In this talk, I analyze the content and reading experience of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City, the most popular serialized gay fiction of the 1970s, which appeared in daily installments in the San Francisco Chronicle between 1976-1983. I argue that the serialized rhythm of the narrative—which followed the social and sexual misadventures of a cadre of queer friends in San Francisco’s Nob Hill neighborhood—modeled gay liberation’s conception of “coming out of the closet” about one’s sexuality as a process that unfolds over time through repeated encounters with new erotic possibilities. I draw upon interviews I conducted with actual San Francisco readers of Maupin’s original text alongside close analysis of the rhetorical and literary modes of address that Maupin deployed to make “coming out” a widely accessible form for articulating one’s sexual and social desires, regardless of one’s specific sexual identity. I show the story’s unfolding narrative about 1970s queer social life and the actual experience of reading it daily alongside other San Francisco residents helped disseminate the radical sexual politics of gay liberation to both gay and straight audiences alike.
Ramzi Fawaz, Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
This talk was co-sponsored by the departments of African American & African Diaspora Studies and Comparative Literature