At first I tried to mix my old and new friends, but there was a tension-I was a different me depending on my company. I’d never had to suffer small-talk with their parents. They were older and funnier than my high school friends. Fitzroy was a little village and I romped within the triangle of Princes, Wellington and Gertrude streets.

I read the Tales of the City books in order, as fast as I could find them, in the bedroom of my first share-house (blue walls, red curtains), and in between stamping punter’s hands on quiet nights at the pub. In the suburbs, everything happened behind closed doors but in the city, it was like the doors had been blown off their hinges. In the cafes up and down Brunswick Street, people posted share-house ads, and this, too, was the gleaming: lesbians and activists and smokers in double-story terraces with veggie patches and cats named Dante. Settle in, the music seemed to say, meet these interesting people, wish they were your friends : Mary-Ann, the naive transplant from Ohio Mona, the kooky copywriter Michael ‘Mouse’, Mary-Ann’s endearing psychopomp, who would ease her journey into the brave new world. I loved the freewheeling utopia of 1970s San Francisco, the gleeful gayness I loved Mona’s hair, Mouse’s Y-fronts, Mrs Madrigal’s caftans, and Connie Bradshaw’s catchphrase (‘FanTABulous!’) The opening credits ran with Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo segueing into something jazzy and beguiling. In 1992, the first three Tales books were adapted for TV-and this is how I came to them.

But it’s Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City that most readily whirlpools me back to that time of freedom and possibility. I liked to read about dreamers and drop outs in unconventional living arrangements, like the characters in Michael Hornburg’s Bongwater and Douglas Coupland’s Generation X. In my post-high-school existence, the gleaming world was to be found in TV and books. You can’t wait to bite into the lotus’”) I searched out the poem ( The Lotus Eaters) and copied the lush lines into my writing book: When Mrs Madrigal summed her new tenant up via Tennyson (“You have that look about you. I knew as soon as I saw Mary-Ann Singleton climb the wooden stairs, and open the lych-gate to the dreamy three-tiered ‘painted lady’. You’ll know if it’s right for you.” - Tales of the City, Armistead MaupinĢ8 Barbary Lane would have been right for me. “ Secluded one-bedroom apartment on Russian Hill.

Bongwater by Michael Hornburg