I got a little behind in my reading, and it snowballed on me,
and then this happens: I get the twentieth anniversary edition of
something I have been meaning to get around to reading since it was
first published, and in this case, I didn't even see the PBS
mini-series. Well, if you have read it or seen the mini-series, you
probably know whether you want to buy it without reading this,
otherwise I'll proceed as if you are a little behind in your
reading too.
Tales of the City is a good read and a real
page-turner, and if you come to it, like me, for the first time in
this edition, you might want to see if you can still get ahold of
the other volumes in the series because it leaves off with a number
of plot threads still hanging fire. Now, it is a great historical
document of some sort with all kinds of social significance, but
before it acquired this baggage, the story was a serial that ran in
The San Francisco Chronicle, and just the only thing
anyone can remember to give Herb Caen any competition as the
paper's number one attraction. That was something of an
accomplishment in itself for serializing fiction is almost a lost
art whose only remnants are staff-written television soap
operas.
Indeed, Tales of the City is much like a soap
opera, as probably anything serialized in short newspaper columns
would have to be. Today, of course, the average television soap
opera is quite a bit steamier than this book, so how come the
controversy? Because in soap operas everyone is straight except
maybe for one character and he—we really don't have many
soap-opera lesbians—well, maybe he is gay and maybe he is
just temporarily confused and will come to his senses about three
plot points down the pike. In Tales of the City the
situation is exactly the reverse: one cannot be certain that the
occasional heterosexual character is indelibly so.
We have to compare Maupin's stuff to soap operas instead of to
Dickens—and Maupin, given to word plays, may mean by his
title to suggest such a comparison—because Dickens got many
more column-inches per whack and no one living has experienced
Dickens's as a serialist, which is what he was. We did not have to
wait for the next issue to discover what had happened to Little
Nell; we had only to turn the page. For all the incredible plot
twists that continued stories seem to produce, all the good ones
have some lifelike and somewhat reassuring features: we don't know
everything about everybody, we never have everything tied up in a
neat bundle—there have to be some threads left for the story
to continue, and we feel we know these people because they live, in
a sense, as we do, whether it is day to day, or week to week, or
month to month. When the stories are successful, they give us
someone to talk about, they are the fodder for our gossip now that
we are an urban people who do not know our neighbors' first
names.
And this is very much how, I am told, Tales of the
City was received in San Francisco. It was about some people
who lived around the corner—and attempting to guess the real
street names and buildings, where fictional ones had been
substituted, was something of a passtime. Even people who never
mistake an actor for his or her role in a soap opera swear to me
that they have known Mouse or Mrs. Madrigal or at any rate they
knew the models for various of Maupin's characters. This
verisimilitude, it seems to me, is at the heart of the American
Family Association's attempt to suppress the PBS mini-series. They
wish to warn us against it, as if it were the prototype for The Gay
Agenda (the homophobes' version of the Protocols of the Elders of
Zion)—a kind of blueprint to bring about, someday, a world
like that depicted in Tales of the City. But what
scares the bejeezus out of them is their suspicion that it is real,
that it has already come about, and that their ideas are indeed
reactionary.
And they are reactionary, for their complaint is about
a story that is twenty years old. Whether the story was realistic
at the time or a utopian vision hardly matters—there are
homosexuals in it and that pretty much proves that PBS should be
classed with other destroyers of the family, like Disneyland. But
gee-whiz people, this isn't the novelization of the
even-more-fictional Gay Agenda; it is a cute little story that a
lot of people would be perfectly comfortable about showing to their
grandmothers. On the other hand, this isn't gilt-edged Great
Literature either. It's something very different: it's a good
story.
In this edition Maupin has added a brief afterword in which he
complains of finding this series of books shelved in the "gay and
lesbian" or "lifestyle" or whatever that section is called instead
of being out with, you know, the "regular" books. I can sympathize
with this, just as I sympathize with Bette Midler when she
complains of being constantly reminded that her career began in the
Continental Baths. Yet, there is something a little less than
gracious about the complaint. Is it that, somehow, those other
books belong in the "lifestyle section" ghetto, but Maupin's books
are so much better, are transcendent? Frankly, anyone who finds it
too threatening to venture into the gay and lesbian section to
fetch this book is unlikely to enjoy it very much anyway.
