Review: Tales Of The City

[Tales of the City (1978) is the first book in the Tales of the City series by American novelist Armistead Maupin, originally serialized in The San Francisco Chronicle.]

This book had a mixed reception from our group. Two people liked it a lot; two were 50/50, and the others didn’t care for it.

Curious, but not so curious. Maupin’s Tales were the signature tune of the gay eighties – on the eve of the Aids crisis – and this tale of Beautiful People turned out to be The Last Post of the age of LGBT libertarianism.

Our group only read the first in this nine-book series. It opens with the arrival of Mary Ann Singleton, a naive young visitor from Ohio, who impulsively decides to stay. She finds a place to stay with the eccentric, marijuana-growing landlady Anna Madrigal. There she befriends the other tenants: the hippyish bisexual Mona Ramsey; heterosexual lothario Brian Hawkins; the sinister attic tenant Norman Neal Williams; and Michael Tolliver, a sweet and personable gay man known to friends as Mouse (as in Mickey Mouse). Adventures, mainly sexual, either unfulfilled or tragic, follow. (This plot summary abbreviated from Wikipedia)

Some in our group were irritated by the need of the characters to present themselves as super-beautiful, super-clever, super-trendy and always-on-the-make: Maupin’s obsessional description of exactly what everybody was required to wear at any given moment (the right cowboy boots, but not too new), by the need to produce the best witticism, and the frivolous lives of most of the characters. For those who do work, work is just a pause in the serious business of getting it off with someone who gives a better high, or finding a joint that does a bit more than the last. This is followed by the inevitable drifting into the ultimate horror of getting to be someone old and of no consequence – or, in the case of one of the characters, someone with terminal cancer, who can never come out to his wife about this unspeakable horror - death.

But for those who liked the book, Maupin also shows the underside of all that. They have come to San Francisco to escape – from parents who want them to be ‘normal’, from the need to be whatever their community prescribes for them. And they do experience freedom. For some, it brings loneliness, for others, relationships that aren’t sufficiently grounded to last. Freedom is the demand of this society, and freedom, it turns out, doesn’t in itself give the means to survive, any more than a beautiful landscape is enough to live on. As the characters work their way through their unsatisfying liaisons (or whatever turns them on) it becomes clear that these are people questing for some kind of anchor.

And the only character in this book who does find an anchor, finds it through loving – though a love that can’t last, since her love-object is dying.

Even if you don’t like it – and this reviewer did like it – this book is a must-read for anyone in the GLBT community. It is part of our history. For millennia our community was despised and rejected and hid itself under the blanket. In the 1980s, we Came Out. Ecstatic moment. But we screwed up. We tried to rid ourselves of society’s restrictions but also rid ourselves of the responsibility of being part of the wider society. We underwent the classic adolescent trauma. With Aids we had to grow up. Maupin perfectly captures that moment when our community knew freedom. Sadly, the San Francisco freedom of the Beautiful People turned out to be hollow.