Get the latest gossip
Why ‘Tales of the City’ Helped to Open Screen Doors for Queer Stories
Why ‘Tales of the City’ helped to open screen doors for queer stories on TV.
The acclaimed American novelist Robert Coover, who recently passed away, once explained why he skipped out on reading perhaps more high-brow fiction in favor of “sci-fi, detective novels, Westerns, pornography, spy stories, horror and romance,” likening them to “folk and fairy tales” because he found them “so much more alluring to a writer trying to burrow inside the collective psyche.” Which brings us to one of the highlights of Mipcom 31 years ago, the breakthrough TV production of Armistead Maupin’s timeless fictional series, “Tales of the City.” Today, you wouldn’t be startled by its wonderful cast of beautifully drawn eccentrics, but in the late 1970s, when Maupin began writing his “Tales,” and in the early 1990s when the series won a Peabody and a GLAAD Award, a show featuring a marijuana-growing transgender landlady was not just entertainment, it was downright revolutionary.
Or read this on Variety