Last year, Armistead Maupin released the tenth volume in his TALES OF THE CITY series, MONA OF THE MANOR. This completed the four subsequent volumes after the original six in the series: TALES OF THE CITY (1978), MORE TALES OF THE CITY (1980), FURTHER TALES OF THE CITY (1982), BABYCAKES (1984), SIGNIFICANT OTHERS (1987), and SURE OF YOU (1989).
Each of these four subsequent volumes was titled for one of his four major characters, MICHAEL TOLIVER LIVES (2007), MARY ANN IN AUTUMN (2010), THE DAYS OF ANNA MADRIGAL (2014), and, most recently, MONA OF THE MANOR (2024).
I was at the original CATEGORY SIX BOOKS store on Capitol Hill in Denver sometime in the mid 1980's with a former friend, Jon O'Neil. He knew a big guy who worked there now and then (he may not have been paid by the much older owner and just enjoyed being at the store and selling gay books). The fellow might also have been a flight attendant for United--if memory serves--and simply volunteered on his days off, to work behind the counter of the popular store on E. 10th Street, on the east side, between N. Downing St. and N. Corona St. The building had been an old house at one time, with steps leading up to the front door of the store. The owner of CATEGORY SIX BOOKS and his partner lived upstairs from the store level itself. In the center of the store were wooden steps leading up to the residence. The staircase divided the store into two, almost equal halves once a patron entered the front door.
Jon and I were just browsing at first, having driven up from Colorado Springs where we lived to Denver that sunny afternoon, probably in Spring. This was the first time I had ever been in a gay book store, at least one that was not primarily selling porn magazines like the one my friend Bart Keeling worked at in Colorado Springs off of N. Platte Blvd.
Eventually, perhaps Jon was making his purchase and I was simply standing beside him as his buddy behind the cash register rang up the total price of his books. Somehow, I must have been asked if I had read TALES OF THE CITY, a series I had never even heard of since this was the mid 1980's and Maupin had not yet published the fifth volume, his breakout novel in the series, SIGNIFICANT OTHERS. When I must have acknowledged that I had not even heard of TALES, Jon's buddy grabbed the four paperback volumes then in existence and handed them to me, confidently saying, "Do yourself a favor and buy these."
This could have been in either late 1984 or 1985 since BABYCAKES was published in 1984.
I cannot imagine that I was anything but startled. I almost never read novels, except in college. And, of course, there were very few "gay" novels back then, at least none that would be included in a college class at Cal State Dominguez Hills circa 1970. I reluctantly accepted the stack though I cannot now recall how I paid for the four books, whether in cash or, more likely, by credit card. (I had an American Express card in the beginning of the decade, which was only the first company to issue me a card of any kind after my resignation from the Air Force in October of 1979. One had to build up credit, then as now, to get credit cards.)
These four volumes were first editions; and none of them, published by Harper & Row, were ever in hardback when they first appeared.
I was, of course, working at Kaman Corporation (later Instrumentation) on Garden of the Gods Road in Colorado Springs full time since 1980 while I worked part time, weekday evenings and sometimes Saturdays, for Pikes Peak Community College at Fort Carson and, less often, Peterson Air Force Base, teaching English, Literature, U.S. History, Western Civilization, Communications, and Humanities. When was I going to read them when I did work full time during the day and two or four evenings during the week and sometimes Friday evening and all day Saturday (for the Communications seminars)? I had joined the History Book Club and was reading many history, as well as art and architectural, books so that I could get a stronger grip on U.S. and European history, in addition to art and architecture, when I was teaching history or humanities classes.
At some point at Kaman, I had been transferred from the small Displacement Measuring Devices team (Rich Hostak, Shirley Overholser, Greg Smith, and our older supervisor, the inventor of the DM devices that Kaman sold, who kindly hired me in 1980 but whose name I no longer remember) to the larger Radiation Monitoring Division of Kaman. My coworker and fellow technical writer at the RMS division was later let go, and then my job would also entail becoming the division's supply officer. I was given a solitary office off of the main manufacturing floor. No one else occupied that area of at least three separate offices.
For anyone to find me, they had to enter double doors, take a couple of steps, turn right, take a few more steps, and then turn right again to enter my office, the single door of which I would often close for privacy. I knew someone was coming well before they got to me.
I started to read the novels then and there when I had nothing to do for work. It took me three days to finish off TALES because it was something quite different than what I was used to reading, a day each for MORE and FURTHER, and a two or three more days because I knew it was the last one and I really wanted to savor it, BABYCAKES. To say I devoured the series would be accurate. I was totally hooked.
As the decade progressed, I would reread the series a couple more times, probably as SIGNIFICANT OTHERS and then SURE OF YOU were published. (I specifically remember once when I was feeling unwell, had to stay home from work, and lay on the couch in the living room and read the books.)
I recall reading that SIGNIFICANT OTHERS did become Maupin's breakout book, extensively widening his fanbase and significantly increasing his book sales. This would also be the last volume to appear only in paperback as the first edition. While the edition was the same height and depth of the four earlier volumes, it was a much thicker book, definitely longer than each of the first four. And, again if I am remembering correctly, this was the first book that no longer relied upon newspaper columns that first appeared in San Francisco newsprint before being gathered in book form.
SURE OF YOU was, finally, the first volume to initially appear as a hardback book. I not only bought it that way at CATEGORY SIX BOOKS, I learned that Maupin was going to appear at the store on Capitol Hill for a signing. My other former friend at the time, Dino, and I headed over to the store on 10th street to discover that Maupin was, indeed, exceedingly popular, given that the signing line extended out the back door of the building and into a backyard that we had not known existed. At least a couple dozen fans were ahead of us. Once inside the main floor, we could hear a straight woman at the table set-up near the front door, while standing in front of Maupin, weeping when Maupin indicated that SURE OF YOU was likely the last volume in the series ever. Maupin's partner at the time, the late Terry Anderson, was standing regally, almost protectively, behind Maupin sitting at the table. He was chuckling at the obvious grief being expressed by this female fan while Maupin tried to soothe her disappointment that he had no more stories to tell about his beloved characters.
His characters had strongly taken a hold of his now far-more-numerous fans. We had actually come to love them as if they were real. And Barbary Lane was as real to us as if it really existed in San Francisco. When Dino and I finally arrived in front of the signing table and Armistead looked up at me expectantly, we asked, "Does Barbary Lane really exist?" Maupin explained that he had based the location upon Macondray Lane, a real pedestrian lane. (Dino and I would later visit the location, climb the wooden steps and walk the Lane, figuring where 28 Barbary Lane would be were it there and not just a soundstage in Los Angeles when the first film was shot.) Maupin signed my hardback book and Dino and I moved off, pleased that we had gotten to speak with him even if briefly.
Here is a photo of Macondray Lane's steps:
With TALES OF THE CITY apparently at an end in 1989, and my searching for the right kind of novel for me to create, I wrote a few single novels that I knew were not worthy to publish. I was soon finally forced to move to Denver when the IBM job appeared. I had already dipped my toes into the Denver stream after I was unable to get hired for a middle school or high school teaching job in Colorado Springs after I finished with my Secondary Education certificate program at UCCS in 1989.
In early 1990, Dino was exiting a building in downtown Denver as a former, fellow tenet of a converted house on Capitol Hill was entering that same building. In chatting Don Nolan up that afternoon, Dino discovered that Don was working as a technical writer on a project for Capital Federal Savings in the Tech Center of Denver. The project needed a few more writers, so Dino was excited to offer my name for consideration. Don was happy to hear that because, as a contractor, if he got another person hired, he would get a $1,000.00 check from Ciber, Inc., his contract company. I would drive that Spring to the Tech Center each day from Colorado Springs after I got hired. Sometimes I would spend Friday night at Dino's place and drive back to Colorado Springs in the morning.
Another Cap Fed contractor was Nancy Dille, and she got a tech writer job from IBM after the Cap Fed job ended in June. Because they needed more writers on that project, she offered my name for consideration. I was hired and she got a check. That job in 1991 forced me to move to Dino and his partner's house in Thornton, CO, north of Denver for a few months. Since the project kept going, and then I got transferred to another IBM project and, eventually, got the Sales Manual job that would last for 31 years eventually, I had to get an apartment and leave my part time teaching for Pikes Peak Community College behind. I now had time to write something I truly believed in. By 1993, I began writing what would become my own series, RAINBOW ARC OF FIRE.
I believe that it was around 1998, after I had moved into my condo on Franklin St., that Maupin was on another book tour. I bought a copy of that hardback 20th Edition of TALES OF THE CITY. Maupin was at the new Denver library for a signing. By then I had published the first six volumes of my own series that had been entirely inspired by Maupin's series. While I created a super-hero series, I did use short, cliff-hanger chapters as he had. And my series was based in Denver while his was set in San Francisco. I decided in homage to present him with a set of my series, as well as having him sign my hardback copy of TALES OF THE CITY. A handler at the library thought he would certainly accept my unusual gift, so he ushered me in front of Maupin at the signing table, I briefly told the now very popular what I was giving him and how he had inspired me to write it. A bit puzzled, he accepted the colorful stack of books, though he seemed quite surprised. He also signed my hardback copy of his book.
These are the covers of his subsequent four volumes, each named for a major character:
When I learned that MONA OF THE MANOR was going to be published, I preordered it. Then I decided to reread the series once again, ordering the three paperback omnibuses, each containing three of the previous volumes in the series. These are what they look like:
I did not want to potentially damage all of my first editions in case something untoward might happen during my rereading. These omnibuses seemed a good bet. I read the first Omnibus last year. But when I started on the second Omnibus that begins with BABYCAKES, I stopped after reading only a few pages. Why?
I was a bit burned out. The first three books, combined, made for a lot of reading. Also, each was made into a series on PBS (TALES OF THE CITY) or Showtime (MORE and FURTHER) after an intolerant, priggish jerk overseeing PBS in the first Bush Administration had halted the possibility of any further TALES OF THE CITY books being made into video series for PBS even though the first was the highest rated PBS show of all time when it aired. He thought it was obscene and not for general public consumption even though some PBS stations pixilated any slight nudity such as Mona's breasts when she was getting dressed in front of Mary Ann and a nude girlie poster on Brian Hawkins's fridge.
Sadly, too, BABYCAKES begins with the reader being made aware that handsome Dr. Jon Fielding, Michael's previous love interest, has died of AIDS and his ashes buried under patio pavers at 28 Barbary Lane. With the book being published in 1984, in major cities such as SF, LA, NY and even Denver, we had seen our share of dying gay men. I had read the TIME and NEWSWEEK articles in the Kaman library about this mysterious new, and fatal, disease that seemed to be primarily targeting gay men. The articles began around 1981, again if I am remembering right. Until the cocktails became widely available after 1995, gay men were still dying. I had my first HIV test in Colorado Springs, but then I regularly got tested at a few sites in Denver after I moved there, once in a mobile testing RV parked at Cheesman for an annual Pride Parade.
Of those of us who had known one another at the Air Force Academy in 1979, George Gordy and Dan Stratford's partner, Dick Tuttle, would be dead in 1989. Dan would hang on until 1995. This was a decade and a half of funerals and notices in the paper and word of mouth gossip as to who had just died. Trying to reread BABYCAKES before MONA OF THE MANOR brought it all back much too clearly. And, of course, some of the survivors guilt also came flooding back. Those of us who are still negative after decades sometimes feels as if we are survivors of the TITANIC. We hadn't always played safe, we had not always been smart, so perhaps we were just preeminently lucky as we escaped in the life rafts and left others at sea to drown.
Also, those who died back then have now been dead for years, and even for decades. Many of them are now almost forgotten. Even the United flight attendant who volunteered at CATEGORY SIX BOOKS and handed me those first four TALES books in 19984 or 1985 died in the 1990's. I saw him shuffling out of a St. Joseph's hospital room in the 1990's after he had visited a guy whom I had briefly dated, who would die not long after the flight attendant died. He was, physically, on his last legs that day with obvious sores clearly visible.
Too many casualties and too many painful memories.
I had already shelved MONA OF THE MANOR for several months before picking it up to read a week ago, finishing it yesterday. Now a period piece about that terrible era before the cocktails and the meds and PrEP, it brought back memories of those terrible years.
Someday, we survivors of AIDS, like those survivors who were there for that night to remember aboard the TITANIC, will be gone. If they read about our generation, they may learn that we survived Polio, The Cold War, the Vietnam War, AIDS, rampant intolerance and COVID. We weren't The Greatest Generation. We were their offspring, and the world we were handed to endure made us survivors of too many perils. But many of us did survive, if just barely.
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