Mary Ann Singleton returns to 28 Barbary Lane in San Francisco after a 23-year absence for the 90th birthday of her former landlady, Anna Madrigal. Mary Ann is happily reunited with Michael Tolliver and Anna, but things are more complicated with her ex-husband, Brian Hawkins, and Shawna, the daughter she left behind to pursue a broadcasting career. Shawna follows a mysterious attraction to a new girl in town who is making a documentary about 28 Barbary Lane. The relationship between transgender man Jake Rodriguez and his lesbian girlfriend Margot Park faces challenges as Jake explores his newfound attraction to men. Michael struggles with the option to stop using condoms now that he is in a relationship with Ben Marshall. Anna begins receiving mysterious letters threatening to expose a secret from her past.
Based on Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City novels, though the events of the series aren't taken directly from any of the novels.
Includes examples of:
- Acronym and Abbreviation Overload: Ben and Michael perusing gay hookup apps and finding a lot of the jargon impenetrable. For example, what's "NDQ"? No Drag Queens.
- Adaptational Sexuality: In the novels, Jake Greenleaf is a gay trans man, and has consistently identified as such since his late teens. In the Netflix miniseries, he previously identified as a lesbian (and is still in a committed relationship with his lesbian girlfriend after transitioning), identifies as non-specifically queer, and only begins to experience attraction to men later on.
- DeDe's decades-long relationship with D'orothea isn't even mentioned, let alone present; the impression she gives is that she dabbled a bit with partners of various sexes instead of being functionally married to a woman after her husband's death.
- Adoption Angst: Shawna, after she learns the truth about her parentage, since she feels that not only her parents but also Anna and Michael lied to her for her entire life.
- The Bear: Michael. His magnificent greying Carpet of Virility is on display in his many shirtless and nude scenes.
- Been There, Shaped History: Not only are Ysela, Anna, and their other trans friends present at the Compton's Cafeteria riot, Ysela is shown throwing coffee in a cop's face - an act that, in real life, was committed by an unknown trans woman and is said to have sparked the riot.
- Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Claire.
- Butterfly of Transformation: a subtle example. Early on in "Days of Small Surrenders", Anna covets a scarf with butterflies on it, and Tommy buys it for her. Once he learns of her trans identity, he offers to save up so he can pay for her gender confirmation surgery.
- Camp Gay: Mateo is the walking embodiment of the prissy, pissy gay man. In fairness, he seems to have good reason to be irritated throughout most of the show.
- Cast Full of Gay: Mary Ann and Brian are straight and cis. Pretty much everybody else in the main cast, not so much.
- Cathartic Chores: After Shawna runs off, Mateo encourages Mary Ann to work out her feelings through vacuuming and window cleaning.
- Closet Trans: Anna in the sixties "passes" enough to hold down a job in a bookstore and even go on a date with a man.
- Club Kid: None of the main cast, but there's plenty of queer debauchery in the background.
- Cool Old Lady: Mrs. Madrigal and Ysela.
- Coordinated Clothes: the twins start dressing alike in flamboyant outfits for their social media careers.
- A Day in the Limelight: "Days of Small Surrenders" is a Whole Episode Flashback to 1966 and Anna's first arrival in San Francisco.
- Dirty Cop: the police working in the Tenderloin harass, extort, and beat up trans women.
- Doppelgänger Replacement Love Interest: Every woman Brian swipes right on on Tinder bears a marked resemblance to Mary Ann.
- Drag Queen: Shawna's boss at Body Politic, Ida Best (portrayed by RuPaul's Drag Race winner Caldwell Tidcue, aka Bob The Drag Queen), as well as loads and loads of background characters.
- Evil Brit: Shawna and Mary Ann suspect Sam of being after Anna's money.
- After it turns out they're wrong, he and Mary Ann team up to dig into Anna's past. The two of them have an argument about who should be the "bad cop"; Sam argues it should be him, since there's "no significant precedent" for a Midwestern bad guy.
- Family of Choice: pretty much the theme of all of Armistead Maupin's works.
- Forced Out of the Closet: when Anna goes to help her trans friends at the Compton's Cafeteria riot, her trans identity is discovered and revealed to the entire police force.
- Gay Personal Assistant: Mateo to DeDe.
- Gay Conservative: the Chrises and other guests at Harrison's dinner party are wealthy, white, and generally opposed to wokeness in all its forms.
- Gay Groom in a White Tux: averted. Both the grooms at Bryce and Donahue's wedding wear matching black tuxes.
- Girlfriend in Canada: when Anna won't let her trans friends meet Tommy, Ysela jokes that she's dating a ghost.
- Higher Understanding Through Drugs: Anna's attitude. When Mary Ann refuses a joint, saying she's just sobered up from day-drinking with DeDe, Anna says, "Being drunk is not the same as being high. One makes you stupid, the other makes you...interesting."
- Homosexual Reproduction: Jake's mother is eager for Jake and Margot to start a family. The way she talks about it implies that she thinks Jake is going to impregnate Margot himself, despite being no more capable of that now than he was before he transitioned.Margot: Where does she think queer babies come from?
- Idiot Ball: Claire says it doesn't matter what she did, because she can misrepresent what actually happened at Barbary Lane by editing her documentary to make her the hero. She says this in front of dozens of people who all turned up for a protest, including two popular social media influencers. Does she really think in 2019, nobody is filming this on their phone?
- If It's You, It's Okay: Margot is a lesbian. Period. But she loves Jake enough to be with him even after he came out and started transitioning.
- Jerkass Has a Point: Mary Ann abandoned Shawna and Brian, and the fact that Shawna wasn't her biological child is not an excuse. However, she is absolutely right that Brian should have told Shawna that she was adopted instead of letting her get to age 25 without having the slightest idea.
- Lady Looks Like a Dude: Or rather, "Lady Looks Like a Dude Who Looks Like a Lady". When Michael and Ben's would-be threesome partner sees Mary Ann come out of the bathroom unexpectedly, he snaps, "I specifically said in my ad, NO DRAG QUEENS!" and storms out without bothering to get dressed.
- Leatherman: Ben teases Michael about his fondness for men in leather.
- LGBT Awakening: Jake, having already come out as a lesbian and then a trans man before the start of the series, realizes he's attracted to men.
- Likes Older Women: Margot, apparently.
- Luxurious Liquor: DeDe serves Mary Ann $600-a-bottle wine during their day-drinking session at DeDe's mansion.
- May–December Romance: Michael and Ben are about twenty years apart, and the age gap is heightened by the relatively rapid progress of both the LGBTQ+ rights movement and treatment for HIV/AIDS in the 2000s and 2010s. Michael came of age at a time when being a gay man was far more highly stigmatized; he also discovered he was HIV+ before effective treatments were developed. As such he has a sense of his own mortality that Ben does not.
- Later in the series, Margot and DeDe.
- Mistaken for Gay: inverted. Mary Ann is surprised to learn that Sam is gay. Yes, he's a well-dressed, well-spoken older gentleman with a fondness for the arts, but she just thought he was English.
- More Diverse Sequel: while the earlier books and adaptations were groundbreaking in their depictions of queerness, they were extremely white. The 2019 series makes a greater effort to include people of colour.
- Naked People Are Funny: Ben and Michael arrange to have a threesome with a guy they met on a hookup app. The guy starts stripping down almost the second he walks in the door, only to be discovered by Mary Ann, who dropped by for an unexpected heart-to-heart with Michael, when she walks out of the bathroom.
- Oblivious Adoption: Shawna has no idea that Brian and Mary Ann aren't her biological parents.
- Out of the Closet, Into the Fire: what Anna worries will happen to her if her trans identity is discovered.
-
Queer Character, Queer Actor: while earlier adaptations tended to be looser about it, the 2019 adaptation makes an effort to cast actors of the same gender and sexuality as the character they're portraying. - Related Differently in the Adaptation: the books feature a pair of Asian-American fraternal twins, as does the miniseries. However, in the books they're DeDe's children, and in the miniseries they're a pair of wannabe influencers who convince her to take them in and document her life on Instagram.
- Shut Up, Hannibal!: Ida interrupting Claire's big speech during the Save Barbary Lane protest.
- The Stoner: almost every character uses pot at least occasionally, but the twins come the closest to embodying the spacy stereotype.
- Trans Equals Gay: Inverted. Jake's family are overwhelmingly accepting of his trans identity - because he's in a relationship with Margot, and they'd rather have a straight trans son than a cis lesbian daughter. Mrs. Rodriguez even says how happy she is that any potential future kids will grow up in a "normal" family with a mother and father.
- Trans Relationship Troubles: Margot identifies very much as a lesbian, and it troubles her to be in a relationship with a man and be perceived as straight. Jake, meanwhile, has started to become attracted to men as well and wants to experiment outside their relationship. It all blows up when Jake cheats on Margot with a guy and they break up.
- Twins Are Special: To Ani/Jen and Raven/Jonathan, their relationship with each other is more important than any other.
- Twofer Token Minority: Lampshaded with Mateo, DeDe's Deaf, gay, POC personal assistant.Mateo: I'm Deaf! You can't out-PC me!
- Watch It Stoned: When Anna is reading Howl (1955) in a park, she's approached by a hippie girl who offers her a joint and says, "If you haven't read Ginsberg high, you haven't read Ginsberg."
- When I Was Your Age...: A non-comedic example. Michael brings Ben to a dinner party where all the other guests are older and white as well as gay. When Ben calls one of them out for racist and transphobic language, using the word "privilege" in doing so, the other man comes back at him with this trope. When he was Ben's age, all his friends were dying of AIDS and no one in power cared, so in a sort of combination of Screw Politeness, I'm a Senior! and N-Word Privileges, he feels he has the right to use the word tr*nny around other gay men if he feels like it.
- Where Everybody Knows Your Flame: Body Politic.
