Author Armistead Maupin ends San Francisco ‘Tales of the City’ saga with ninth volume

[DonViejo]

By Hermione Hoby, The Guardian
Sunday, January 5, 2014 12:53 EST

His Tales of the City have delighted readers for four decades and brought gay life into the mainstream. Now the landmark series is coming to an end as the ninth volume is published

In 1974, when Armistead Maupin began writing what became Tales of the City, he thought of it as “an in-joke about the way life worked in San Francisco”. Four decades later, that in-joke has been shared by more than 6 million readers. His stories of interlocking gay and straight lives in the city constitute one of the best-loved of literary sagas. The New York Times described reading them as “like dipping into an inexhaustible bag of M&Ms, with no risk of sugar overload”. Now though, after four decades, that bag is finally about to be exhausted. The series will conclude with Maupin’s ninth book, Days of Anne Madrigal, published at the end of this month.

Quentin Crisp once introduced him with the boast: “This is Mr Maupin. He invented San Francisco.” More importantly, Maupin virtually invented the mainstreaming of gay life and helped the world see that “the gay experience” was nothing lesser or greater than human experience.


Maupin came to a realisation of his homosexuality relatively late. He was 30 when he came out, the same year he began writing. Taking stock of himself the way he would one of his characters, he once observed: “He had kept his heart (and his libido) under wraps for most of his life, only to discover that the thing he feared the most had actually become a source of great comfort and inspiration.”

At the time he began writing, he saw gay fiction as both bleak and myopic. This was an era when Truman Capote still equated his homosexuality with his alcoholism and a climate in which Gore Vidal could claim: “There were homosexual acts, but not homosexual people.” Maupin, however, had discovered a joyful fraternity and welcoming community in the bath houses and nightclubs of the city and decided, as he put it, to “[allow] a little air into the situation by actually placing gay people in the context of the world at large”.

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http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/01/05/author-armistead-maupin-ends-san-francisco-tales-of-the-city-saga-with-ninth-volume/

[shenmue]

1. I will have to get it!

I like him.

[joeybee12]

2. He could have stopped at volume one , IMHO...

[dickthegrouch]

3. I can't wait

I stared at Vol 5 and had to abandon that and go all the way back to Vol 1 when I first discovered them.

I have never got through a set of books so quickly or avidly.

[mitchtv]

4. I remember it in serial in the Chronicle

I enjoyed the TV version,too