Dinner Tables, Belonging, and Tales of the City

Originally a fictional newspaper serial, Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City has been revised and retold from the 1990s to the present in PBS, Showtime, and Netflix televisual adaptations. This paper focuses on how Netflix’s limited series illustrates continuities within debates on queer and trans representation by approaching the newest Tales as an extension of queer and trans worldmaking. By incubating and cultivating trans and nonbinary acting talent, drawing on queer celebrities and microcelebrities, and hiring older queer actors from stage and screen for the much-talked-about dinner party scene, Morelli and Poul highlight multiple queer generations of cultural laborers, revise queer genealogies, and contest hagiographies.