era, by chosen families, by the hard-earned politics of coming out - survival depends on communities being legible to the next generation. Interacting with children isn’t framed as recruitment; it’s framed as continuity. Visibility is the antidote to isolation, and he’s willing to say so without apologizing.