My Fabulous Disease: Chronicles of a Gay Survivor

By Mark S King

My Fabulous Disease: Chronicles of a Gay Survivor is an anthology spanning four decades - in turns emotional, biting and hilarious - from activist and writer Mark S. King.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mark S. King
• Release date: Sep 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9798987721414

Book preview

MY FABULOUS DISEASE

Chronicles of a Gay Survivor

Mark S. King

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Praise for

My Fabulous Disease: Chronicles of a Gay Survivor

"Start with queer attitude, add a spoonful of humor (camp and/or dark), and top it all off with a heart of gold, and you’ll still be missing some secret ingredients found in My Fabulous Disease. Mark’s writing is a diary of survival, and a beautiful example of giving back. I know his words have helped me over the years, and he has my thanks. Bon appétit!" —Peter Staley, activist and author, Never Silent: ACT UP and My Life in Activism

Four decades ago, Mark S. King began to chronicle his life with HIV/AIDS. His writings—occasionally shocking, often gentle, sometimes hilarious—have been a consistent voice of courage as he has evolved into one of the most thoughtful and articulate advocates for people living with HIV/AIDS today. —Cleve Jones, founder of the AIDS Memorial Quilt and author of When We Rise: My Life in the Movement

"If the AIDS pandemic had a Mark Twain, it would be Mark S. King. My Fabulous Disease chronicles his own odyssey navigating the epidemic, brilliantly telling our collective story with humor, pathos and humility." —Sean Strub, activist and author of Body Counts: A Memoir of Politics, Sex, AIDS and Survival

Mark S. King’s life is a roller coaster ride, and we’re with him through the ups and downs, holding on tight. It’s a gift he’s given us all these years: amazing stories that are sometimes hilarious, sometimes wrenching, sometimes enraging—and always powerful. He’s put himself out there, and the result is insightful writing that has inspired and empowered so many of us. —Michelangelo Signorile, SiriusXM radio host and author, It’s Not Over: Getting Beyond Tolerance, Defeating Homophobia, and Winning True Equality

Mark S. King is a Hero. And no, not because he is a survivor, or an AIDS activist, and no, not because he uses his life—every bit of it—to inspire others who struggle every single day. He is a Hero because he isn’t afraid to share his darkest moments, his deepest shame, his greatest victories. His scars. His wounds. His untamed, exuberant humor. —Amy Ferris, author of Mighty Gorgeous, A Small Book about Messy Love

"Mark S. King is one of our community’s most trusted and treasured storytellers. My Fabulous Disease reflects a deep passion for LGBTQ+ and HIV movement work, and the important struggle for visibility. He lovingly nudges us to tell our stories, raise hell, and own our narratives." —Charles Stephens, founder of Counter Narrative Project

"When I read the first draft of ‘The Sound of Stigma,’ Mark’s 2013 essay for POZ Magazine, I expected insightful commentary, which I got. What I didn’t expect was the emotional journey I had stumbled on. I cried—and it felt great. That essay remains as relevant today as ever. Do yourself a favor and let Mark S. King take you on a journey. You’ll be happy you did." —Oriol Gutierrez, Editor, POZ Magazine

Mark S. King is a determined AIDS activist, a bold sexual advocate, and a fabulous scamp. King has turned his personal chronicles into an important, scathing history of both a shattered and beloved LGBTQ community. You’d be a fool not to dive in. —Tom Viola, Executive Director, Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS

Living openly with ones HIV status is no small feat. It requires a strength that once found can never be taken away. This visibility holds such power that it opens doors, paves new paths, and inspires courage in others living with, or affected by, HIV to live their lives to the fullest. Mark S. King is one example of this kind of person who has found their strength and courage to live openly, honestly, and fully. —Javier Muñoz, Artist/Activist

Mark King is fabulous and then some. He is also compassionate, articulate, funny, sexy, passionate, heroic, straightforward, honest, and groovy. King delivers with genuine panache. Long live the King! —Michael Kearns, actor and founder of QueerWise

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My Fabulous Disease: Chronicles of a Gay Survivor.

Copyright © 2023 by Mark S. King

SMASHWORDS LICENSE STATEMENT

Thank you for downloading this ebook. This book remains the copyrighted property of the editor (with the individual contributors retaining copyright to their own work), and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy from their favorite authorized retailer. Thank you for your support.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For permission requests, contact [e-mail].

For privacy reasons, some names, locations, and dates may have been changed. Many of the essays in this collection have appeared, some differently titled or in slightly different form, in the following publications:

The Advocate, Equal Entertainment, Inc.: Outliving My Father, 2001.

The Body: The HIV/AIDS Resource, Remedy Health Media, LLC: HIV and Other Fantastic Prizes, Jan. 1, 1997.

Frontiers, previously published by Multimedia Platforms Worldwide: In My Humble, Closeted Opinion, April 18, 1997.

HIV Plus Magazine, Equal Entertainment, Inc.: Stop Bludgeoning Young Gay Men with Our AIDS Tragedy, November 21, 2013.

Mark S. King, A Place Like This. iUniverse, 2007: My Sad and Trivial Night with Rock Hudson.

Mark S. King, My Fabulous Disease. www.marksking.com [blog].

Positively Aware, the HIV Treatment Journal of TPAN [Chicago]: What Sex? June 2021.

POZ. Reprinted with permission. Copyright 2013-2022 CDM Publishing, LLC: The Sound of Stigma, June 2013; Surviving Life Itself, June 2015; The Truth About the 7,000, April/May 2018; What Makes an Activist? March 2022.

Shades of Blue: Writers on Depression, Suicide, and Feeling Blue. Edited by Amy Ferris. Seal Press, 2015: Suicide: A Love Story.

South Florida Gay News. Norm Kent, publisher: Once, When We Were Heroes, 2007.

Southern Voice, previously published by Window Media: Lessons Learned from Kissing a Straight Boy, 2007.

Unsafe Words: Queering Consent in the #MeToo Era. Edited by Shantel Gabrieal Buggs and Trevor Hoppe. Rutgers University Press, 2023. Was I a Teenage Sexual Predator?

The Washington Blade. Brown Naff Pitts Omnimedia, Inc.: Hurting Mom on My First Gay Christmas, 1998; I Love Monsters. January 23, 1998.

Cover design by Andy Reynolds Graphic Design LLC

Front cover portrait by Jonathan Timmes

Back cover portrait by Mark S. King

Edited by Elaine King

Research by Lynne Rhys

ISBN: 979-8-9877214-0-7 (Paperback)

ISBN: 979-8-9877214-1-4 (Kindle)

Printed in the United States of America

First printing September 2023

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023903805

Visit https://marksking.com

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For Michael, of course.

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Contents

Foreword by Greg Louganis

Introduction

Part I: My Fabulous Disease

HIV and Other Fantastic Prizes

Once, When We Were Heroes

Surviving Life Itself

The Sound of Stigma

The Fabulous Wizard of POZ

The Charlie Sheen Moment You Probably Missed

The Man Who Buried Them Remembers

Stop Bludgeoning Young Gay Men with Our AIDS Tragedy

Your Mother Liked It Bareback

How the Denver Principles Changed Healthcare Forever

The Night Miss America Met the Biggest Star in the World

Suicide Bombers

Will HIV Ever Be Safe Enough for You?

Finding a Pain of My Very Own

As Timothy Dies, a Great Love Endures

What Makes an Activist?

The Truth About the 7,000

Shopping at the Mall with Larry Kramer

Part II: My Prodigious Sex Life

Was I a Teenage Sexual Predator?

Probing My Anal Phobia

The Stupid Question

My Sad and Trivial Night with Rock Hudson

My Gonorrhea Nostalgia

One Night with the Gay Man Who Slept with Thousands

What Sex?

Part III: My Phenomenal Family

I Am the Man My Father Built

The Fog of a Thousand Years

I Discovered My Brother was Gay in The Advocate Magazine

Suicide: A Love Story

Hurting Mom on My First Gay Christmas

Outliving My Father

Did I Abandon Family for Gay Community?

I Love Monsters

Asking for What You Want

Part IV: My Glorious Addiction

My Muscles, My Disease

The Terrifying Crystal Meth Story I Have Never Told

The Crystal Meth Connection of the Gay Porn Killer

The Night Don Lemon Hugged Me

The Long Road Home from Relapse

What Became of the Happy Hustler?

Part V:  My Staggering Homosexuality

In My Humble, Closeted Opinion

Coming Out with Donna Summer

The Twilight of the Redhead

Shame is a Drag

Secrets of the Masturbatory Gay Male

Examining Death, Including the One I Caused

Lessons Learned from Kissing a Straight Boy

Carlton’s Dangerous Denial

The Inconvenience of Queer Activism

Is Dawson’s 20 Load Weekend the Most Influential Gay Porn Ever Made?

Blame the Fire Island Gays for COVID

I Am Racist and That’s a Good Place to Start

On Milford, and Finding Home Again

The Odds of Love

Acknowledgments

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Foreword

When Mark reached out to ask if I’d consider writing the foreword for this book, I was deeply touched. He has been writing honestly and in real time about living with HIV over the span of four decades, beginning not long after he was diagnosed in 1985. As long-term HIV survivors we share so much, including gratitude and resilience. Also, there’s a joy for the life we’re able to live now and a reverence for our ability to survive the trauma of the darkest days.

When I first was diagnosed, I felt I had to hide it from the world, aside from my closest friends and family. There was so much we didn’t know about the disease and a plethora of misinformation. It was a difficult time to not feel judged. Stigma surrounding the disease was hard to endure, and we questioned if we would ever find happiness or love. Thankfully, so much has changed, but we still have a way to go.

I applaud Mark’s courage in making such a bold contribution to our history. Mark’s writing presents people living with HIV as the multi-dimensional people we are, who fall in love, crack jokes, have sexual misadventures, and be funny and thoughtful—and sometimes not so thoughtful. Because, after all, we are human.

This is what I love about Mark’s writing: We see a complete, authentic perspective on both the mundane and the ridiculous moments that make up a life. HIV is only part of our lives and Mark knows this and shares it, moving beyond HIV to include essays about gay life, his recovery from addiction and more.

Sharing stories helps you heal and helps the people you share them with. Having been in my own downward spiral due to depression, I understand the struggles with this deeply.  So many LGBTQ people are affected by alcohol and drug misuse, addiction and other mental health issues. In the most challenging moments it always helps to know you are not alone. Mark’s writing reminds the reader of this simple but important fact. We are definitely not alone.

In my Samoan heritage we have Talk Story as a way for elders to share wisdom with younger generations. Mark’s willingness to be bold and speak his truth reminds me of this, as well as my own journey. HIV disclosure is a challenge for anyone, so it’s inspiring for people living with HIV to recognize themselves in the stories and transparency of others.

I think our real legacy is about inspiring people. When our time here ends, none of us ever really know all the lives we’ve touched. My mother always told me, and I live by this: Make everywhere you go better because you were there. That’s just one of the many pieces of wisdom I carry with me from her. Mark’s legacy will include this book and all of the writing he has yet to do. By sharing his thoughts and stories he is preserving history and inspiring other people to embrace life—the mundane and the ridiculous.

Mark’s book is as likely to make you laugh as it is to make you cry, sometimes in the same essay. Just like life itself.

Greg Louganis

Actor, Author and Olympic Gold Medalist

***

Introduction

Early in our relationship, I took my husband Michael home to Louisiana to meet my family. I gave him a single warning beforehand. I’m not the worst one, I said.

As soon as we arrived in town we went to my sister Nancy’s house for a cozy dinner so the folks could begin to get to know him. Twenty people showed up.

They swarmed around Michael, burying him in a barrage of questions and compliments and ohmygod how did you meet? while we all ate standing up and they traded well-rehearsed, hysterically humiliating stories about me.

This, as was often the case, transmogrified into stories about the whole family, the hilarious and the profane, classics presented with theatrical relish, begun by one of us and passed off to another, or snatched away from the teller with shouts of, No! You’re not telling it right! Let me!

Poor Michael. At one point during the brief visit home, which was bliss to me and exhausting to Michael, he asked me if we could borrow a car to run an errand. Where do we need to go? I asked. His eyes betrayed a weary panic. Anywhere, he replied.

I come from a family of storytellers, that’s my point.

After testing HIV positive in March of 1985, I couldn’t imagine being alive long enough to tell many more stories, much less those about living happily for decades with HIV or my sexual misadventures or my entertaining (and patient) family or what it’s like for this queer man to face middle age with fortitude and joy. Yet here we are.

The fact that I didn’t die a generation ago is a complete mystery to me. Life is random. Many, many people who inspired me and did all the right things died just as fast as the ones who gave up the minute they were diagnosed with HIV. I stopped trying to understand why a long time ago.

What I never stopped doing, through it all, is writing. The process became a settling of my mind, a meditation of keystrokes in a quiet apartment, a way to sort out this particular life’s riddles and comedies and discomforts. Early on, my editor at TheBody.com, Bonnie Goldman, urged me along with a constant refrain: tell the truth. Don’t smooth it over or glamorize it or make yourself appear smarter or better equipped than you actually are.

The essays in this book, collected from websites and LGBTQ newspapers and my blog over the span of four decades, represents my best attempts to follow that editor’s advice.

We all have our stories. Yours are just as valuable as mine, my friend. If you are living with HIV or LGBTQ or marginalized in one way or another, your story is critical to a through-line of history that must include us all. My sincere hope is that you find the strength, courage and platform to have your say.

As for me, I’ll keep on writing and speaking up, standing on the shoulders of so many LGBTQ storytellers before me. I’ve taken up the torch within these pages, and surely, over time, there are others who will add to it, perhaps change or correct it, and then tell the story their way. Maybe they will even tell it better.

That’s fine. I’m used to it.

Mark

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PART I

My Fabulous Disease

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HIV and Other Fantastic Prizes

In 1980, when I was nineteen years old, I vacationed in Los Angeles and won a car on the game show The Price is Right.

I have a video of the entire episode and it gets trotted out and viewed from time to time. On the tape I’m impossibly cute, with a tall lean body and a freckled face. There is bright orange hair on my head, blown dry to late-70s perfection and parted in the middle between two feathered, astoundingly symmetrical sides.

Portions of my Price is Right Story are deeply ingrained from repeated tellings, as frozen in my delivery as they are on that old Betamax video tape. Hearing announcer Johnny Olson shouting Mark King! Come on down! and galloping down the ramp to bidding stations in front of the stage, jumping up and down, my sprayed hair jolted above me in two clumps, floating back down to my head like snapping an orange sheet over a bed and watching it descend.

Or when I won the very first prize that came up for bids, an Amana Range. And to the winner of that range goes, I can hear Johnny Olson saying, Kentucky Fried Chicken in an insulated tote bag. It’s so nice to feel so good about a meal!

And the original retail price of that range is ... six hundred and eighty-nine dollars and Mark, you’ve won it! Come on up here! Bob Barker declares, and I scramble up for a chat with Bob. Bob asks me where I’m from and I tell him I’m a college student. Really? What year? he asks. I say I’m a senior—a lie, I was a sophomore, but couldn’t have told you my middle name at that point—and say that I’ll go right on to graduate school to get a masters in Arts Management.

Today when I see the tape, I want to wipe the idyllic grin off that skinny boy’s face and correct the error I made all those years ago. I had it all wrong. Well Bob, I would say instead, "I’ll move here to Los Angeles and go on to watch some friends die horribly of a disease we haven’t even heard of yet. Then I’ll struggle with drug addiction and spend years searching for life’s greater meaning. You guys have anything up for bids that might help me with that?"

But back to reality or, at least, The Price is Right.

Johnny Olsen announces what I just might win—a shiny new 1981 Pontiac Coupe! The audience absolutely screeches, and the camera flashes to my lover Charlie whistling with his fingers in his mouth, wearing the same jeans and t-shirt as myself. We were in that early, wearing-matching-outfits stage of our relationship. Every choice I pondered during the game would feature a shot of Charlie squirming in his seat, fraught with excitement and looking every bit the handsome boyfriend.

On stage, Bob inspected the car with me. Just look at these wire wheel covers there, Mark. Say, tell me, he asked as he put the microphone to my lips, do you have a girlfriend back home?

No, Bob. But your camera