Stanford Humanities Center
Queer Love on Barbary Lane
The Sexual Politics of Serial Gay Fiction in Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City
Author and literary scholar Ramzi Fawaz, a 2019-20 Humanities Center fellow, takes us down Barbary Lane in his presentation on the reading experiences of Bay Area residents who encountered Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City when it first appeared as a serial in the San Francisco Chronicle between 1976 and 1983.
Drawing on oral history interviews, Professor Fawaz will discuss readers’ emotional responses to Maupin’s events, characters, and storylines. In particular, he’ll track the ways Tales of the City made the gay liberation call to come out of the closet available to a wide range of readers, thus disseminating the values of the movement to audiences far beyond the limits of gay radical political activism.
Following the talk, there will be an opportunity for Q&A with Professor Fawaz.
About the Speaker
An associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Ramzi Fawaz is the author of The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics (NYU Press, 2016), which won the 2017 ASAP Book Prize from the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present. His research and teaching explore the cultural production of radical left-wing social movements in the late 20th century United States, with particular focus on movements for women's and gay liberation, black power, and AIDS activism.
