Young, occasionally dumb and often full of fun, I was 21 and approaching peak gay in the minty fresh first year of this new millennium. Not long graduated from Glasgow University, where I had finally, abundantly come out, I was spinning my wheels working in a flashy furniture store in the bustling heart of the city before settling on what came next (spoiler, journalism school in London.)
With Christmas fast approaching, I’d circle the packed shop floor with my best girls Jenny Lau and Elaine ‘Tinny’ Grantham, gossiping far more then selling solid oak dining tables. Avoiding the beady eyes of our frustrated (but pretty forgiving) managers, we were increasingly excited about megastar Madonna’s impending wedding to cockney gangster moviemaker Guy Ritchie in Skibo Castle up in the Highlands.
It was around this giddy time that Tinny, ridiculously glamorous and a decade wiser, gave me one of the greatest gifts I’ve ever received. Handing over her much-loved copy of Armistead Maupin’s novel Tales of the City, she dubbed me her “babycakes.” Borrowed from the mouth of go-go dancing gay protagonist Michael ‘Mouse’ Tolliver, it’s a nickname that’s stuck 20 years later.
A magical chronicle of free love and queer life in San Francisco, it began as a weekly column, surviving one newspaper folding only to flourish in the San Francisco Chronicle. Published in 1978, the year I was born, the first book collected the misadventures of the colourful residents of 28 Barbary Lane. A hilltop house overlooking Coit Tower divided into apartments, it was overseen by kaftan-clad landlady Anna Madrigal, a 60-something secretive matriarch who greets all her new tenants with a joint stuck to a welcome note and eventually came out as trans. I recognised as much of myself in Mouse’s adorably naïve 20-something straight best friend Mary Ann Singleton, fresh off the bus from the Midwest, as I did in his partying at the End Up Club.
Working my way feverishly through the then six installments leading up to 1989’s Sure of You, I was still a very long way from coming out to my parents or even truly accepting myself, despite hitting queer bars, clubs, beats and random blokes’ beds with gay abandon. Unsure if my family could ever accept who I truly was and wrestling with years of closet-born fear and loathing, I held fast to Maupin’s concept of the logical family. That LGBTIQ+ people could find loving support and security with one another even if all else failed.
And we were being failed. Decriminalisation of homosexuality in the UK, first passed in Scotland, may have arrived in 1981, but the age of consent was only equalised the year Tinny handed me that first Tales installment, the same year former Prime Minster Margaret Thatcher’s hateful Section 28 clause – banning local authorities and schools from ‘promoting’ homosexuality – was finally, overturned.
Unsure if my family could ever accept who I truly was and wrestling with years of closet-born fear and loathing, I held fast to Maupin’s concept of the logical family.
It’s hardly surprising, in this climate, that the abandoned closet’s shadow loomed large over my early exploration. Books had always been my main avenue to feel my way around this world, but it was only on leaving behind the sleepy Scottish coastal town we moved to from Glasgow when I was still young and where, for all I knew, queer folks didn’t exist, that I felt confident enough to seek out queer literature. I had a lot of catching up to do.
It wasn’t exactly front and centre on the university curriculum either, though I found more evidence on the big screen through the wild works of John Waters (Pink Flamingos) and Jim Sharman (The Rocky Horror Picture Show), and the much gentler romance of Hettie MacDonald’s Beautiful Thing. Finally I could more freely explore the (to me at least) hidden histories of our rainbow communities.
Tales of the City was a bright beacon in this newfound education, riding the wave of adulation as proud drag queens mingled with right-on lesbians and Mouse falls head over heels for hunky gynaecologist Jon Fielding. And therein lay tragedy too, as the HIV/AIDS crisis forced its awful way into the books in real time, claiming Jon and leaving Mouse awaiting what seemed like certain death. I could hardly bear losing this newfound hero, and many years later, when I was honoured to interview Maupin, it turns out that’s exactly why he stopped writing them. He only returned to the lives and loves of the Barbary Lane set with three final novels – beginning with 2007’s Michael Tolliver Lives – when incredible medical progress meant Mouse no longer had to leave us.
But back in 2000, still the days of whirring VHS, I hungrily consumed the TV adaptations controversially created by British network Channel 4 in 1993, with Marcus D'Amico breathing vibrant life into Michael, alongside a then largely unknown Laura Linney as his babycakes Mary Ann and a majestic Olympia Dukakis as Anna. Paul Hopkins would take over as Mouse on two further series, with Australian Murray Bartlett, star of Andrew Haigh’s also San Francisco-set Looking, joining Linney and Dukakis in the upcoming Netflix sequel.
That he lives and breathes still is a testament to the heroes who battled against intransigent governments and big pharma, to countless lives unfairly lost, and a brilliant community that remained caring for one another and remains unbowed. And I’ll never forget the kindness of Tinny, my much younger but just as fabulous Mrs Madrigal who so generously helped me be sure of me.
