You can still walk down the street naked if you want to, on any given day. Total nudity is totally legal in San Francisco. I recently ran into a town supervisor and congratulated him on a piece of legislation he introduced, that people who are nude must put down a towel or newspaper before they sit in public places. I’m always baffled by questions about how the city has changed. But Mary Ann in Autumn says a lot more about what it means to get older, and look back on your youth in the city. One of the obvious new developments is the presence of Facebook and the tech boom, which plays a big part in the plot. What does it say about how San Francisco has evolved over the 30-plus years since you began Tales of the City? Your eighth novel in the saga, Mary Ann in Autumn, just came out in paperback. My editors liked that little vignette so much that they asked me to continue following her and the gay man she met at the Safeway. So I went home and made up a fictional character, Mary Ann Singleton. I started out trying to write a nonfiction piece on the cruising scene at the Marina Safeway, but I couldn’t find anyone to fess up to going to the local supermarket to get laid.
Why did you choose to write fiction rather than narrative nonfiction? I threw everyone into the same stew and let the stories season each other. I took great glee in intertwining the narratives, so that readers wouldn’t be able to understand any of it if they didn’t read all of it. Gays were only reading gay episodes, and socialites were only reading about the wealthy. In the beginning, there were people in the city who would only read episodes which included characters from social groups like their own. I allowed them to interact with each other, and felt the novel grow. When I ran out of phenomena, I started to look at the characters.
It began as a series of vignettes about various social phenomena – hetero-cruising at a local supermarket, gay bathhouses, things of that sort. When you began the saga, as a serial in The San Francisco Chronicle, what did you set out to capture about your chosen home? The first volume of your Tales of the City series was such a time capsule of San Francisco in the 70s that it is quite literally in a time capsule, buried by the Mayor in 1979. Foreign Policy & International Relations.
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