Armistead Maupin is Back in the City

Armistead Maupin will be reading and signing Mary Ann in Autumn, his newest Tales of the City novel, tonight at UW Bookstore, at 7 p.m.

On August 8, 1974, the first Tale of the City was printed in The Pacific Sun, a Marin County newspaper. A fiction newspaper serial, the only thing to set the story apart from any other was that the author, the practically unknown Armistead Maupin, included frank depictions of urban gay life as part of the narrative. Mr. Maupin came out with the series, and to a large degree so did America.

No other work of fiction featuring major gay characters has been so mainstream, and therefore so influential, as the Tales of the City books. For thirty-six years, the only depiction of gay people familiar to much of middle America has come from Mr. Maupin. Even conservatives in Tennessee who refused to acknowledge the existence of Brokeback Mountain have seen the Tales miniseries, because how could anything starring Olympia Dukakis be subversive? She was in Steel Magnolias, for heaven's sake!

Much of the appeal of the stories lies in their very lack of challenging material. They are pure soap opera, full of the domestic dramas that the much touted regular Americans endure daily, in addition to those endemic to any marginalized group. The novels explicitly argue that most LGBT "issues" wouldn't be issues at all if it weren't for the Gay Factor. Everyone gets sick, has a first kiss, wants to love and be loved. Discrimination creates an environment in which being ordinary becomes an act of resistance.

Unlike most genre-ified (and therefore ghettoized) LGBT fiction, the gay, lesbian, and transgender characters in Maupin's books are a normalized element of the narrative, dominating only inasmuch as they are set in a locale in which LGBT issues are at the forefront of civic discourse. To quote Eudora Welty, the Tales of the City are about "what folks will up and do" when gays and lesbians are considered "folks." This was a revolutionary concept in American popular fiction when the first Tales was released. Shockingly, thirty-six years after the first Tales of the City story, our national civic discourse proves that the idea that LGBTs are "ordinary Americans" is still radical, still revolutionary.

The Tales have a great advantage, in that they are written in language that is accessible to the average reader. When Maupin began writing the stories, he had to produce one per week, in addition to other paid work. That sort of pace does not allow for flights of linguistic fancy. Nor was Maupin out to bludgeon his audience with an MFA or win a prestigious book award, which it sometimes seems like more than a few marginalized authors set out to do, as if the only way to win is to win big. The Tales of the City series was intended to reflect what was happening in current events in real time--events reported in the same paper the stories were published in, in a manner scannable to someone reading in a cafe or on the bus.

The result was a cultural phenomenon that not only commented on society, but also affected it. Because the collected Tales were often shelved simply as popular fiction, not in the back or missing entirely, the books were frequently the only depictions of gays and lesbians available in libraries and bookstores outside of urban areas, making them accessible to two generations of questioning youth, and even adults. Those that answered "Yes, that's me!" flocked to San Francisco, took their books to college (Hell, they went to college!), and came out in droves.

Americans, gay or straight, had an opportunity to read about, or watch on television, LGBT people as a part of the social contract. With decent production values and good editing! Maupin's characters weren't molesting children, dying in fiery accidents while repenting, or living on the street as drugged-out hustlers. They weren't saints and angels either: just regular folks with a few extra problems that were mostly the result of social stigma, not mental illness, inherent criminality, or demonic possession.

We were offered a vision of gays and lesbians in society other than The Well of Loneliness or Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers, and many of us grew into an expectation of the future that had previously not been available--a conventional, integrated, non-radical future that has yet to be realized. In many ways, gay rights took several steps back in the mid-nineties, and we are climbing that hill, again. And yes, we are tired. But what can be imagined can be made possible: that is the promise of fiction, is why fiction is important. Fiction may not be real, but it is true.

The Tales of the City were followed by--and arguably opened the door for--books like Rubyfruit Jungle, Annie on My Mind, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, and a whole lot of less lesbianic titles. The 1980s and early '90s were a great period for mainstreaming gay literature, and that in turn has allowed a new crop--as well as the best of the old crop--of LGBT and allied writers to get onto awards lists over the last decade and a half. Michael Cunningham and Annie Proulx would not exist in their current incarnations as household literary names without Armistead Maupin. Elton John might still be married to a woman, if not for Mr. Maupin. Can you imagine? The horror!

After all that, who cares if Mary Ann in Autumn is any good? But it is. Mary Ann Singleton has never been a very sympathetic character, which is one of the most interesting things about her. Maupin freely acknowledges that Mary Ann is his own darker side. Mary Ann says the things that everyone thinks, does the things that society disapproves of. She wants to be good and she wants to be happy, and sometimes she's not sure how to accomplish either, much less both.

Mary Ann is neither Madonna, nor whore; she's a person, selfish and needy and kind and mixed-up, a notion as radical for a woman in America, as it is for queers, or for any other Other. Sometimes villainous, occasionally heroic, always complex, Mary Ann is partially "redeemed" in her Autumn year... but not too much.

In Michael Tolliver Lives, Maupin focused on a single character, abandoning the multi-person storylines of the previous Tales of the City novels. At the time, Maupin claimed that Michael Tolliver Lives was not a Tales of the City novel, feeling that it didn't fit in with the rest of the series. Mary Ann signals a return to the format familiar from the earlier books, and integrates Michael Tolliver Lives. The novel is also a clear signal that at 66, Maupin is not finished writing about the City.

Mary Ann in Autumn will probably not win any national book awards, or make many Top Ten of 2010 lists. It would make a terrific movie, but how likely is that in an era of 3-D remakes? The odds are vanishingly small. But it is a book that is needed now for the same reasons that Tales, More Tales, Further Tales, et cetera, were needed back then, and that makes it a very, very good book indeed.