InsideBayArea.com – By Lucinda Ryan – Correspondent
The refurbished apartments at the former Lake Merritt Hotel in Oakland are now open for retirement living, though residents need not be retired to settle in. Nor do they need to be lesbian, gay, straight or transgender.
They need only to want to live in a diverse community within one building, a community modeled on author Armistead Maupin’s fictional series, “Tales of the City.”
Maupin’s characters all lived in a San Francisco apartment on Barbary Lane. It was a place where homosexuals and heterosexuals – young and not so young – built friendships and camaraderie and no lines were drawn on which lifestyle was acceptable. Everyone was accepted.