[In the review below, Clifton describes Sure of You as a dark finale to the Tales series set "in a city now haunted by AIDS."]

Armistead Maupin is a jovial fellow, a witty gay writer who can even make wry jokes about AIDS—which he does in his latest book, Sure of You…. There is only one subject that annoys him, irritates the hell out of him, enrages him, in fact. It is the subject of The Closet, and the cowards and traitors still cowering in its darkness.

Sure of You is the sixth—and Maupin says the last—novel in his famous series chronicling the lives of characters who, like Maupin himself, were drawn to San Francisco from all over America. The first five books, starting with the frothy Tales of the City in 1978, were based on his daily newspaper columns, which described San Francisco social life through a fictional parade of people. The books became cult classics; the Times of London called them "the funniest series of novels currently in progress." The new novel is the first that Maupin has written from scratch. It is a much darker, tougher book, about the breakdown of relationships among his familiar characters in a city now haunted by AIDS. With the first printing of 50,000 sold out before the official publication date, Sure of You is likely to promote Maupin once and for all from underground humorist to mainstream satirist.

The new book introduces a character as close to villainous as could be found in Maupin's usually comic universe: Russell Rand, an immensely successful gay fashion designer, married for camouflage to a beautiful woman. The Rands represent the kind of New York glamour and wealth that finally entices the series's heroine, Mary Ann Singleton, into leaving her husband and child to become a TV talk-show anchor in the East. Maupin's alter ego, Michael Tolliver, berates Rand for staying in the closet, calling him a money-grubbing hypocrite: "You're just greedy. Keeping up a front while your friends drop dead … You could've shown people that gay people are everywhere, and that we're no different."

"That designer is not just my creation," Maupin said in a recent interview; he based the character on one of America's fashion leaders. "He's a hypocrite, and there're a lot more like him," says the author, naming a long list of Hollywood stars, sportsmen and entrepreneurs both male and female, who pretend they are heterosexual. "I really despise them for the way they cover up. What I'm trying to say is that being gay is normal for people like me, and a lot of other Americans. Just as it's no news if I say Robert Redford is a heterosexual, it shouldn't be news if I say a male star is gay. But it isn't like that."

Maupin (pronounced Moppin), a rangy 45-year-old with a bushy mustache, is quick to proclaim his own homosexuality, although he comes from a conservative family in Raleigh, N.C., who rather wish he wouldn't. By the age of 13, he knew he was gay; because nobody in his circle would ever have admitted such a thing, he grew up feeling completely alone. But he could, if he chose, pass as an upper-crust good ole boy. His résumé is perfect: he served in the Navy in Vietnam, worked for Jesse Helms at a radio station in Helms's pre-Senate days and was awarded a Presidential Commendation by Richard Nixon for his work with refugees in Southeast Asia. He was working as a journalist in San Francisco when he decided to come out of the closet. "A magazine wanted to include me in their list of the 10 sexiest men in San Francisco," he recalls. "They assumed I was straight, and I thought how ridiculous it had become. I said they could include me as long as they said I was gay."

Maupin first introduced his cast of whimsical characters when his newspaper audience was still living out the hedonism of the '60s. In his earlier books, boy meets girl, girl meets girl, boy meets boy: they make sure that their astrological signs are in synch and off they go, usually for not much more than a night. They smoke dope, snort some coke, go on to the next partner—and the next, and the next. For the gays, there is no sense of the terrible times to come; life is at its most promiscuous in the bathhouse capital of the world.

The characters live in San Francisco but travel all over the world, from the blue-blooded all-male Bohemian Club romps in the California redwoods to elegant English manor houses to a women-only camp on a Greek island (Lesbos, of course). There's a lot of Maupin himself in the books, and when Michael, in More Tales of the City, writes to his mother to tell her he is gay, it was Maupin's own way of telling his parents the same thing.

"I knew they would read it, because they were reading the serial in the San Francisco Chronicle at the time," he recalls. "My father later said that he suspected I was gay, and my mother knew because a girlfriend of mine had told her. They reacted the same way to the letter: my mother wrote to say it was killing my father, and my father wrote to say it was killing my mother." His mother is now dead, and he and his father "respect each other," says the author. But his father has remarried, and his stepmother, close to his own age, won't let Maupin and his lover, Terry Anderson, stay in the family house.

Anderson, 30, who runs a bookshop in San Francisco, has tested positive for AIDS (Maupin remains negative). They live together in a penthouse in the Mission district, which is filled with flowers grown from seeds sent them by a friend just before he died of AIDS. The disease is very much a part of their lives, but they will not let it overwhelm them. "It's very hard to tell you how it feels to be in love with someone who might be dead in six months," says Maupin. "But the knowledge makes love infinitely more exquisite."