I’ve learned not to generalize about these folks. When Tales was first published in book form its audience was largely gay and male. Then, reader by reader, it built a following that grew to resemble the demographics of the novels itself, leaping barriers of age, race, gender, and sexual orientation. (“Believe it or not, my mother loves you” is a remark I hear time and again). The typical Tales fan is simply someone who revels in the act of being oneself—whatever that might be—and of letting others do the same.
That’s why I cringe a little when some bookstores restrict this book and its sequels to the Gay & Lesbian section. Don’t get me wrong; I’m proud that I’ve been openly gay for over twenty years—and aware of the impact my homosexuality has had on my work—but my writing has always been intended for everyone. I want the message of Tales to reach the widest possible audience: teenagers and grandparents and people who think they’ve never known a gay person. To aim for anything less would be to betray the spirit of joyful inclusion that makes life what it is on Barbary Lane.
Armistead Maupin
13 February 1996
San Francisco
About the Author
ARMISTED MAUPIN is the author of Tales of the City, More Tales of the City, Further Tales of the City, Babycakes, Significant Others, Sure of You, and Maybe the Moon. In 1994 Tales of the City became a controversial but highly acclaimed miniseries on public television. More Tales of the City became s Showtime orginal miniseries in 1998. Maupin lines in San Francisco.
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BY ARMISTEAD MAUPIN
Novels
Tales of the City
More Tales of the City
Further Tales of the City
Babycakes
Significant Others
Sure of You
Maybe the Moon
Collections
28 Barbary Lane
Back to Barbary Lane
PRAISE FOR ARMISTEAD MAUPIN
“I love Maupin’s novels for very much the same qualities that make me love the novels of Dickens.”
Christopher Isherwood
“[Maupin] works his dialogue with a jeweller’s precision and a playwright’s deployment of dramatic irony.”
Edmund White, Times Literary Supplement
“Armistead Maupin has this uncanny way of providing a different sort of mirror on life, which he then rotates to a particular angle, so that we can see the backs of our own heads—that wayward cowlick, the bald spot we’ve been trying to cover up, what’s really on our minds.”
Amy Tan
“Maupin has a genius for observation. His characters have the timing of vaudeville comics, flawed by human frailty and fueled by blind hope.”
Denver Post
“Armistead Maupin is a first-rate, world-class novelist, creating characters so vivid, complicated, tender, and true as to seem utterly timeless…. I’m willing to bet that fifty years from now Maupin’s work will be read for its detailed descriptions of late-twentieth-century America, its rollicking humor and kind heart, its Chekovian compassion, its Wildean wit, its intricate … sometimes unbelievable but always utterly irresistible plotlines.”
Stephen McCauley
“Like those of Dickens and Wilkie Collins, Armistead Maupin’s novels have all appeared originally as serials. It is the strength of this approach, with its fantastic adventures and astonishingly contrived coincidences, that makes these novels charming and compelling. Everything is explained and everything tied up and nothing is lost by reading them individually. There is no need even to read them chronologically.”
Literary Review
Copyright
This work was published in somewhat different form in the San Francisco Chronicle.
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint lyrics from “It Never Rains in Southern California,” © 1972 Landers Roberts Music (U.S. and Canada) and Rondor Music (International).
TALES OF THE CITY. Copyright © 1978 by The Chronicle Publishing Company. After word copyright © 1996 by Armistead Maupin.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © APRIL 2011 ISBN: 978-0-062-11239-2
First Perennial Library edition published 1978. Reissued 1989.
FIRST HARPERPERENNIAL EDITION PUBLISHED 1991.
* * *
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CARD CATALOG NUMBER 77-11781
ISBN 0-06-096404-9
* * *
06 07 RRD 42 43 44 45 46
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