Tales of the City

San Francisco is a major theme in the novel as both a setting, and as the backdrop to the characters and their personal stories. To suggest that San Francisco in the 1970’s was the one city in America where heterosexuals were completely accepting of homosexuals is to forget that it was on a late November day in 1978 when Dan White went hunting for Harvey Milk. Even so, it is beyond question that the level of normality expressed in the relations between gays and straights in the city had already attained a level at that time which many cities still do not exhibit today. Maupin’s book is really one of the most extraordinary subversive works of fiction published in the 1970’s because it positions widespread (if not necessarily universal) acceptance of homosexuality by its heterosexual characters as a given. This is an especially audacious theme to pursue consider that in the real world time and space inhabited by these characters, Anita Bryant, Dan White and the Briggs Initiative were all enjoying widespread public acclaim for their own uniquely individual brands of homophobic hysteria.