Duplechan was born on December 30, 1956 in Los Angeles, California. He attended the University of California, Los Angeles, where he studied English and participated in the university's men's choir. After graduation, he initially pursued a career in music, both as a solo singer and as a member of a jazz vocal group, but gave it up after the time demands of pursuing music while also holding down a full-time day job began to threaten his relationship with his partner Greg Harvey.
Writing
Duplechan published his first novel, Eight Days a Week, in 1985. The novel introduced Johnnie Ray Rousseau, the lead character in nearly all of his subsequent novels. Blackbird, a prequel novel focusing on Rousseau's childhood, was published the following year and more strongly established Duplechan's reputation as an important writer of gay African-American fiction. He has also been identified as one of the first important gay writers to have come of age after the Stonewall riots, and whose writing thus lacked the internalized homophobia that often characterized the work of the previous generation of gay writers. In 1990, he published Tangled Up in Blue, an AIDS-themed novel which was his only work not to feature Rousseau as its central character, although its main characters reappear in Duplechan's subsequent Rousseau novels as supporting characters. The novel dealt with a married couple, Maggie and Daniel Sullivan, whose relationship is tested when Maggie discovers that Daniel is bisexual and was once in a relationship with her gay friend Crockett Miller. Duplechan's next novel Captain Swing returned to Rousseau, and found him grieving the death of his boyfriend Keith in a car accident. After Captain Swing, Duplechan took a hiatus from writing for several years and returned to singing, founding an a cappella vocal group and participating in community choirs after the home he shared with Harvey was damaged in the 1994 Northridge earthquake. A new 20th anniversary edition of Blackbird was published by Arsenal Pulp Press in 2006, and Duplechan's most recent novel to date, Got 'til It's Gone, was published by the same company in 2008. In addition to his novels, his work has also been published in numerous anthologies, including Freedom in This Village: Twenty-Five Years of Black Gay Men's Writing, and Mighty Real: An Anthology of African AmericanSame Gender Loving Writing.
