Tales of the City

"Oh, I love Armistead Maupin! Tales of the City is just so touching and fun. And truly landmark. Although I’m choosing it to represent the G in LGBT—the gay male author of the genre—he also represents everybody, particularly the trans community. I mean, Anna Madrigal was this revolutionary trans landlady, a very motherly character who looks after everybody. You know, sellotapes joints to their doors. The first Tales of the City came out in 1978. I was lucky enough to interview Armistead in 2014, when the final, ninth Tales of the City was coming out, The Days of Anna Madrigal . I think most people know that ‘Anna Madrigal’ is an anagram of ‘a man and a girl’; it just seemed such a revolutionary thing, that there was this wonderful trans character, who he told me was partly inspired by his grandmother, who was a bit of a new age hippy, and once was a suffragist in the UK. As with Sarah Waters, his work has had real cultural resonance. We’ve seen it on screen—a TV adaptation that I saw back in the 1990s, when I was first coming out. And more recently there’s been another adaptation on Netflix. We should all celebrate that. “When any sexuality deviates from the norm we still think it’s more explicit, even if it’s an equivalent physical act” His books say so much about community. He talks about the idea of ‘logical’ family, as opposed to biological family. When he first arrived in San Francisco in 1971, and was absorbing the atmosphere that eventually permeated his books, he discovered a sense of community in alternative family. So many people at that time were rejected by their biological parents, because it was still seen as a mental illness to be homosexual. So gay people clung to one another and formed these little microcosms of community, alternative family, which the queer community has long held as a kind of template for life, and for survival. He also talks about coming out. His character Michael Tolliver, or ‘Mouse’, writes a very famous letter called ‘Dear Mama’, which has been turned into musicals, performances and theatre shows. Scissor Sisters have done a version of it. It’s become something outside of the books, that ‘Dear Mama’ letter. People have used it as a template for coming out to their own parents. You know, around that time, Harvey Milk was making speeches saying, ‘you must come out.’ There was this message that it would help others if we stood up: we would have strength in numbers. So the idea of coming out was very, very important. And it’s taken a long time for the majority of queer young people to feel safe coming out. We’re getting there. But, for example, I had a relationship from 2006 to 2011, the relationship that inspired all my work on breakups—because I got dumped by email at the end of it, which I felt was very cold and impersonal—but what was so very complex and painful about that relationship was that she was not out to her family. It was very, very obstructive to being able to move forward in a relationship with somebody. We didn’t live together. We were both women in our thirties who I think would have been interested in exploring having a child, but that just felt so completely off the list of things we could possibly do, because our parents didn’t even know we had a partnership. I met her mum once, for about twenty minutes, in five years. I never met her father at all. It was very, very difficult to feel like this. This was in the noughties, only just over a decade ago, but it was still this very shameful secret. We’ve come a bit further since then. But it’s amazing how not that long ago it was still something people did not want to know, and would close their ears to. So I think having people like Armistead walk in who were writing on the challenges of coming out, and reflecting that emotional experience of sitting down and writing that letter… that has been really important. Perhaps there’s not the same sense of political responsibility. Although there are some old school activists like me who would say it’s still really important. But of course the labels are becoming broader and more fluid; our ideas about gender are becoming less binary. That’s a great thing. But it becomes more complicated, and changes how we think about being ‘other’, being queer. Because there are some people who are ostensibly straight, but are sort of hetero-flexible. On the one hand, it’s all very healthy, we’re a bit more fluid. But perhaps it then becomes more grey, more complex when we’re campaigning for equality legally. Sometimes, as frustrating as it can be, you need labels to actually get the boxes ticked, you know? Being able to get married, have children, do things that a more traditional family or couple could do. It’s interesting times, and I think it’s still important to stand up and say who you are. But I think there’s a generation of younger people now who would shy away from labels, wanting things to be more broad and fluid. We’re getting to a point where that can be the way, but I’m not sure we’re there yet. I think we do still need to be able to say ‘I’m queer,’ ‘I’m gay,’ or whatever labels you prefer to use: standing up and being counted."