Also along is Wren Douglas, overweight, beautiful, detoured to the river from a book tour by none other than Booter to be his temporary mistress. Maupin, like a chess champion, moves DeDe and D’or one summer week to Wimminwood, a lesbian music festival (no men over 10 allowed) on the Russian River, Booter upriver to Bohemian Grove (no women allowed) for his annual reactionary hootenanny, and Brian, Michael, and an instant friend of Michael’s to points in-between. Let me clue you, Babycakes, this one has more converging lines than “Intolerance” and more curves than Lombard Street on a drug trip. Most of the same crew reports in: the sweet gay hero, Michael (Mouse) Tolliver, the once-naive Mary Ann, now Oprah-Winfrying it on local TV her house-husband and Michael’s best straight friend, Brian (with a new Angst to grind) DeDe and D’orothea, rich lesbian lovers, and mother and step-mother respectively of Eurasian twins (see “More Tales”), DeDe’s even richer stepfather, Booter Manigault, bastion of the San Francisco Bohemian Club (where white Republican males go to escape from characters like these), and Anna Madrigal, everybody’s favorite enigmatic landlady, still dispensing sensimilla and sympathy, if this time only on the fringe of the plot.īut what a plot. If you’ve been tracking and giggling over Maupin’s jolly crew all along, no explanation is necessary if however you come to “Significant Others” like a virgin, some explanation is possible: The first Maupin one comes upon is usually the funniest still, this one strikes me as his most skillful balancing act yet in a self-limiting genre, especially one additionally limited by current events. Now, almost 10 years later, Armistead Maupin’s spool of labyrinthine plot, barbed-wire dialogue (that doesn’t really sting long), and playful trend-skewering is winding its way unflaggingly on.
There followed “More Tales of,” “Further Tales,” and “Babycakes” (a communal nickname). First, up popped “Tales of the City” in 1978, a collection of his serialized newspaper columns chronicling the hopelessly, comically tangled lives of selected fictional soul mates from widely disparate sexual, geographic and social orientations-and all this in a charmed, anything-possible San Francisco.
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