What's alarming now is that the loudest voices on the ascendant Right are preachers of ignorance and hate

On the cruise to Acapulco in More Tales of the City, Mary Ann (Laura Linney) meets the mystery man Burke (Colin Ferguson) she knows is too perfect to be her dream man. (As a matter of fact, in a characteristically Maupinesque ironic touch, many years later -- in the sixth Tales book, Sure of You -- Burke will play a quite unexpected, life-changing role for her.) Meanwhile, beginning at 1:35, a despondent Michael (Paul Hopkins) sets off on an excursion that will lead to a startling and life-changing reunion. [Spoiler alert: That's Billy Campbell as Jon.]

MARY ANN: Things have changed, Mouse. The world has grown up a lot.
MICHAEL: Has it? . . .

-- More Tales of the City, where Mary Ann is actually
discouraging Michael from coming out to his parents

by Ken

As I noted in that innocent era we can now call B.E. (Before the Election), the occasion of the imminent publication of Armistead Maupin's Mary Ann in Autumn set me off in a mad tear through the earlier Tales of the City canon -- the six books published (following publication in Dickens-style serial form in the San Francisco Chronicle) between 1978 and 1989, and the 2007 sequel (which I had somehow managed not to know about), Michael Tolliver Lives.

At the time I had already zipped through the last three of the original six books (Babycakes, Significant Others, and Sure of You) in preparation for my mad dash through the nearly-20-years-later sequel, which reminded me of the deep emotional investment I had in the amazing characters brought to such vivid life in these stories. Well, I've got my copy of Mary Ann in Autumn on order, and after replacing my gone-missing copy of the third book, I'm rereading the first three (Tales of the City, More Tales of the City, and Further Tales of the City). It continues to be a remarkable experience.

While I want to stress again that these aren't "gay" books -- there are straight characters treated with the same human richness, delicacy, and depth as the gay ones -- there's no question that Maupin brings a special perspective to the relations between people of different sexual orientations. Midway through More Tales I was stopped by a couple of passages that resonated wildly at a time when strident voices of ignorance and hatred, spewing forth from minds ravaged by anti-human social orthodoxy, are going to be heard in even more deafening screech mode.

(1) MEET MICHAEL'S UNCLE ROGER,
THE "ECCENTRIC OLD BACHELOR"

In a time of deep depression over his future life, Michael Tolliver, a San Francisco transplant from deeply homophobic roots in Orlando, Florida (in the time, older folks will recall, of onetime Miss America second runner-up Anita Bryant's Florida-based "Save Our Children" jihad), has been whisked off on a cruise to Acapulco by his housemate Mary Ann Singleton (as noted in that earlier post, a transplant from Cleveland), using money left to her by her late boss, Edgar Halcyon. On the flight back from Los Angeles back to San Francisco, Michael tells Mary Ann he's on the verge of breaking the news to his parents -- finally -- that he's gay. (Apologies for typos.)

"Mouse . . . do you think they're ready?"

"No. They'll never be ready. They're past changing now. They just get more the same."

"Then why?"

"I love them, Mary Ann. They don't even know who I am."

"Yes they do. They know that you're kind and gentle and . . . funny. They know that you love them. Why is it necessary for you to . . . ?"

"They know a twelve-year-old."

"Mouse . . . lots of men never marry. Your parents are three thousand miles away. Why shouldn't they just keep assuming that you're . . . " She sought for a word, making a little circle with her hand.

"An Eccentric Old Bachelor," smiled Michael. "That's what they used to call them in Orlando. My Uncle Roger was an Eccentric Old Bachelor. He taught English and raised day lilies, and we never saw much of him, except at weddings and funerals. My cousins and I liked him because he could make puppets out of knotted handkerchiefs. Most of the time, though, he kept to himself, because he knew what the rules were: Shut up about it if you want us to love you. Don't make us think about the disgusting thing you are.

"He did what they said, too. I don't know . . . maybe he'd never heard about the queers in New Orleans and San Francisco. Maybe he didn't even know what queer was. Maybe he thought he was the only one . . . or maybe he just loved living in Orlando. At any rate, he stayed, and when he died -- I was a junior in high school -- they gave him a decent eunuch's funeral. Mary Ann . . . I had never seen him touch another human being. Not one."

Michael hesitated, then shook his head. "I hope to God he got laid."

Mary Ann reached over and put her hand on his arm. "Things have changed, Mouse. The world has grown up a lot."

"Has it?" He handed her the third section of the Chronicle and pointed to Charles McCabe's column.This enlightened liberal says there's going to be a big backlash against homosexuals, because the decent folk out there are sick and tired of the 'abnormal.'"

"Maybe he --"

"I've got news for him. Guess who else is sick of it? Guess who else has tried like hell not to be abnormal, by joking and apologizing and camping our way through a hell of a lot of crap?

"Abnormal? Anita Bryant would be a nonentity today if she hadn't put on a bathing suit and strutted her stuff in that cattle call in Atlantic City. If you know how that differs from a jockey shorts dance contest, I wish you'd tell me."

(2) MICHAEL REMEMBERS HIS TEENAGE PLAN
FOR DEALING WITH NOT GETTING MARRIED

It's not an accident that Michael is confiding to Mary Ann. They're in the early, most intimate stages of a relationship that, like all the relationships among the central character of the Tales tales, is one of the great relationships I've encountered anywhere in literature, one we're apparently still tracking after more than 30 years.

The reference to the jockey shorts dance contest is to one of Michael's own great traumas, the contest he entered in desperate hope of winning $100 to help pay his rent, which he did, only to find himself spotted (and, he assumes, scorned) by the gorgeous blond gynecologist, Jon, the object of his all-time biggest crush. By coincidence he has run into Jon in Acapulco, and they've picked up where they left off. And almost immediately Michael, now 27 if I recall correctly, is sticken with what the doctors think is Guillain-Barré syndrome.

Lying in a hospital bed paralyzed from the neck down, with a shadowy prognosis, Michael sees visitors via an angled mirror placed over his head. Jon asks him if he's "doin' O.K."

"I remembered something funny today."

"Yeah?"

"When I was a kid, fourteen or so, I used to worry about what would happen when I didn't get married. My father was married when he was twenty-three, so I figured I had nine or ten years before people would figure out that I was gay. After that . . . well, there weren't a whole lot of goo excuses. So you know what I used to hope for?"

Jon shook his head.

"That I'd be paralyzed."

"Michael, for Christ's sake!"

"Not like this. Just from the waist down. That way, I could be in a wheelchair, and people would like me, and I wouldn't have to worry about what they'd say when I didn't get married. It seemed like a pretty good solution at the time. I was a dumb little kid."

It was c 1977 that Mary Ann said to Michael: "Things have changed, Mouse. The world has grown up a lot." It was true then, and it's a lot truer now. But the world still hasn't changed completely, and I worry that in these particularly difficult times, the voices we're going to be hearing loudest are going to be coming from people who, like Michael's parents, are "past changing now. They just get more the same."

Recently I thought about writing about Tony Perkins sounding off (for a change) in his customarily militant, bullying way in defense of "normal" behavior. But how often can you point out that nobody on the planet is less qualified to talk about normal behavior. This is a man whose brain is a seething cauldron of toxic waste. Fewer and fewer Americans have much use for his brand of ignorance-mongering. But he and his kind -- including, perhaps especially, those seemingly uncountable hordes of sociopathically self-loathing closet cases -- have very loud voices.

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