66 pages • 2 hours read
Armistead MaupinTales of the City
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1978A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Secrets
There is a pervading air of secrecy throughout the novel; practically every character hides some element of the truth. While this might be expected from someone like Beauchamp, even the more innocent—such as Mary Ann—eventually find something they need to hide. By the final chapter, for example, Mary Ann is keeping the death of Norman as quiet as she can, and she has refused to alleviate herself of the findings in Norman’s report. She swears Michael to secrecy, even if she has told him nothing more than that the report exists. That this turn to secrecy is tied to her first trip across the bridge is a literary flourish; Michael tells her that “‘I can’t believe it […] there’s something you’ve never done’” (267). The comment is laden in irony, but it also refers to secret-keeping just as much as it does visiting a specific tourist spot.
For many characters, secrecy is tied to sexuality. Both Mona and Michael hide their sexuality from loved ones. Mona does not tell Michael about D’orothea, while Michael struggles to tell his parents. There are plenty of emotional motivations for this, including shame, fear, guilt, and many others—but the emotions are typically internalized. In San Francisco, one has less to worry about in terms of expressing one’s sexuality. For Mona, however, this is an internal conundrum. She would have no trouble existing as a lesbian in San Francisco, but it is only when a remnant of her past arrives that she is finally willing to express that side of her character. Until that moment, it remains secret. For Michael, however, telling his parents the truth does not seem like an option. The secret nature of his sexuality in relation to his parents turns their visit into a minefield. He is recognized as a gay person everywhere he goes, whether he is catcalled on the street or winked at by a waiter, Michael’s sexuality is in a constant state of tension with his parents’ approval. Until this tension is reconciled, secrecy will remain a key part of his life.
Secrecy also pertains to health matters. DeDe keeps her pregnancy as secret as she can, including hiding it from her husband. Meanwhile, her father Edgar struggles to tell people about his impending demise. With only six months to live, the only people who know are faith healers and his mistress, both of whom he keeps secret from his wife. Again, the characters have plenty of reasons to keep their secrets. DeDe’s baby belongs to the delivery boy, rather than Beauchamp, and is likely a different race. Edgar struggles to come to terms with his own mortality, turning from “‘the biggest asshole on the Barbary Coast’” (90) to a bedridden patient. Pride and fear are important motivating emotions, but they also push the characters further and further toward secrecy. On many occasions, secrecy is the natural state of being. It pervades the novel at every turn, whether in the tubs or in Bohemian Grove. There is always something to keep secret and always someone to keep it secret from.
Sexuality
From the moment Mary Ann arrives in San Francisco, sex and sexuality is a topic on everybody’s mind. The first place she stays, Connie’s house, is filled with little hints and references to sex. Mary Ann spots books about the topic on the shelf and reads the cover of one magazine, which contains an article titled “Coed Baths—Welcome to the World’s Cleanest Orgy” (12). Considering Mary Ann’s small-town sensibilities and her reputation as a less popular but reliable girl, this sudden prevalence of all things sexual is a shock to Mary Ann’s system. As much as this shocks her at first, Mary Ann never has any trouble with her actual sexuality.
This is most certainly a problem for Michael. As a gay man, he is able to be far more open about his sexuality in San Francisco than his original home in Orlando, Florida. As evidence of this, he is still struggling to tell his parents about his sexuality. However, as well as the more obvious aspects of his struggles with his sexuality, Michael also finds it difficult to find his place within the gay community. Even among other homosexual people, his sexuality is still uncertain and opaque. When he first meets Mary Ann, Michael is with Robert—a “strong and direct” (20) man with a firm handshake—though they break up soon after. Later in the novel, he meets Jon, who looks like he could be the “Vice President of every high school class in northern Florida” (95). Jon and Robert are presented differently from the men who Michael meets at clubs and bars. The man who compliments his shoes or the roller-skating nuns on Halloween seem more extravagant and hedonistic in comparison. As such, Michael is forced to navigate his sexuality between his long-term relationships and his one-night stands. It is clear that both are incompatible. When Jon spots Michael taking part in the jockey shorts dance, he leaves immediately, his face “wrinkled with disdain” (167). Though there appears to be hope for both of them to get together in the future, the novel ends without Michael and Jon reconciling. As such, Michael’s sexuality remains a difficult problem that he must face head on.
For Mona, sexuality is just as complicated. Even though Mona might technically be a bisexual woman, she still finds romantic opportunities limited due to her disdain for most people. She tells Michael that she “‘hardly knows any straight people anymore’” (78) and spends most of her time at gay bars and venues. To her, “‘straight men are boorish and boring’” (78). However, her sexuality still remains hidden. When Michael refers to a “‘nasty epidemic of heterosexuality […] gay guys who’re sneaking off […] to get it on with women’” (78), Mona simply replies “‘how bizarre’” (78). She is happy to lie by omission (at first) and then directly (later) about her true relationship with D’orothea. Mona, the product of a broken home and someone who is as willful and individualistic as anyone else in the text, still retains an air of privacy about her sexuality. Even in San Francisco, being the “resident freak” (34) does not mean knowing everything about one’s own sexuality. Throughout the novel, sexuality remains one of the most unknowable, difficult-to-navigate themes.
The Post-Hippie Era
Set in the 1970s in California, the novel contains many themes associated with the post-hippie era. The aftermath of 1967 and the political fallout which followed are discussed explicitly, while many characters have since struggled to find their place in society as the high watermark of the hippie movement ebbed away to reveal what was left of America.
Mary Ann is introduced to this concept on a number of occasions. As a 25-year-old who only recently arrived in San Francisco, she is not expected to know about the energy or the movements which were associated with the city in the middle of the 1960s, though she may well be aware of them. When attending a dinner party with Mrs. Madrigal, she sits and listens as two of the city’s residents discuss the issue. To them—the North Beach poet and the clinic worker with unshaved armpits—the movement is not just dead, but it was killed. When probed for who killed it, the clinic worker replies “‘Nixon, Watergate, Patty Fucking Hearst, the Bicentennial. The Media got bored with 1967, so they zapped it’” (42). Mary Ann sits quietly and listens as the dinner party guests establish the fundamental understanding of the post-hippie era: the epoch is dead, murdered, and everything that came afterward drove back all the progress that was made.
From this ideological baseline, it is possible to begin to see the evidence throughout the rest of the novel. Elsewhere, there are more subtle hints at what happened to the free love movement. While the dinner party guests describe how “‘the acid, the music, the sex’” (42) was everywhere, those things are still available. Now, however, they are placed behind closed doors. Mona does all manner of drugs in her home, and Brian visits the baths, a sex club which is located in an “oddly squalid setting” (97). The sex, in this age, is quite literally “behind the façade” (97) of a respectable business. What was freely available and public in the 1960s has shifted back behind the squalid veneer of respectability. Those indulgences are still available, but they are associated with grimy, seedy locations, rather than being the dominating cultural force that once occupied the mainstream. The remnants of the hippie era are still evident in San Francisco, but only if one knows where to find them.
The most explicit reference to this theme is Vincent. The suicidal, self-harming switchboard operator is depressed in the contemporary age. His ex-girlfriend, a fierce opponent of the Vietnam War, suddenly found herself purposeless in the post-war 1970s. She left Vincent and moved to Israel, the disintegration of her political movement leaving her without a purpose in life. Vincent himself feels like “the last hippie in the world” (170) and imbues himself with a “tragic grandeur” (170) and, as such, it is “time to split” (171). If the cultural moment which was the 1960s hippie movement has already died, Vincent’s death is one of the final nails in the coffin. As the last hippie, he chooses to kill himself rather than live in a world where all of the movement’s achievements are crumbling around him. He tears down the posters from the walls and ties a rope around his neck. The death of Vincent has a dramatic effect on Mary Ann; it helps to further another layer of her innocence and shows her that she is not able to help anyone. Unlike Vincent, however, she never loses hope. She still tries to help Norman when he slips off a cliff and still remains positive and optimistic. Perhaps because Mary Ann is part of a new generation in the city, she is not nearly as obsessed with San Francisco as it existed 10 years before. The post-hippie era is well and truly dead in the novel, and San Francisco is ready to be occupied by a new generation.
