Ohmygosh, it's a "rebirth for Britain"! (In which DWT takes official note of the historic Royal Development)

Caution before clicking: Do you really want to look at Prince William? (Gosh, he used to be so beautiful, before he started looking more and more like his father. Now he makes his depressing brother Harry look almost human. Hmm, I suppose these are just the sorts of comment that would horrify my English relations, as explained below.) On the plus side (work with me here -- I'm scrounging), if you click through, you get to watch a free commercial!

"Prince William's engagement a rebirth for Britain"

-- a headline today on washingtonpost.com

by Ken

A rebirth of Britain, eh? So the slash-and-burn "austerity" crusade is already showing results?

Oh, no, it's apparently not that kind of rebirth. It's more along the lines of what the British government can do for its subjects without actually doing anything for them -- unless you count sucking generous quantities of pounds out of the treasury for this great public event.

NOW, FOR THE RECORD --

What follows about the Royal Announcement was written before I set eyes on the above washingtonpost.com headline, which I encountered only when I went searching for visual adornment for this post. In other words, at a time when I could have been writing about, say, Elizabeth Kolbert's incredibly depressing "Comment" piece in the new (Nov. 22) New Yorker, "Uncomfortable Climate," about the criminally ignorant "F*@k Science" mentality of the Teabagger-blessed band of can-do sociopaths who'll be in charge of the U.S. House of Representatives come January, I undertook to write about the feather-light subject of the Royal Engagement, in full awareness that it's about as shamelessly trivial a story as I could be taking on. Apparently I was wrong!

At this point I'm afraid all I can do is wonder what my mother would have made of Princess-to-be (and, presumably, Queen-to-be) What's-Her-Name. Oh, I'll learn her name eventually, but you know who I mean. The New Diana.

Come to think of it, I don't rightly know what my mother made of the old Diana. It's not something we talked about much, and I never really understood the thing she had for British royalty.

The closest I can figure is that we do have English cousins. My stepfather's Austrian family mostly dispersed in the first several decades of the 20th century to various points outside the German-speaking world. (The undispersed became, of course, the disappeared.) The English branch, if I remember right, found its way to London by way of Ireland.

And to illustrate the, er, unconventionality of my mother's royalism, I offer this story, which I don't doubt I've offered before. I think you'll see why it's one of my favorite stories.

My folks were visiting the cousins, which they loved to do. In fact, when my stepfather's Alzheimer's was still in its milder stages, they were planning a trip to London for an especially joyous event: the wedding of the daughter of the house they'd watched growing up. (Time took care of that plan. By the time of the wedding it was no longer possible for him to travel. My mother, sadly, made the trip alone, having with some difficulty asked if I would come down to Florida to stay with my stepfather. It was an educational experience -- horrible, but educational. I got a small glimpse of what her life was like in the years of his decline.)

Now the cousins, you should understand, are not just lovely people, but sensitive and well-educated ones too. (Both father and daughter were lawyers.) So, anyway, my folks were watching the telly in the cousins' house, and there on-screen was (a much younger) Prince Charles. My mother ventured, as she recounted it, "Wouldn't you think, with all their money, they could do something about his ears?" She did a pretty good job of conveying the shock and horror with which this innocent question was greeted.

Among the clutch of magazine subscriptions I had to tend to when I relieved my mother of the burden of dealing with her own finances was one to a magazine I had never heard of called Royalty. It was, and perhaps still is, a magazine devoted solely to chronicling the British royal family. [This is apparently incorrect. See the PPPS below.] My mother was possibly more devoted to it than it was to its readers; I recall some hiatusing owing to straitened finances during the years I watched over that subscription.

I have to say, the magazine came in handy. In the senior residence to which my mother moved, living on the modest proceeds from the sale of her apartment when, at 83, after living on her own for a decade (six-plus of those years following a cerebral hemorrhage) and deciding she'd cooked enough meals, the social director was an ex-pat Brit. She turned her copies of Royalty over to him when she was done with them, which scored her big-time points.

Wait, Catherine! That's here name, isn't it? The New Diana? I remember because I read . . . Oh goodness, I have to admit that I actually clicked through to the link on AOL yesterday and skimmed a piece on the subject. Anyway, I remember reading that, assuming the royal succession eventually eventuates the way it's mapped out (and it's always dangerous to assume; after all, Prince Charles didn't expect to spend all these decades cooling his heels waiting for his accession), she will/would be Queen Catherine, which gave me a jolt, because I realized I'd never actually registered her name. Kate, I guess it is. (Judging by her résumé since leaving school, I'm thinking she may have gone for career counseling and been counseled that off her work experience to date, she might be best suited to snagging the heir apparent to something or other.)

All seriousness aside, I wish the happy couple the best of luck. Given the bridegroom's family's track record in matters of the, er, heart, they'll need all the luck they can garner.


PS: THERE'S COMMON, AND THEN THERE'S COMMON

A key point in the buzzy rebirth of Britain is that our Kate, as a commoner, is an unprecedented match for Young Will. I suppose it's just the way my mind works, but as some of you are aware, I recently completed a grand tour through all eight of Armistead Maupin's sublime Tales of the City books, and so inevitably I'm flashing back to the opening of the fourth book, Babycakes, where the author imagines some of the private life of Prince William's grammy on the occasion of her 1984 royal visit to San Francisco, which is enmeshed in the plot with the author's customary impudence and ingenuity. And, allowing for the outsize aura of entitlement that I supposes comes with, you know, the title, people don't come much commoner than the queen portrayed there.


PPS: ONLINE "ASK THE AUTHOR LIVE" CHAT 
ON "REPUBLICANS AND THE ENVIRONMENT"

Just because, as noted above, I wasn't up to writing about Elizabeth Kolbert's depressing New Yorker "Comment" piece on the marauding anti-science mentality of the new Republican House majority doesn't mean you couldn't read it if you want to. (Here's the link again.) Note that there's an online "Ask the Author Live" chat with Kolbert scheduled for tomorrow, Thursday, Nov. 18, at 3pm ET.


PPPS: ROYALTY LIVES!

And apparently I'm wrong in thinking that its subject matter is limited to British royalty. Crown Princess Victoria (born 1977), after all, is Swedish. I guess the admirers of royalty can't afford to cast their net so narrowly. I apologize for the erroneous information above. Pretty much the extent of my involvement with the magazine was mailing in the renewal forms with the checks.

Victoria's royal wedding, I see, took place in June. I seem to have missed the event entirely. I suppose I should at least have sent a card.

#

"My responsibility was to tell you the truth, that your own child is homosexual": Michael Tolliver's "Dear Mama" letter

"The letter" was meant for reading, not acting: At 4:35 of this clip from the More Tales of the City miniseries, it's Mrs. Madrigal (Olympia Dukakis) and Mona (Nina Siemaszko) rather than Mary Ann (Laura Linney) who bring Mama's letter to Michael (Paul Hopkins) in the hospital, and it's Mona who reads a drastically condensed version of it and then takes Michael's dictation of an understandably shortened (but with some important stuff left out) and unfortunately sentimentalized version of his reply, during which they're joined by Mary Ann and Burke (Colin Ferguson). The letter concludes in the next "chapter."

"I'm sorry, Mama. Not for what I am, but for how you must feel at this moment. I know what that feeling is, for I felt it for most of my life. Revulsion, shame, disbelief -- rejection through fear of something I knew, even as a child, was as basic to my nature as the color of my eyes."

-- from Michael's letter, in Armistead Maupin's
More Tales of the City

by Ken

Tonight's business, as I explained last night, is the "coming out" letter Michael sends his mother back in Orlando, finally breaking the news (at age 27) to his parents that he's gay.

Note that I didn't say Michael writes the letter. As I mentioned, he actually dictates it to his friend Mary Ann while he's lying in a hospital bed paralyzed from the neck down by a sudden mysterious illness. Before we get to the letter itself, I think it may be helpful to skip ahead to Mary Ann's own reaction, as she expresses it to her current Mr. Right, Burke, when they return to 28 Barbary Lane from the hospital.

Mary Ann is recalling her first meeting with Michael, which -- as he never tires of reminding her -- took place in the "singles" supermarket her Cleveland friend Connie took her to shortly after her arrival in San Francisco, when she tried to pick up a potential Mr. Right who turned out to be Michael's boyfriend of the moment.

"He was so cute, Burke . . . but I was furious with him, because he was with this guy I really liked, and all night long I just kept saying to myself, 'What a waste . . . what a waste.' I believed that, too. I really believed he was wasted, that he had gone wrong somehow. Of course, I told myself I felt sorry for him, but I was really just feeling sorry for myself. I found out all the Mr. Rights weren't made for me, and I couldn't handle it."

"That's O.K. People change."

"I didn't. Not for a long time. I used to feel . . . I don't know. I guess I thought I could change him, become his friend and make him relax around women or something. I didn't count on finding out that I was the one who needed to relax."

Burke startles Mary Ann by revealing that during the cruise to Mexico on which they met, when Mary Ann was traveling with Michael, he was at times "almost eaten up with jealousy" over her relationship with Michael.

"Michael and you together. Michael and you laughing and conspiring together. Michael and you playing tricks on Arnold and Melba [their shipboard tablemates]. Michael and you pretending -- hell, you weren't pretending -- you were married. You were as married as two people could ever be."

GETTING BACK TO THE LETTER

Michael's decision to out himself to his parents is prompted, as I mentioned, by a letter he receives from his mother, which Mary Ann has brought to the hospital from his apartment, and he has her read to him. In it Michael's mama goes on at length about how upset she is at an old high school classmate of hers who has refused to support Anita Bryant's Save Our Children campaign. (Yes, it's 1977.) Lucy "has all of a sudden become real militant about the homosexuals," and "called us heathens and hypocrites and said that Jesus wouldn't even let us kiss His feet if He came back to earth today."

After all these years it suddenly seems significant to Mama that "Lucy never did marry, and she was really pretty." Michael's father "pointed out that Lucy takes modern art classes at the YWCA now and wears Indian blouses and hippie clothes, so I guess it's possible that the lesbians have recruited her."

(Michael himself spent a good part of his growing-up years worrying about how he would explain not getting married to the good folk of Orlando. I've already quoted Michael's description to Mary Ann -- during the trip back from Mexico, when he first thought seriously about coming out to his parents -- of the phenomenon of the "eccentric old bachelors" of Orlando, including his own Uncle Roger, who are permitted to live out their unmarried lives without being shunned as long as they don't actually have any visible contact with one another. Michael recalled his uncle's "decent eunuch's funeral," reflecting that "I had never seen him touch another human being. Not one," then saying, "I hope to God he got laid.")

Mama's letter concluded:

We are all praying that the referendum in Miami will pass. If the homosexuals are allowed to teach in Miami, then it might happen in Orlando. Reverend Harker says that things have gotten so bad in Miami that the homosexuals are kissing each other in public. Your Papa doesn't believe that, but I say that the devil is a lot more powerful than we think he is.

Mikey, we had to put Blackie to sleep. I hate to tell you that, but he was mighty old. I know the Lord will look after him, like He does with all His creatures.

All His creatures, that is, except the homosexuals. (Papa, by the way, is such a paragon of morality that he eventually has an affair with his daughter-in-law, Michael's brother's wife.)

Mary Ann tries to soften the blow for Michael. His mother "doesn't know what she's saying." (Michael: "She's a capital-C Christian. They always know what they're saying.") But she wouldn't say that "if she knew. Not her own son." (Michael: "She'd say it about somebody else's son. What the hell is the difference?") Finally Michael asks Mary Ann, "Got your Bic handy?" She says, "Sure." He says, "Take a letter, Miss Singleton."

The letter occupies a chapter by itself, a chapter called "Dear Mama."

Dear Mama,

I'm sorry it's taken me so long to write. Every time I try to write to you and Papa I realize I'm not saying the things that are in my heart. That would be O.K., if I loved you any less than I do, but you are still my parents and I am still your child.

I have friends who think I'm foolish to write this letter. I hope they're wrong. I hope their doubts are based on parents who loved and trusted them less than mine do. I hope especially that you'll see this as an act of love on my part, a sign of my continuing need to share my life with you.

I wouldn't have written, I guess, if you hadn't told me about your involvement in the Save Our Children campaign. That, more than anything, made it clear that my responsibility was to tell you the truth, that your own child is homosexual, and that I never needed saving from anything except the cruel and ignorant piety of people like Anita Bryant.

I'm sorry, Mama. Not for what I am, but for how you must feel at this moment. I know what that feeling is, for I felt it for most of my life. Revulsion, shame, disbelief -- rejection through fear of something I knew, even as a child, was as basic to my nature as the color of my eyes.

No, Mama, I wasn't "recruited." No seasoned homosexual ever served as my mentor. But you know what? I wish someone had. I wish someone older than me and wiser than the people in Orlando had taken me aside and said, "You're all right, kid. You can grow up to be a doctor or a teacher just like anyone else. You're not crazy or sick or evil. You can succeed and be happy and find peace with friends -- all kinds of friends -- who don't give a damn who you go to bed with. Most of all, though, you can love and be loved, without hating yourself for it."

But no one ever said that to me, Mama. I had to find it out on my own, with the help of the city that has become my home. I know this may be hard for you to believe, but San Francisco is full of men and women, both straight and gay, who don't consider sexuality in measuring the worth of another human being.

These aren't radicals or weirdos, Mama. They are shop clerks and bankers and little old ladies and people who nod and smile to you when you meet them on the bus. Their attitude is neither patronizing nor pitying. And their message is so simple: Yes, you are a person. Yes, I like you. Yes, it's all right for you to like me too.

I know what you must be thinking now. You're asking yourself: What did we do wrong? How did we let this happen? Which one of us made him that way?

I can't answer that, Mama. In the long run, I guess I really don't care. All I know is this: If you and Papa are responsible for the way I am, then I thank you with all my heart, for it's the light and the joy of my life.

I know I can't tell you what it is to be gay. But I can tell you what it's not.

It's not hiding behind words, Mama. Like family and decency and Christianity. It's not fearing your body, or the pleasures God made for it. It's not judging your neighbor, except when he's crass or unkind.

Being gay has taught me tolerance, compassion and humility. It has shown me the limitless possibilities of living. It has given me people whose passion and kindness and sensitivity provided a constant source of strength.

It has brought me into the family of man, Mama, and I like it here. I like it.

There's not much else I can say, except that I'm the same Michael you've always known. You just know me better now. I have never consciously done anything to hurt you. I never will.

Please don't feel you have to answer right away. It's enough for me to know that I no longer have to lie to the people who taught me to value the truth.

Mary Ann sends her love.

Everything is fine at 28 Barbary Lane.

Your loving son,
Michael

FOURTEEN CHAPTERS LATER . . .

Mary Ann asks Michael if he's heard from his parents.

"I guess you could call it that. My mother wrote to say that my 'sin against the Lord' was killing my father, and my father wrote to say that it was killing my mother. " He smiled wanly. "They're terribly worried about each other."

AND THEN IN THE BOOK'S FINAL PAGES . . .

in the chapter "Happy Ending," in which Michael is back home at 28 Barbary Lane and walking, Mary Ann encounters him in the courtyard "testing his legs like a newborn colt."

"I'm a healthy, strapping boy again, and Jon and I can . . . well, never mind that part. Plus -- oh, miracle of miracles! -- my mother sent me a pound cake yesterday!"

Mary Ann smiled. "I know. Jon gave me some. I'm glad she's coming around, Mouse."

"We don't know that yet. There wasn't a message. Just the pound cake."

"She's trying, Mouse."

He smiled. "A fruit cake would've made me a little nervous."

As a matter of fact, as we see finally in the 2007 Tales sequel Michael Tolliver Lives, in which Michael in his mid-50s has to deal with his mother's final decline, Mama really never does come around.

#

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.

#

For "Tales of the City" fans the new book is self-recommending; others owe it to themselves to give the books a shot

Mrs. Madrigal's secret, finally revealed at the end of the first Tales of the City book and series, then becomes pretty much a non-issue. Olympia Dukakis is Mrs. Madrigal; Laura Linney, Mary Ann; and Donald Moffat, the dying Edgar Halcyon.

"You aren't listening, Mom. I'm trying to tell you I'm a grown woman."
"Well, act like it, then! You can't just . . . run away from your family and friends to go live with a bunch of hippies and mass murderers!"

-- Mary Ann Singleton, 25, on vacation in San Francisco, informing

her mother by phone that she's not returning to Cleveland,

at the outset of the original Tales of the City

by Ken

Growing up has always been one of the things the Tales of the City stories were centrally concerned with. Since Mary Ann was 25 when the first story took place, in 1976, that means she's about to turn 60, assuming she makes it to next year. She has at least made it far enough to allow her creator, Armistead Maupin, to offer us the brand-new Mary Ann in Autumn, which has its official publication date Tuesday.

For a certain group of readers, namely those of us who have followed the lives of the onetime residents of 28 Barbary Lane in the six original Tales of the City volumes, published between 1978 and 1989, and then in 2007, after an 18-year gap, the suddenly arriving Michael Tolliver Lives, the newer books are self-recommending, and perhaps also for viewers of the three lovely TV miniseries made from the first three books (first seen in 1993, 1998, and 2001) -- though I suspect these groups are largely overlapping. (Actually, I was not an original Tales reader. I'd heard about the books for years, of course, but didn't experience them until all six of the original books had been published.)

I suspect there are a lot of potential readers who haven't yet discovered these amazing books, perhaps thinking the stories are, in one way or another, too parochial in their concerns, too "in" -- in a "San Francisco hippie culture" way, or perhaps a "gay" way -- to speak to them. This is a misfortune that fortunately can be easily corrected, since the earlier books are now available conveniently in a pair of "omnibus" trilogies (Tales of the City, More Tales of the City, and Further Tales of the City as 28 Barbary Lane: A Tales of the City Omnibus; Babycakes, Signifcant Others, and Sure of You as Back to Barbary Lane: The Final Tales of the City Omnibus), and copies of all the earlier books can be found pretty cheap all over the place.

The first Tales of the City miniseries was made so long after the tales were written that it seemed to a lot of people as if they were blithely unaware of AIDS, whereas of course the books kept all too painfully attuned to the epidemic. The death of Jon, one of the most treasurable fictional characters I've encountered, at the midway point of the original six books hangs over most everything that happens in the later ones. Michael's continued survival as an HIV-positive man is one of their (not to mention his) central realities. But the books are so much more than "gay stories."

I have the rather odd perspective of somehow having only discovered when I was tipped off to the imminent publication of Mary Ann in Autumn that Michael Tolliver Lives even existed. I ordered a copy immediately, and in the meantime undertook a crash expedition through the last three of the original six books, which I hadn't read in ages, and especially hadn't read since the making of the TV versions of the three earlier books. It turned out to be a whirlwind experience indeed. Within a few days I found myself checking the mailbox every day for the "new" book. The night it finally arrived I attacked it, and reached the end about five subway stops before mine on the way home from work the next day. While I wait for Mary Ann in Autumn, I've gone back to the earlier books, whose characters and events are so tightly bound into the later ones.

On reencounter, I was reminded how much I cherish those characters -- what Mrs. Madrigal refers to as a "logical family," for most of us more real than the real kind. In fact, with knowledge of their subsequent lives, I found myself now absorbed by all sorts of things I recalled having once given short shrift. Now, of course, it's hard to read the books without a sensory awareness of the indelible film portrayals: above all Olympia Dukakis's uncanny incarnation of Anna Madrigal, the mistress of 28 Barbary Lane, but also Laura Linney's Mary Ann, and Donald Moffat's Edgar Halcyon, and Billy Campbell's Jon, and perhaps the first Michael (Marcus D'Amico) and Mona (Chloe Webb).

It was always evident, but now strikes me as even more striking, how vivid, believable, and grabbing Maupin's portrayals of his straight characters are. Are there any straight novelists who could deal as engrossingly with gay characters? The relationship between Mary Ann and Brian is as fascinating, and painful, as ever. All in all, it was an unbelievable experience -- especially now that I'd forgotten most of the plot twists and turns -- retracing the further lives of Mrs. Madrigal and the others, and then catching up with those missing years via Michael Tolliver Lives, not told in the third person, as the earlier books were, but told by Michael himself. (It's also startling, with Michael and Brian having emerged as the story's central characters, to revisit them with awareness of the American Queer as Folk and its central characters, curiously named Michael and Brian.)

Of course, for a long time the Tales tales have also been crucially concerned with the other end of living, and it's inevitable for Michael in his 50s -- and Brian already in his 60s -- that this end of the life spectrum now colors everything. As Michael points out, having against all his expectations survived his HIV status, he now finds himself overtaken by all the "normal" ways we work our way toward the end.

In a way it was an odd stroke of fate for me -- a lucky one, I think -- that i didn't discover Michael Tolliver Lives, one of whose central plot lines is the final decline of Michael's mother in distant Florida, until after my mother's protracted decline and passing . . . in distant Florida. Many of the specific issues are different, but a lot of the fundamental ones are eerily familiar. This may be yet another way in which these stories simply don't speak to readers younger than the Tales generation that more or less grew up with them. I really have no way of judging that. But I think it's too bad, and wrong. I do hope people who haven't given the Tales a shot yet will do themselves the favor of doing so.

[Note: I can't tell you anything more than I have about Mary Ann in Autumn, because just as I did when I found out about Michael Tolliver Lives, I've determinedly avoided reading anything more about it until I'd read it, so as to avoid spoiling surprises. For the same reason, for the benefit of those who may yet discover the Tales tales, I've chosen a deliberate vagueness with regard to plot details to lessen the incidence of spoilers.]

POSTSCRIPT: I don't think I mentioned that the Tales books are also really, really funny, in case you didn't know.

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