I always loved Armistead Maupin’s Tales Of The City, and I was happy to find a modern revisiting of his stories this weekend on Netflix.

I have always been captivated by the rise and fall and rise and fall of San Francisco, a magical and beautiful place for outcasts and writers and people in transition, an escape from the dictates and perpetual tyranny of the angry white men who seem to always  be hanging on to their world, forcing everyone else into their own mold.

In Tales Of The City, the mythical landlady Anna Madrigal is advising a young transgender tenant who is “transitioning” from woman to man and discovers he is drawn to men. He isn’t sure how to face his girlfriend, who he loves very much. Anna looks him in the eye – she is 90 – and says, “you know Jake, the truth is the truth.”

It was a simple line, but also a powerful one, it got into my head and stayed there. Wise words from Anna. The truth is the truth. The angry white men will learn this lesson of life. Truth always wins, no matter how long it takes or how bloody a struggle. There is just no getting around it, history is pretty clear about that.

I would never bet against the truth.

That is the most important discovery I have made in the years since I had my own collapse, then awakening and rebirth. That is what I decided was to be my challenge, my purpose. To tell the truth.

I loved the San Francisco of Maupin and Dashiel Hammett and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. It was one of the world capitals of the imagination.

It was from Hammett that I learned about truth in my writing: “If you have a story worth telling, and you think you can tell it worthily, then the thing for you to do is to tell it, regardless of whether it has to do with sex, sailors or mounted policeman.”

Today, San Francisco, now homogenized into a colorless and soulness Yuppie enclave and gated city, is instead known for attracting  young billionaires and the homeless. Almost everyone else is gone. Maupin left San Francisco years ago, and Hammett and Ferlinghetti would never choose to go near the place today. What would they write about?

Each in his own way stood for the soul of a city.

Maupin captured the time when San Francisco was truly the City On The Hill  (as Frances Fitzgerald put it), the promised land for creatives, individualists, and gay people. There,  the oddballs and the repressed could go to come home and form powerful communities and care for one another. They were free to   live the lives they wanted and deserved.

And that was an amazing thing.

I am surprised to see that many of our greatest cities have quite willingly succumbed to the Capitalist Tsunami and are only for rich condo lovers. I loved the Manhattan of my youth, the streets teeming with yearning young people like me, I had a spacious two-bedroom apartment just off Washington Square I rented with a friend for $300 a month. We were always letting newcomers crash until they got settled, and then they let newcomers crash.

We were strangers, but we were a community, just like the gay men and women who flocked to San Francisco decades ago. We found our true families.

In New York, I remember going to a cafe down the block to listen to the scrawny and broody Bob Dylan try out his new songs, to boos and cheers, I could sit there all night for $3.

Another magical, mystical place, another lost beacon for the dreamers and seekers.

There is no reason for me to go back there now unless I wanted to buy some expensive and useless thing from Bed and Beyond or Banana Republic. I am sad to think of what was sold away and lost for money.

I try to reject nostalgia, but sometimes nostalgia is about the truth, and the truth can definitely break the heart, even if the past is rarely as glorious as the elderly like to remember it.

To never lie to myself again, or to anyone else. To be authentic in my writing. It was here on the blog that I really learned how to do it, guided along by the support and challenges of my new community, good and bad.

I can’t say I have never lied or  hidden the truth since then, of course I am a human being, that is what we all do sometimes, it is our nature.

But one doesn’t have to be pure or a saint to tell the truth, you just have to care about it and work at it, and get there step by step. To my knowledge, I rarely lie to me, or to anyone else, at least not knowingly. When I do, it churns my stomach, my soul gets nauseous, I feel like vomiting. I can’t help it, when I took the pledge, there was no turning back.

The other part of the truth thing is this. I had to not care what other people think of me. I have to not care about what other people think of me. I have to think about it every day.

They go hand in  hand, truth and identity. Without my being able to do that, there is no truth. One gives birth to the other, in any order.

As it happens, I have never done one really good or important thing that most of the people around me did not think was foolish, short-sighted or doomed.

When I decided to stop running from my classes and leave college – they didn’t know about Dyslexia there, either –  my friends and family told me I was making a dreadful mistake.

When I left the corporate world to become a book writer, every writer I knew warned me the odds were long and urged me to keep my health and pension benefits, and my day job.

When I wanted to buy a farm and live in the country, most of the people I knew said I would hate it, there was no culture or good restaurants, only  people so different from me I would never be accepted.

When I got divorced, some members of my family were furious with me, and my closest friends stopped talking to me and have never come to see me in my new life. When I started taking photos, my editor said it was silly for writers to take pictures. My photos, he said, were ordinary,  like Hallmark cards. I was a writer, he said, not a photographer.

People I thought might understand me did not. I was alone until Maria came along, yearning for a way and a place to do her art. Each time, I had to remind myself not to care what other people think.

I denied my own growing unhappiness in my marriage for decades, until a therapist stunned me by pointing out that I was no longer really married at all. I had been lying to myself for many years.

I left her office and rushed to my car and picked up my cell phone and called my wife and said our marriage was in trouble. We were not even living together by then, neither of us seemed to know it.

We met a few days later and ended 35 years of marriage.

She deserved better than this, and so did I.

I told her the truth, finally, and it was if a 20-story building was lifted from my shoulders.

And there it was again,  the time when I decided I was in love with Maria and wanted to spend my life with her. Once again, I lost friends I trusted and who have not seen or heard from since. Once again, I learned  to not care what other people thought. Truth can be very messy.

But this time, I got it.

Life began again for me, and the truth was the key that opened the door.

Bud was out herding sheep the other day and at one point he looked at me curiously, as if to say “am I really supposed to be doing this?”

I knew I was projecting a part of myself onto him, but still, I had this fantasy that he felt strange acting like a border collie when he really wasn’t one.

And I found myself talking to him, a Boston Terrier, telling him out loud, ” Bud, just be yourself. You have to not care what other people think.”