Pride Month: ‘Tales of the City’ by Armistead Maupin

For Pride Month, I’ll be sharing pop culture works like literature, film, television, and music to celebrate queer culture.

Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City is a landmark gay novel that tells the story of San Francisco life in the late 1970s. Coming from a series of newspaper columns, Maupin created characters that become lively friends to his readers: Mona Ramsey, Mary Ann Singleton, Michael “Mouse” Tolliver, and the enigmatic and wise landlady, Anna Madrigal lived in the mythical 28 Barbary Lane, an apartment building that became a source of love, laughter, and life for its residents.

Tales of the City is the first of ten novels, which take the characters through queer history from the 1970s to 2024. The first volume is great because it’s a hilarious comedy of errors and a cracking mystery, too. Mary Ann Singleton is the naïve girl from the Midwest who finds liberation in San Francisco; instead of being seduced by its supposed decadence, she falls in love with city’s freedom. Readers see the swirling world of San Francisco through Mary Ann’s wide eyes. Though a proverbial babe in the woods initially, she finds her family at 28 Barbary Lane with the colourful denizens. Even if she’s initially guarded and shy, somewhat scandalised by her friends, she learns to love them for their hilarity and kindness.

I regularly read Tales of the City – at least once a year because it’s so well written and very funny. When a good friend of mine was personally affected by the latest rounds of war and terrifying geopolitics, she turned to me for suggestions on soothing books. I immediately got her a copy of Maupin’s Tales of the City and pressed her to read the book, which she loved, finding escape in his beautiful little world.

Maupin would follow up Tales of the City with ten more books that folded real historical events such as Jonestown, Anita Bryant, the AIDS crisis, Rock Hudson, Princess Diana, as well as the growing acknowledgment of other members of the queer community, including nonbinary folks and trans folks. The books take on more melancholy notes as the characters age, but they lose none of the beauty of the language or humanity and empathy that Maupin imbues in the beloved Barbary Lane residents. Still, Tales of the City is the most enjoyable, funniest entry and an important entry in the queer canon.

In 1993, PBS aired a six-part miniseries based on the book, starring Laura Linney and Olympia Dukakis. It was a landmark production that included frank depictions of sex and drug use, which caused controversy during the Culture Wars of the early 1990s (so much so that further adaptations were cancelled). Directed by Alastair Reid, the series is one of the best and most essential queer comedies of the 20th century.