SOURCE: "Tweak My Nipple," in London Review of Books, Vol. 15, No. 6, March 25, 1993, pp. 21-2.

In the following review of Maybe the Moon, Mars-Jones charges that the story is poorly paced, the characterizations are lackluster, and the themes lack consistently serious treatment.

Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City, which started appearing as a newspaper serial in the mid-Seventies, and in volume form a few years later, are little classics of light literature: in their lightness they outweigh any number of more earnest enterprises. Maupin's San Francisco is a carousel lightly disguised as a city, a continuous party where everyone is welcome without any tedious obligation to fit in, and even the hangovers are fun.

To gay readers these books offered an extraordinary experience, of having their difference neither denied nor insisted on, but dissolved for the duration—far less of an existential branding in this jaunty utopia than, say...