[In the following excerpted essay, which is based on a conversation with Maupin, Spain discusses Maupin's homosexual themes and attitudes, the AIDS crisis and its effect on his writing, his method for creating characters and plots, and his wide appeal among both heterosexuals and homosexuals.]

It's the Friday before a long holiday weekend in San Francisco, and many of the city's residents are preparing to escape to the country for some time away from their day-to-day concerns. The readers of the San Francisco Examiner, however, will take at least one daily concern away with them—namely, a worried curiosity about what Monday will bring for the cast of characters whose lives Tales of the City author Armistead Maupin outlines daily in the Examiner serial Significant Others….

San Franciscans are accustomed to the suspense. Maupin has been serializing the adventures of a cross-section of Bay Area characters off and on since 1976, when the original series first appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle. Readers elsewhere have followed these tales in four editions, beginning with Tales of the City in 1978, followed by More Tales … (1980), Further Tales … (1982) and 1984's Babycakes; together they have sold over 200,000 copies….

While the latest serial lacks the Tales of the City label—lost when Maupin jumped from the Chronicle to the Examiner—the same, familiar characters are there, along with Maupin's trademark tone, which blends humor, melodrama and deadly accurate social satire. Its three main story lines follow in the tradition of bucolic comedy, in which city dwellers escape to the proverbial forest for a weekend of romantic misadventure, set against the backdrop of the Bohemian Grove men's retreat, a women's music festival and the predominantly gay Russian River resort. But the story that San Franciscans were left to ponder on the holiday weekend in question has an immediate relevance that separates it from its predecessors, and perhaps from anything else that is currently being published. For at Maupin's Russian River retreat, the character Brian Hawkins, who has blazed a trail of heterosexual promiscuity through all four books, awaits the results of a test that will reveal whether or not the illness, fatigue and sudden weight loss that have afflicted him the past few weeks—weeks through which Examiner readers suffered with him day after day—are indeed the undeniable signs of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.

The result is a portrait of the devastating effects of the AIDS epidemic that achieves an intimacy that could scarcely be duplicated in any other format. Whether they read the newspaper series or the book, readers are faced with the prospect that someone they've "known" for 10 years may be dying before their eyes. While this hardly sounds like material for romantic comedy—miraculously, it is—the AIDS issue reflects Maupin's sensitivity to the responsibilities he takes upon himself as a homosexual, a novelist and a member of the press—responsibilities that became clearer in 1985 when he emerged as a de facto spokesperson on gay matters surrounding his friend Rock Hudson's death.

Significant Others, like its predecessors, offers Maupin a welcome opportunity to extend his social commentary to a broader audience than the subject matter might usually attract. "I'm lucky, because my books cross over," he says. "I constantly fight the premise that because I'm gay my books are only for gay people." The crossover element is central to Maupin's mission. Maupin sees his work in the tradition of the 19th century serialists, whose fiction brought social issues to life for the masses; Significant Others even aspires to evoke those historical serials graphically, with decorative chapter headings and an elaborate frontispiece. But the key to that crossover, and to Maupin's most important affinity to his 19th century influences, has nothing to do with his stories' look or content. Rather, it's the way they draw in any reader, gay or straight, from San Francisco or beyond. For shaping his every plot twist or satirical barb is a set of three simple rules of serial fiction handed down from Dickens's contemporary, Wilkie Collins: "Make 'em cry, make 'em laugh, make 'em wait."

When PW [Publishers Weekly] visited Maupin, San Francisco had just received the 80th installment of the series, and Maupin was completing #86, with 41 left to go. "That's actually pretty far ahead for me," he confessed. "My Achilles heel is that I'm very late getting copy in. I'm both a perfectionist and a procrastinator—a deadly combination." While his one-step-ahead strategy may unnerve his editor, it gives him the opportunity to respond to the reaction of a city full of readers. "I'm writing my first draft in public," he says. "It's nerve-racking, but I get marvelous feedback."

Even on his "first draft," though, Maupin is working from a blueprint. "When I sit down to start, I have a rough idea of the journey ahead with little idea of the side trips," he explains. "I map out the overall theme, some sort of emotional resolution that I want for all of the characters. But there's enough room to surprise myself in the process."

At the same time that he's writing the serial, he's thinking about how it will work as a novel as well. "I'm programmed to write for both," he says. "I've learned how to do that over the course of four books. I know that some of the seams can be stitched together later." It wasn't always this way, however. A former reporter, Maupin launched the original series as an ongoing column with no plans for turning it into a book. Then Harper & Row senior editor Harvey Ginsberg spotted it in the paper while vacationing in the area and the first deal was struck. While the original daily installments had to be "severely reworked" in the process of becoming Tales and More Tales, the third and fourth books were "more structured for novels" from the outset.

Significant Others marks the first time that Maupin signed a book contract before he wrote the serial—one reason that he left the Chronicle, which refused to deal with his book agent, Jed Mattes. Even in serial form, it reads more like a novel than the previous books. "This time, I'm deliberately lessening the number of twists and turns in the plot to give the reader a sense of character studies," Maupin acknowledges. "Some readers object that there aren't as many cliff-hangers as there used to be. But when I have a novel in mind, I can't have that herky-jerky rhythm anymore. Now I tone down the cliff-hanger endings for the novel."

The story is "a different creature" in the different formats, he says, and both have their advantages. "The daily form lets air in," he explains. "People have 24 hours to speculate on what's going to happen, so they remember it in a different way. It becomes part of their own experience." The transition to novel form, on the other hand, allows the author to correct mistakes—such as a few inaccurate details in the Bohemian Grove pageant scene in Significant Others—which pleases the reporter in him. "I like to maintain some basis in fact," he says.

And the facts, when you're talking about the people Maupin's writing about, include sex, of which there is much more in the books than in the newspaper. While Examiner publisher Will Hearst did allow Maupin to include some fairly "mature" situations in the "family newspaper," many of the scenes will be racier in the book, Maupin reports. "Will Hearst is a child of the '60s, and he gives me free reign," he says. "Still, there are whole passages I'm going to embellish that simply couldn't be handled in newspaper form."

Sex and sexuality are central issues in all of Maupin's books, but are especially prominent in Significant Others. In addition to the AIDS-test vigil, the story offers the adventures of an adulterous Bohemian Grove member who ensconces his mistress at a cabin near the all-male jamboree; a pair of lesbians with conflicting responses to an all-female festival; and a gay man contemplating his first affair since his lover Jon, a character in earlier books, died of AIDS. Of course, all of the action occurs in the same general vicinity, and the various story lines inevitably end up overlapping and knotting up before the end. "I'm interested in the juxtaposition of characters—who's forced to meet whom and how they deal with it—the meeting of different worlds, through fate."

Significant Others' premise takes off from the "fairly natural instinct for the sexes to want to spend some time away from each other," explains Maupin. "The humor arises when they try to be rigid about it. It's not really a natural state to live with just one gender." He sees that as a relevant message for his San Francisco gay audience in particular. "Here is a town known for being all-male," he says, and while that attracts some of the transplants who come to live there (Maupin himself was raised in Raleigh, N.C.), it can result in an unhealthy degree of "male exclusivity."

A variation on that exclusivity is something that Maupin has carefully avoided in his fiction. "A lot of gay writers," he says, "lose their effectiveness by writing only about gay people," which can result in a "rarefied" atmosphere "that sends me running and screaming. I would like to see myself as part of the world at large." So, too, his characters: "The books show gay people in context. They give their relationships the blessing of heterosexual friends, and make them more real, I hope.

"The bottom line—the message—is acceptance, love and understanding," he continues. "I try to celebrate difference through the books, the way 19th century writers did, to show all the classes, the richness of humankind." That effort is directed in part at heterosexual readers, to assuage their fears or hostilities toward homosexuals. "The reader is besieged by so many combinations that you just see them as relationships." But he also feels that his gay readers have to be reminded that they need not be at odds with the straight world, and he finds himself in an "advocacy position of urging other gay people to be honest about who they are. There's still a lot of improvement needed in that department."

AIDS, he says, could be a valuable catalyst in the elimination of homophobia. "It's taken a thing like AIDS to jar people into discussing the one thing they want most to avoid." Writing about it in the context of his serial is not without its risks. "People stop me in the street and say, 'Don't you dare kill that sweet boy,'" he says. "I got into enough trouble killing Jon [the above-mentioned character died 'off-camera' between More Tales and Babycakes]." And while some may criticize his humorous treatment of the matter, Maupin defends it. "A lot of people have taken an unctuous approach to AIDS," he says. "Their solemnity is frightening—almost as much as the disease." His tone, he says, is "one step up from the tedium of real life. At the same time, interwoven in there, I'm trying to confront issues that people are having to deal with now."

Maupin is outspoken on the need to confront those issues, and on the responsibility of homosexuals with influence to apply that influence toward constructive ends—namely, communication. "The problem lies with the homosexuals in power who lead lives of deceit and through their secrecy imply that it's something to be ashamed of," he says. "I travel all over the country speaking to gay groups, but I spend very little time decrying the Jerry Falwells of the world. I point the finger at the closet, at the people who are making life hell for the rest of us. They hold a lot of people in their hands, because the degree to which people have been kept ignorant about homosexuality is directly responsible for our government's failure to take action on AIDS research."

Nevertheless, Maupin is encouraged by the dialogue about homosexuality that the events of recent years have engendered. "I don't see that anything but good can come from the stories about AIDS that have been in the press in the last year," he says. "The degree to which the subject of homosexuality has been opened for discussion is enormous. It has been demystified—it's less scary now. My goal is the day it becomes boring—the day it's just people and relationships, and we just leave it at that. That's what it comes down to, anyway."