I really struggled to get into Tales of the City. Had it not been for the fact that I was stuck on a boat trip with the book and a lot of spare time, I’m not sure I would have finished it.

But I’m glad I did. The short chapters – which had originally irritated me by jumping from one storyline to another – finally got me hooked. Like tens of thousands of other people, I was ready to make 28 Barbary Lane my virtual home.

As the Eighties rolled out, I shared the ups and downs of Anna Madrigal’s ‘logical’ (as opposed to biological) family as they faced challenges ranging from cults, cannibalism and child pornographers to sex, drugs and homophobia. An everyday story of everyday people it wasn’t.

Or, there again, maybe it was.

Obviously few of us have had to tackle murderous cults, but I do think that the success of this magical series is due in part to the fact that so many of us either identified with or aspired to many other elements of it. With a dearth of positive role models, this was an unapologetic blueprint for our own ‘logical’ families and a reference point for managing the personal and community issues we were all facing.

By describing one particular type of ‘non-nuclear’ family Maupin validated the diverse and non-conformist lives so many of us lived or aspired to, irrespective of which part of the globe we inhabited. For the majority of us who didn’t live in one of the gay Meccas, it described an exciting world of acceptance and amazing possibilities.

Not that this was some escapist fairytale: Maupin also identified and explored the real issues and challenges that we faced. Sometimes these were the direct experience of living as sexual outlaws – homophobia, transphobia, coming out and, by the time of Significant Others, the firestorm that was AIDS.  But it was just as likely to be about the small things – romance gone wrong, personal insecurities or friendships under strain: queers go through these just like everyone else.

Whenever Mouse, Mona or Mary Ann struggled with these various issues it was almost inevitable that we felt a flicker of recognition – either with the situation or with the characters. We didn’t need to be Michael Tolliver to understand his frustrations at his homophobic family or his despair at ever finding a lover. We’ve all been there – but we’d rarely seen it explored in print.

Maupin had (and still has) an exceptional ability to express our fears and frustrations as well as articulate the case against bigotry. The following clip, from the TV serialisation of More Tales of the City, illustrates this particularly well. Having received a letter from his parents announcing their involvement in Anita Bryant’s Save Our Children campaign, Mouse decides it’s finally time to put the record straight.

https://youtu.be/TMEjmEYi8Ts

Of course, even an ardent fan like myself had a few gripes about some parts of the series.

In the first instance there was the strange issue of the un-named movie star “_______  _______” in Further Tales of the City. Whilst no one would have expected Maupin to actually name Rock Hudson, on whom this was surely based, it seemed odd that he didn’t create a fictional name instead, in the way that he had done for other real celebrities.

It also seems to clash with Maupin’s apparent disapproval of gay celebrities remaining in the closet, as manifested in Sure of You, when Mouse royally dissed a closet celebrity who came on to him one evening.

Sure of You also felt to me like Maupin was falling out of love (and running out of steam) with Tales since it lacked the complexity of the previous books and felt very much like the author was just keen to get it over with.

Perhaps he was: like so many of us his life was also affected by HIV/AIDS – in this case his partner having been diagnosed with it. So maybe it was just too raw an issue to explore.

Around the same time that Sure of You was signalling an end to the Tales series, with Mouse manifesting signs of Kaposi’s Sarcoma, the AIDS crisis was continuing to worsen and none of us knew what was going to happen next.

It wasn’t until 2007, and the publication of Michael Tolliver Lives, that Maupin brought us back to San Francisco and, in so doing signalled, if not the end of the crisis, a significant easing. It seemed like the worst was over and we could finally allow ourselves to exhale and take stock.

Things had changed but life still goes on – as does the saga of the folks from Barbary Lane. Michael Tolliver Lives was followed by Mary Ann in Autumn and Mr Maupin promises us The Days of Anna Madrigal at some future date. These people have had such an important place in our lives it’s only right that we get the chance to catch up with them all again.