‘I thought we were going to make history with our same sex kiss. And we did. There were protests all over America – and a bomb threat in Chattanooga’

Armistead Maupin, author and executive producer of the Channel 4 series

I wrote Tales of the City for the San Francisco Chronicle. It then mushroomed from one novel into a series of nine. To say my parents didn’t like them would be an understatement. When Tales came out in 1978, they wrote to me: “Read Tales of the City today; moving to Zanzibar tomorrow.” There were a lot of gay characters in Tales, that was kind of the point, but my books were never prurient.