Offending Starbucks cups yanked at Baylor

Coffee cups featuring a quote by a gay author about growing up homosexual have been pulled from Baylor University's on-campus Starbucks.

Aramark, which as the contractor for Baylor dining services oversees the coffee outlet, pulled cups from the campus store earlier this month after a university staff member sent out an e-mail complaining about the appropriateness of the quote at a Baptist university, Baylor officials said.

The e-mail was sent on to Baylor dining services, which consulted with Starbucks' district office, which said it fully supported a decision to take the cup out of circulation to avoid offending others, Baylor officials said Monday.

“My understanding is it was a decision made by Baylor dining services staff, and I've not yet been able to trace it back to any Baylor administrators telling them point-blank to pull the cup,” Baylor spokesman Larry Brumley said.

He added, “I think they were trying to be sensitive. Obviously, Baylor is a Baptist-affiliated institution, and Baptists as a denomination have been pretty outspoken on the record about the denomination's views about the homosexual lifestyle.”

The action was spurred by the fact that some of the store's coffee cups contained a quote from novelist Armistead Maupin. He is best known for a six-book series titled Tales of the City, which is about life in San Francisco in the 1970s and 1980s.

“My only regret about being gay is that I repressed it for so long. I surrendered my youth to the people I feared when I could have been out there loving someone. Don't make that mistake yourself. Life's too damn short.”

The cup is No. 43 in a series of cups being used chainwide by the Seattle-based coffee giant. The cups are part of a campaign called “The Way I See It,” which features quotes from a variety of notable figures. They range from the musings of electronic musician Moby to the thoughts of figure skater Michelle Kwan.

Sanja Gould, a spokeswoman with Starbucks' corporate office, said the company sees the program “as an extension of the coffeehouse culture – a way to promote open, respectful conversation among a wide variety of individuals.”

Gould said cups with the Maupin quote has been in circulation since July. She said the cups were placed randomly in the cases shipped to the store, and store employees would have to remove the cups manually.

Linda Ricks, marketing program manager for Baylor Dining Services, said she could not comment on the cups, and referred calls to Aramark's corporate offices, which could not be reached for comment Monday.

Concerned Women for America, a national Christian women's organization, says Starbucks is promoting a homosexual agenda with the cup. The group also has expressed concern about the campaign as a whole, saying most of the quotes are liberal, according to a report in the Seattle Times.

Members of the local gay community said they are disappointed by the cups' removal.

Cade Hammond, president of the board of directors for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance of Central Texas, said he sees pulling the cups as unnecessarily restrictive. He said the situation reminds him of people who burn books because they don't like what they say.

“You can't restrict information like that,” Hammond said. “It just seems a little backwards.”

Valerie Fallas, president of the Waco chapter of Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, called the action “unnecessary.”

“It's a shame that anybody would do this,” Fallas said. “Whatever you feel, whatever you think about something, discussion is the number one thing to do to educate yourself on an issue.”

That Maupin's gay and lesbian characters are seeded in this larger social milieu is no accident; Maupin speaks of his intention to "create a large framework of humanity and to place gay characters within that framework."

The community is Maupin's theme. His San Francisco is home to interlocking networks of friends, lovers, and enemies. As these groups develop and evolve, some become supportive and nurturing, others hypocritical and stifling. This social awareness marks Maupin's emergence as a political spokesperson and critic of the Far Right and of the entertainment industry.

Armistead Jones Maupin, Jr. was born to be a Young Republican. Raised in a conservative North Carolina family, he wrote for the Daily Tar Heel while a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After dropping out of law school, he worked at a Raleigh television station where the manager, Jesse Helms, was already gaining notoriety for his conservative television commentaries.

Several tours of duty with the Navy (one in Vietnam) and work on a Charleston newspaper landed him eventually in California, where in 1976 the San Francisco Chronicle began publishing his Tales of the City.

snip

Mirroring the communities it depicts, the series turns bleaker when AIDS enters its characters' lives. Sharp divisions develop between those who demonstrate "bravery and conspicuous beauty" in battling the disease and those who retreat into piety or indifference. The diverse Barbary Lane "family," forged through tears and joy, breaks apart, reflecting Maupin's sense of real-life betrayals of the gay community.

Maybe the Moon (1992), his first post-Tales novel, builds on these themes of community and hypocrisy; its screenwriters, actors, and Hollywood executives struggle for happiness, nurture and betray each other, and find love in the most unexpected places.

Armistead Maupin was born in Washington, D.C. in 1944 but was brought up in Raleigh, North Carolina. A graduate of the University of North Carolina, he served as a naval officer in Vietnam before moving to California in 1971 as a reporter for the Associated Press.

In 1976 he launched his daily newspaper serial, Tales of the City, in the San Francisco Chronicle. The first fiction to appear in an American daily for decades, Tales grew into an international sensation when compiled and rewritten as novels.

Maupin's six-volume Tales of the City sequence - Tales of the City, More Tales of the City, Further Tales of the City, Babycakes, Significant Others, and Sure of You - are now multi-million bestsellers published in eleven languages.

The first two of these novels were adapted as a pair of widely acclaimed television mini-series: the third, Further Tales of the City, is currently in production.

Maupin's 1992 novel, Maybe the Moon, chronicling the adventures of the world's shortest woman, was a number one bestseller. His latest novel is The Night Listener. He lives in San Francisco, California.

Armistead Maupin

When did YOU come out?

Late. It embarrasses me how late. It upsets me, because I could have had a lot more fun earlier. But I essentially came out to my family at the same time Michael came out to his family.

I was 32 before I really confronted my parents with it. I wrote Michael's coming-out letter to his parents which appeared in the [SAN FRANCISCO] CHRONICLE. And my parents were subscribing to the CHRONICLE because I was writing the series, and I hoped that this would get the message across to them. My mother figured it out; my father didn't figure it out until he read that I was gay in NEWSWEEK magazine.

I was shocked to find out just a little while ago that at the cocktail party in my honor tonight [Friday, June 21, 1985] the media has been forbidden, because there are going to be council members attending who don't want to be photographed with fags and dykes. Well, why the hell are they invited to the cocktail party?

Well, I don't know, but do you know about [the referendum] . . .
I know what's going on, but that's just bowing to the political arm of things. No politician is worth that, no matter how sympathetic they may seem to the gay community.

When I came out of the closet, I nailed the door shut, and I'm not going back in it for anybody, including some politician who says he'll help me out as soon as I get him into power—if I'll just stay out of the way until he gets elected.

When I was a kid in the South, I saw black people who behaved the same way. We called them Uncle Toms. And that's what's going on.

You said you were in the South as a kid. Where exactly was that?
I was born in Washington, D.C., but I grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. I'm a Southern boy.

Were you gay?
I knew since I was 13 that I was attracted to men, but I didn't act on it till I was twice that age.

What religion are you?
I'm an Episcopalian, so I have not been seriously warped by my religion.

I was seriously warped—I was Catholic.
Catholics and Baptists have it very hard. The religions which are most cruel to their gay members are the ones which are represented within the gay community—the gay Mormons, the gay Catholics, the Jewish congregations—the religions which make it most difficult for homosexuals within the mainstream religions; they can't let go of the religion even after they're gay.

That's not letting go of God—I want to make a distinction. I'm a very spiritual person; I feel a connection with God. I just don't feel the necessity to go kiss the butt of a religious group which has done nothing but oppress gay people from the beginning of time . . . and continues to do it in spite of the fact that there are an enormous amount of gay people, particularly within the Catholic clergy and certainly within the Episcopal clergy, my own church. And yet, somehow they can't manage to come around to accept the full tenets of Christ's teachings and say, "Yes, everybody get's God's love; everybody's love is as valid as everybody else's."

Maybe it's so engrained, people just don't know how to get away from it.
They get 'em early.

What is your idea of God?
[Laughter]

I'll tell you mine if you tell me yours.
Okay, tell me yours.

I believe WE make what God is. We're all God, both the people and everything else that make up the universe. And our thoughts and actions contribute to the world's makeup . . . This is hard to put into words.

Born again/fundamentalist Christians have a very narrow tunnel vision of the world, which excludes almost everyone except who's sitting down in the pew next to them. I don't think that's what Jesus had in mind at all. He was running around with whores and outcasts.

Do you think that there are gay people who feel that AIDS is God's punishment?
Yes, I think it's especially sad to think that there are gay people with AIDS who feel that this is somehow God's retribution.

I spoke with [writer] Christopher Isherwood a couple of days ago for an interview with the VILLAGE VOICE for their gay rights issue, and I brought up that very question. And he said, "It breaks my heart to think that these young men think that this terrible thing in some way is God's will." He said, "If it's God's will, **** God's will. God's will must be circumvented."

I couldn't agree more. If your spirituality is telling you that AIDS is a way of punishing you, then you're in the wrong ****ing religion. There are plenty of religions on this earth that do not regard physical ailments in that primitive, Neanderthal way.

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