All Other Video Postings
Dab Garner’s 30 year story of survival.
Tuesday, June 28th, 2011
Storytelling is a crucial part of our culture, and not simply for entertainment value. Sharing our stories can heal our pain, educate others, and help us relive our happiest triumphs.
This video is quite simple, really. One man explains to you what happened to him, from becoming one of the first AIDS patients in San Francisco to his life today in the service of others with HIV. Dab Garner has clearly put things into perspective, and his calm manner shows a man at peace with his fate, his survival, and the ghosts around him.
It’s an amazing story, actually. And considering the importance of passing our history down to younger people, it might not be a bad idea to share this video with someone you know, maybe even someone under 35 years old.
But for now, let’s allow Dab Garner to simply speak for himself.
Thanks for watching, and please be well.
Mark
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PLUS…
The latest volley in the debate among prevention advocates regarding “test and treat” is an interesting article by AIDS Healthcare Foundation consultant James Driscoll. His Washington Post piece, “HIV Treatment can be HIV prevention,” urges more access to medications and better funding for programs like the AIDS Drug Assistance Program. Driscoll is convinced that we can get a handle on the epidemic through increased testing and by treating those who test positive. As he writes: “Science has proven what many at the people doing primary care and others at the forefront of the epidemic have long suspected: HIV treatment is remarkably effective HIV prevention. A recent study from the National Institutes of Health has shown that treating HIV patients with antiviral drugs makes them 96 percent less likely to pass on the virus.”
Tags: aids, culture
Posted in All Other Video Postings, Living with HIV/AIDS, My Fabulous Disease, News | 8 Comments »
How one Mom handles HIV/AIDS in the family.
Thursday, May 5th, 2011
God could not be everywhere, so he created mothers.
~Jewish Proverb
My mother raised six children, topping off this great achievement with yours truly. Yes, I’m the youngest, which explains a lot, but not all. To understand the rest, you’d have to know the woman. Or, perhaps, simply be a mother yourself.
Mom was there for her kids during the years my father spent in far flung corners of the world flying B-52′s as a pilot in the Air Force for more than thirty years. Mom had to be all things: nurturer, disciplinarian, confessor, judge and jury. She was the parental constant, and she performed it all admirably (and stylishly, if you ask me).
Once I was old enough to safely get home from school on my own, Mom went back to school herself. To everyone’s surprise but hers, she got a Master’s Degree — even spending a semester at Oxford — before starting a prestigious career as head of Louisiana State University’s library. She has since retired but could easily keep a smirk on her face for the rest of her life for all of those poor fools who, like me, thought her talents stretched as far as PTA meetings but not much further.
In 1985, she approached the news of my HIV status with the same pragmatic resolve as her career. She studied up, listened when I needed to talk about it, and traveled to Los Angeles to join me for a weekend educational retreat for people with HIV/AIDS and their allies. I’ll never forget her attending a breakout session on safer sex and then catching up with me to say, “Mark, explain rimming.”
Her life has been the kind of roller coaster you might expect for a woman who has raised six kids, seen a few wars, and watched two gay sons negotiate the AIDS epidemic.
There are questions I have always wanted to ask Mom about finding out about my HIV status during the darkest years of the pandemic, and how it felt for her to go through a family AIDS tragedy. In my video interview with her (above) from last year, she never flinches at the questions.
This Mother’s Day, I hope you are fortunate to have a supportive mother to call or remember fondly. Thank God, mine is not unique in her capacity to empathize or love unconditionally.
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PLUS…
Exactly 21 years ago today, my friend Jonny Wood (right) tested HIV positive. Like many of us, he has channeled his gratitude for his good health by giving back to his community, and next weekend Jonny will participate in the grueling AIDS Ride to raise funds for the Emory Vaccine Center. You know I never hit you up for donations, but if you can afford even a modest contribution, his official web page for his AIDS Ride makes it really easy and secure to donate. No donation is too small, my friends. Isn’t it amazing that so many of us who lived through the dawn of this epidemic are not only still walking and talking, but riding their bikes for hundreds of miles in hopes of finding an effective vaccine? You go, Jonny.
Larry Kramer‘s searing indictment of society’s response to AIDS in its early years, The Normal Heart, is back on Broadway and just racked up five Tony Award nominations, including for Ellen Barkin (right). “Powerful” hardly describes this primal scream of a play, and its fitting that this 1985 masterpiece has been remounted as we commemorate 30 years of the epidemic and as our community commitment to AIDS continues to be diluted by time and treatment advances.
As always, my friends, please be well.
Tags: aids, family, gay, gratitude, help others, recovery, research
Posted in All Other Video Postings, Family and Friends, Living with HIV/AIDS, My Fabulous Disease | 6 Comments »
My Fabulous Disease: The Top Ten Postings of Year One
Tuesday, February 22nd, 2011
“The suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.”
– Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Ernest
How was this judged, exactly? I was afraid you might ask. Not on the number of hits or any formal voting procedure. I relied purely on feedback received through the year and from posted comments, but mostly, umm, I picked my favorites. So there.
presented in reverse order
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#10. The Wisdom of Youth at AIDS2010. My skills (and physical stamina) were sorely tested when TheBody.com sent me to Vienna for the 2010 International AIDS Conference. Every day was a sprint around the massive conference center in search of stories that inspired or amused me. In this episode, I was blown away by a collection of teenage (!) activists from around the globe who gave a press conference and then chatted with me (try being nineteen and an HIV advocate in Afghanistan). Then I interviewed an actual muppet with No Strings, a program that uses puppetry to communicate with African children about AIDS, transmission, and grief. Awesome.
#9. The Real Poz Guys of Atlanta. Nothing has been more important to my long term sanity and well-being than the support of friends, so I decided to let you meet a few of them in this ongoing series of videos. In this, our second get together, my friends Craig, James, Antron and Eric and I (all of us are living with HIV) bake brownies — recipe included in the post! — and dish about our HIV, doctors, families and love lives. To top it off we all engage in some surprisingly moving “show ‘n tell,” by bringing things to our dinner that represent something about life with HIV. If you need to feel the love of friends right now, check this out.
#8. Locker 32, your room is ready… to be hosed and sanitized. Okay, so here’s my bawdy comedy side, in a farewell essay to the gay baths. In my former, youthful and/or drug fueled days, I was a staple in such establishments, and the value of how one looked sauntering about in a towel was a misguided priority that, frankly, I’m still working to shake from my world view. But there’s no such depth in this funny essay, just a final look at the baths on my very last visit, or as the piece begins, “the last time I went to the baths… I stepped in poop.” Hold your nose, and enjoy!
#7. The Price is Right, thirty years after coming on down. “When I was 19 years old, I vacationed to Los Angeles and won a car on The Price is Right.” So begins my book “A Place Like This,” my first-person account of my years in Hollywood in the 1980′s. I use the game show story to reflect on the young man I was and what dreams I had, while AIDS looms in the near distance ready to wreck the plans of a generation. I’ve always liked this as its own essay, though, and thought it would be fun to include the actual footage of my winning the car, so the reader can watch the little story come to life.
#6. My T-cells Could Use a Facelift. I’ve probably posted the heart and soul right out of this poor video, using it more than once this year, but it remains a favorite of mine because it strikes the heart of my issues as a gay man, a man with HIV, and an aging one at that. We’re the guys that can still remember being youthful but we just don’t quite hack it in the cruise clubs anymore. I know I shouldn’t miss it, and yet… The video also lets me show off my butt pads and discuss my not-so-subtle tactics to avoid growing up. Maturity is hard won in my household, my friends.
#5. A Facial Wasting Update. This is when I realized the real potential of my little digital camera: when Dr. Gerald Pierone agreed to let me film our consultation about my facial wasting (lipoatrophy), and the procedure to remedy it. This episode is actually our second video together, when I returned for a follow-up treatment — it reviews footage from the first visit but also gives a more accurate look at the treatment results. At the end of the first episode, I was so pleased with my new face that I shot my closing with such bright light I looked like I was voguing in a Madonna video. I don’t make that mistake again.
#4. I am the man my father built. Why are there passages in our life that we return to, again and again, those milestones that shape us and serve as references points our entire lives? Camping in the woods would seem an unmemorable scenario for a young gay boy like me (behold my pubescent self, right, in repose). Dad wasn’t trying to butch me up, he simply reveled in being different, like pitching a clear plastic tent when all the other fathers and sons on the campout had normal ones. But every time dad instilled in me the value of being different (“that’s the beauty of it,” was his most common exclamation), he was preparing his son for the world in a way he never imagined. A love letter to my dad, and I hope you’ll read it.
#3. Examining death, including the one I caused. To be honest, I thought I was doing my ex-partner Chris Glaser a favor by reviewing his most recent book. But that blithe arrogance evaporated when I read his elegant book about death, “The Final Deadline.” Chris devotes chapters to manners of death and their lessons for the living, and to my surprise includes one about the death of our relationship and there, suddenly and in black and white, was the wreckage of a romance, and the crushing hurt I had caused when I chose my escalating drug addiction over my partner. Reading this book would enlighten anyone, but no one more than me. Chris’ capacity for forgiveness and finding teachable moments is more beautifully rendered in his book than anything I might conjure.
#2. Once, When We Were Heroes. Another one I’ve posted to death — the video version has been on my main page for ages — but it’s as if I’m afraid I’ll never write something quite like it again. It sprang from my observations about so many of us that lived through the horror of the 1980′s and how mundane our lives are today. So many of us were called upon to do courageous things, or withstand terrible grief, and today we’re shopping at Macy’s and planning brunch. Which is a miracle and perfectly allowed, of course. It just makes me realize that you can never know what the man on the treadmill at the gym might have once withstood, or how resilient our own spirits are, when we once thought they might never survive.
#1. The Day Larry Kramer Dissed Me. Pure whimsy, no doubt about it, and the funniest part of this fictional account of a disastrous trip to the mall with Larry Kramer was how many people didn’t know I made the damn thing up. Not until they read the footnote. Reactions were all over the place: how dare I ridicule an icon, they wanted to know. I would be dead if it were not for him, they wailed. And “this is hilarious, please do HRC next!” I have not had the honor of meeting Larry Kramer but idolize him as an activist and as a writer. And if my “six degrees of Larry Kramer” friends are telling the truth, the man himself got the joke and liked it (and even left a posted comment for all to see).
Honorable mentions: My provocative chat with activist and POZ Magazine founder Sean Strub, “Five Things About HIV They’re Not Telling You,” had prevention advocates either impressed or aghast, and that’s a good thing. My favorite little video was the Gay Pride PSA That Will Never Air, which begins with funny stories before it punches you in the gut with a message about drug addiction. And speaking of addiction, there’s a precious vision of recovery is in the simple essay “A Dance to an Atlanta Night,” in which I enjoy some simple pleasures with friends who have seen me at my worst.
I feel like I’m hitting my stride. Thanks to all of you for your words of encouragement, and I mean that. This has been an awesome adventure because of you. As always, please be well.
Mark
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I hope you will consider “sharing” this via the buttons below with anyone who might enjoy an introduction to the blog. I love reaching new readers. Thanks.
Tags: A Place Like This, acting, Aging, aids, barebacking, culture, drag, family, gay, help others, hiv, lipo, meth, physician, politics, recovery, Recreation, serosorting, Sexuality
Posted in All Other Video Postings, Books and Writings, Family and Friends, Gay Life, Living with HIV/AIDS, Meth and Recovery, My Fabulous Disease, News, Prevention and Policy | 2 Comments »
Recovering Joy
Tuesday, December 14th, 2010
“Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea. Joy to you and me.†– Hoyt Axton
If you have spent any time wandering around this blog or watching my videos, you know I have an almost stubbornly positive view of things. I like to smile, I love to laugh, and if someone is rude to me I figure they must be having a bad day.
Kinda sickening, isn’t it? There’s nothing worse than someone like me standing around when you’re pissed off about something. And I realize that my insistence on being happy can be my own, clever sense of denial. It could actually prevent me from seeing things clearly in times of real trouble.
Life has a way of foiling attitudes like mine, of course. Between watching AIDS emerge twenty-five years ago and then my drug addiction during the last decade, I’ve known pain and hopelessness. So, when my first sponsor in recovery asked what I wanted for myself, I said “I want to have joy again.†It seemed like such a distant goal at the time.
Thank God for you – yes you, sitting there reading this – because this blog has helped me regain a sense of purpose that I never thought I would get back. Your support and comments since I launched this blog just ten months ago have encouraged me more than you will know. I feel like I have my voice again, that I am making a contribution. I am filled with joy today.
Let me share some of that joy with you. Above, you’ll find a special reading of “Twas the Night Before Christmas†by my alter ego Anita Mann (her rendition takes you places you never thought this story could go, trust me).
The video was recorded at a fundraiser for GLBT folks recovering from addiction. It has a message that applies to us all, and it’s pretty funny. And come on, now… when was the last time someone read you this classic tale? Now is the time, so relax and enjoy.
As Anita says during her reading, “…we all have gifts in our bag.†Thanks for the gifts you have given me this year, my friends, and here’s to a wondrous, healthy year ahead.
Joy to you, to me, and to the world,
Mark
(I have added a new “share†feature†below, so you may now share this post with your friends via Facebook or Twitter, etc. with one click. I hope you will!)
Tags: culture, drag, gay, gratitude, help others, recovery
Posted in All Other Video Postings, Anita Mann and Acting Gigs, Gay Life, Meth and Recovery, My Fabulous Disease | 8 Comments »
Once, When We Were Heroes.
Sunday, November 28th, 2010
My brother Richard smiles a lot. He has an easy laugh. But there was a time, years ago, when he held a poisonous drink in his hands and begged his dying lover not to swallow it. A time when Richard held the concoction they had prepared together and wept.
Emil couldn’t wait. He took the drink from Richard quickly, because the release it offered was something more rapturous than the appeals of his lover of thirteen years.
It was Emil’s wish to die on his own terms if living became unbearable, a promise made one to the other. When that time arrived, however, Richard wanted another moment, just a little more time to say, “I love you, Emil,†over and over again, before the drink would close Emil’s eyes and quietly kill him.
Richard has a charming store in my hometown today, where he sells collectibles and does theater in his free time. The drink was consumed over twenty years ago.
There were people who displayed remarkable courage then. People who lived and died by their promises and shared the intimacy of death, and then the world moved forward and grief subsided and lives moved on. But make no mistake, there are heroes among us right now.
There is a shy, friendly man at my gym. There was a time when his sick roommate deliberately overdosed after his father told him that people with unspeakable diseases will suffer in hell. My gym friend performed CPR for an hour before help arrived, but the body never heard a loving word again.
There is courage among us, astonishing courage, and we summoned it and survived. And then years passed. We got new jobs and changed gyms.
There was a time when old friends called to say goodbye, and by “goodbye†they meant forever. When all of us had a file folder marked “Memorial†that outlined how we wanted our service to be conducted. When people shot themselves and jumped off bridges after getting their test results.
There is profound, shocking sadness here, right here among us, but years went by and medicine got better and we found other lives to lead. Our sadness is a distant, dark dream.
My best friend Stephen just bought a new condo. He’s having a ball picking out furniture. But there was a time when he knew all the intensive care nurses by name. When a phone call late at night always meant someone had died. And just who, exactly, was anyone’s guess.
Stephen tested positive in the 1980s, shortly after I did. A few months after the devastating news, he agreed to facilitate a support group with me. We regularly saw men join the group, get sick and die, often within weeks.
Watching them disintegrate felt like a preview of coming attractions. But Stephen was remarkable, a reassuring presence to everyone, and worked with the group for more than a year despite the emotional toll and the high body count.
There is bravery here, still, living all around us. But the bravest time was many years ago, and times change and the yard needs landscaping and there’s a brunch tomorrow.
There was a time when I sat beside friends in their very last minutes of life, and I helped them relax, perhaps surrender, and told them comforting stories. And lied to them.
Jeremy lost his mind weeks before he died. Sometimes he had moments of sanity, when we could have a coherent conversation before his dementia engulfed him again. It was a time when you were given masks and gloves to visit friends in the hospital.
He was agitated with the business of dying, and told me he couldn’t bear to miss what might happen after he’d gone. I had an idea.
“I tell you what,†I offered, “I’m from the future, and I can tell you anything you would like to know.â€
“OK then, what happens to my parents?†he asked. I thought it might be a distracting game, but Jeremy’s confused mind took it very seriously.
“They went to Hollywood and won big on a game show, so they never did need your support in their old age,†I answered. He barely took the time to enjoy this thought before his hand grabbed my wrist, tightly, almost frantically. He pulled me closer.
“When …†he began, and a mournful sob swelled inside him in an instant, his eyes begging for relief. “When does this end?†There was an awful, helpless silence. His eyes beckoned for a truth he could die believing.
“It does end,†I finally managed, although nothing suggested it would. “It ends, Jeremy, but not for a really long time.†He digested each word like a revelation, and slowly relaxed into sleep.
There is compassion here, enough for all the world’s deities and saints acting in concert. Infinite compassion for men who lived in fear and checked every spot when they showered for Kaposi sarcoma, and for disowned sons wasting away in the guest room of whoever had the space. But we get older, and friends don’t ask us to hold their hand when they stop breathing, and the fear fades and I bought new leather loafers and the White Party is coming.
The truth is simply this, and no one will convince me otherwise: My most courageous self, the best man that I’ll ever be, lived more than two decades ago during the first years of a horrific plague.
He worked relentlessly alongside a million others who had no choice but to act. He secretly prayed to survive, even above the lives of others, and his horrible prayer was answered with the death of nearly everyone close to him.
To say I miss that brutal decade would only be partially true. I miss the man I was forced to become, when an entire community abandoned tea dances for town hall meetings, when I learned to offer help to those facing what terrified me most.
Today, the lives of those of us who witnessed the horror have become relatively normal again, perhaps mundane. We prefer it. We have new lives in a world that isn’t choking on disease.
But once, there was a time when we were heroes.
(I was honored to receive an award from the National Gay and Lesbian Journalists Association for this piece in 2007, which has been revised to commemorate World AIDS Day. I produced the accompanying video a few days ago — think of it as a “DVD Extra.” Feel free to share this with friends (I’m trying to introduce my blog to new people, if you can help with that). Here’s to a joyous and healthy holiday season for us all. — Mark)
Tags: aids, culture, gratitude, hiv, politics
Posted in All Other Video Postings, Books and Writings, Family and Friends, Living with HIV/AIDS, My Fabulous Disease, News | 33 Comments »
My mega-blog week with The Bilerico Project
Tuesday, November 16th, 2010
This week I am honored to be a “guest host” for The Bilerico Project, the leading online blogging salon for GLBT commentary, politics and culture. My job is to contribute three times a day and get out of my HIV rut! I’m having fun with pop culture topics you don’t normally see around here (although my most discussed posting so far is about the tension between HIV positive and negative gay men, and it has managed to piss off both).
Here’s a collection of the postings so far for the week. You can always post a comment here, or feel free to leave one at the posts’ Bilerico location. Any friend of mine is a friend of theirs.
The Critic’s Foyer. When Gene Shalit announced he was leaving The Today Show after 40 years of reviewing movies, somebody had to take the job, right? With apologies to Mr. Shalit’s “The Critic’s Corner,” here is my gay, snarky, snappy review of recent movies. This was a fun video to produce!
Jocks are Sexy. Straps are Silly. Jockstraps are a costume, like wearing a harness to a leather bar. Right? I consider the topic oh-so-carefully and provide some history of the garment. At least finding the pictures to use with this post was fun.
Positive vs. Negative: The Truce is Broken. My post about “the tense truce between HIV positive and HIV negative gay men” got me in some hot water (wait until you read the passionate comments!). I wrote about the angry responses I received to my video that praised HIV negative gay men, saying that a nerve had been struck that dealt with buried resentments between positive and negative. Some readers, though, just thought I came across as sarcastic in the video, and it was my style that ruined the substance.
Dancing Away the Sins of the Mother. The series Dancing with the Stars has a way of showing you a celebrity as you’ve never seen them before or, as in the case of Bristol Palin, allowing us to see her humanity and gumption and forget for a moment who the hell her mother is. Bristol has grown on me, and challenged my tendency to demonize opponents — and even by extension, their kids. Bristol’s future on the show doesn’t matter. She’s already done something amazing.
The Top 5 Most Adorable Animal Videos. It’s shameful how spoiled my three dogs are. Thank God my partner is worse about it than I am. So you can imagine how much fun it was for me to research and then create this list. Warning to cat lovers: the list is dog heavy, but a few cute kitties make the grade.
The week is still unfolding; I’ll check back with more Bilerico posts later. Coming up next week: a great new video episode, wherein HIV exercise and nutrition expert Nelson Vergel takes me to the gym, cleans out my fridge, and lectures me about white bread.
Tags: Aging, aids, culture, family, gay, gratitude, hiv, lipo, meth, recovery, Recreation, serosorting, Sexuality
Posted in All Other Video Postings, Books and Writings, Family and Friends, Gay Life, Living with HIV/AIDS, My Fabulous Disease, News, Prevention and Policy | 3 Comments »
The Price is Right, 30 years after coming on down
Monday, October 18th, 2010
When I was nineteen years old, I vacationed to Los Angeles and won a car on “The Price is Right.â€
In the following years, if I really liked you and wanted to impress you — or give you a small, wacky glimpse of my life — then at some juncture I’d say “So hey, have you ever been to Los Angeles?†Or, “Did I ever tell you about the car?â€
It was a long time ago. Thirty years. I have a videotape of the entire episode and it gets trotted out and viewed from time to time. Well, maybe not as much anymore.
Year after year I’ve seen that video and find myself pulling farther away from the image on my television screen — the oldest tape I have of myself on TV, although, make no mistake about it, I have many.
On the tape I’m impossibly cute, with a tall lean body and a freckled face straight out of Howdy Doody’s Peanut Gallery. There is bright orange hair on my head, blown dry to late-70’s perfection and parted in the middle between two feathered, astoundingly symmetrical sides.
Anyway, here’s the “Price is Right†story.
It’s Spring 1980. My lover Charley and I are visiting my old college friend Charles, who lives in Los Angeles. Charles takes us to CBS studios for a tour, but once there we find out they don’t give them anymore. But we can go wait in line for “The Price is Right†if we want to, the lady says. Why not? A live game show taping. Cool.
We stand in line and this producer comes by with an assistant in tow, and he’s chatting with everybody in the line. One by one. And the assistant is taking careful notes. Get it? They’re picking contestants. So the producer gets to me and whereas everybody’s been kind of shy and polite and maybe a little perky, I grab his hand and shake as hard as I can and just about bust a gut beaming, saying “Hi there, I’m Mark King and I drove all the way from New Orleans Louisiana just to be on this show!â€
I watch TV. Everybody knows what they’re looking for.
Portions of The Price is Right Story are deeply ingrained, as frozen in my delivery as they are on that old Betamax video tape. Hearing Johnny Olsen 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 feathered clumps, lazily 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 Olsen saying, “Kentucky Fried Chicken in an insulated tote bag. It’s so nice to feel so good about a meal!â€
“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 that holds no memory or recollection, just what I’ve seen on the tape, because I truly had no idea what the man was saying, such was my shock. But I nod and grin in the right places.
Bob asks me where I’m from and I tell him I’m a student at the University of New Orleans. 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.â€
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 years ago. I had it all wrong. “Well Bob,†I would say instead, “I’ll finish college through the mail after I move here to Los Angeles and work for a heroin-addicted mail order sleaze bag. Then I hope to make it big as a sexual entrepreneur.†“That’s marvelous!†Bob would then reply, “A prostitute perhaps?â€
The cameras would turn to the audience, all of them glued to the monitors and nodding expectantly. “Aw, you flatter me, Bob. Seriously, I was thinking I’d be good at getting people off over the phone.†Bob’s most winning game show host smile would appear. “What a talented young man!†he would say with fatherly pride. The APPLAUSE light would flash again and again. The audience would react like stadium fans witnessing a touchdown. “There’s even more, Bob. I’ll go on to watch some friends die horribly of a disease we haven’t even heard of yet, fight my drug addiction, and then spend years searching for life’s greater meaning. You have anything up for bids that might help me with that?â€
But back to reality — or, at least, “The Price is Right.â€
Bob stops talking for a second and Johnny Olsen announces what I just might win—a shiny new Pontiac Coupe! The audience absolutely screeches, and the camera flashes to my lover Charley whistling with his fingers in his mouth, wearing exactly the same jeans and red t-shirt as myself. We were in that early, wearing-matching-outfits stage of our relationship.
On stage, Bob inspected the car with me before the game began. “Just look at these wire wheel covers here, Mark. Say tell me,†he questioned as he put the microphone to my lips, “do you have a girlfriend back home?†No, Bob. But your camera man must adore my homosexual lover because he’s given him every reaction shot since I stepped up here.
“Aw, several!†I offered with a laugh and an adorable but practiced shrug. “Well, you’ll have several more if you win this one!†Bob said. The game was something called “Lucky Seven†and Charley screamed out every last thing for me to say and do, which was a great help since I didn’t understand what the hell was going on. After going step by step through the game, with tension building and Bob reminding me how close I was to winning every three seconds, I get to the last question. After Charley’s prompting I give the winning answer, the audience goes nuts, and the camera man goes to Charley for even more shots as he explodes from his chair and waves his hands and dances about. “You’ve won that car!†Bob shouts. If I had won a fur coat Charley would’ve jumped to the stage and thrown it on, so help me.
I furiously shake Bob Barker’s hand and notice how much make-up he has on. Thick, like a paste. And his hair dye has left a brown stain across his hairline. He introduces the first sponsor while the camera returns to me, beaming, all shocked and happy. I pick my teeth with my tongue and they break to a commercial. The show went on to other contestants of course, but I’ve never watched the tape that far. The beginning of the show has been played ragged, however. About six minutes of my life, run countless times on the TV in my living room, after some dinner with friends and maybe coffee and dessert.
I sold the car to my sister Nancy for what the income taxes cost me — I was in college and didn’t need one anyway. The Amana Range went to my brother David as a wedding present. I kept the insulated Kentucky Fried Chicken tote bag — my lone trophy from the event — and store it in the laundry room. It’s nearby if there’s a showing of the video and it makes a great prop during the viewing.
Within a few years of Coming On Down, there would be enormous differences between that video boy and myself, shaped by life events that would throw a wet blanket on my aw shucks optimism. I’ve tried to recover from them, to regain the hopeful, expectant glimmer found in the eyes of the kid from “The Price is Right,†with mixed success.
He was fearless, I have reservations. He believed, I suspect. A few years in the life of a gay man living at the dusk of the sexual revolution and during the dawn of a terrible disease does manage to bring about some striking changes.
I have a few stories about those times, too. Some of them aren’t very attractive, and I definitely haven’t shared them at parties. I wonder if they have any value, if they define something more than myself, if they sound familiar. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to decide if what I’ve been through has helped me, if it “made me a better person,†if it was, in fact, a gift.
And wondering, of course, if the price was right.
Just like the old video tape trotted out for the occasional viewing, I like sharing this (slightly revised) prologue from my book A Place Like This. It may have been thirty years ago, but winning the car remains one of my life’s milestones. Can I still approximate that young man’s happiness today, or reconcile him with the man I have become…? — Mark
Tags: A Place Like This, acting, Aging, culture, family, Recreation
Posted in All Other Video Postings, Books and Writings, Family and Friends, Gay Life, My Fabulous Disease | 9 Comments »
Fighting Back Hard Against Bullying
Tuesday, October 5th, 2010
“You’ve got to fight back. You’ve got to fight back hard.â€
— Abby, the young vampire of the new film Let Me In
In the melancholy new vampire thriller Let Me In, the most unnerving scenes for me had nothing to do with fangs or bloodletting. They were the scenes of bullies terrorizing Owen, a lonely 12-year-old boy at the center of the story (below). His traumatic assault by school tyrants gives the film a topical sadness that’s hard to shake.
Worse still, when the bullies in the film are visited by gruesome violence themselves, my feelings shifted. The teen inside me, the one who had been kicked and humiliated in grade school, nodded in approval at the carnage and whispered, “good.†My own childhood traumas are not buried very deeply.
Bullying has taken center stage in the public consciousness lately, with the number of gay teen suicides growing by the week. Six heavily reported deaths, at last count. In several cases, bullying seems to have played a role in the teens’ final misery.
According to a 2009 survey by the Gay and Lesbian Students Education Network, 90% of gay or lesbian students have been physically harassed in school, and nearly two-thirds feel unsafe being there. Gay teens also racked up more absenteeism and had lower grade point averages.
There are some encouraging responses to the recent wave of tragedy, and two projects in particular have everything to do with the internet and it‘s growing influence on our lives.
David Glick is a career educator who founded GLBTQ Online High School, a cyber alma mater that opened in January of this year. David believes his online schooling can be a healthy alternative for queer kids who are having trouble functioning safely in a bricks-and-mortar school, and he rejects the notion that an online experience might impede social skills.
“Socialization isn’t based on where or how you take classes,†David explained. “We are social creatures. GLBTQ High School wants to give students tools to socialize more successfully. Meanwhile, we help them focus on their academic achievement.â€
Many of his students dropped out of school due to bullying, David said. GLBTQ Online High School recognizes this by accepting students of any age who wish to pursue a full diploma.
Some tweaking of the curriculum has been made to address the realities of gay life. “We have a more open and honest discussion of HIV and safer sex than one would find in a public school,†said David. “And one of our partners. The Pride Institute in Minneapolis, does assessments of our students to determine any drug or alcohol dependence issues.â€
With the endorsement of gay figures such as Greg Louganis, who has created a school scholarship fund, the concept is gaining visibility. And compared to the various costs of putting any kid through high school, the yearly $5900 tuition sounds reasonable.
Another, more immediate and emotional reaction to recent teen suicides has been the creation of the It Gets Better Project by gay writer Dan Savage (right). Dan started a YouTube channel to collect messages from anyone who wants to talk to gay youth directly.
“Why are we waiting for permission to talk to these kids? We have the ability to talk directly to them right now,†says Dan on his YouTube page. “We don’t have to wait for permission to let them know that it gets better. We can reach these kids.”
Hundreds of video messages have poured in and the channel is quickly approaching one million views.
My gay brother Dick and I contributed our story (and some embarrassing old photos) to the Project. Check this out:
Other remarkable programs have an online presence as well. Be sure to check out the efforts of the Give a Damn Campaign, and the wonderful work of The Trevor Project.
Anyone can make a difference in the lives of a young person who is struggling. If you can record a video, go for it. But there are always ways to contribute, including making sure your own kids know that bullying isn’t cool. Since this all began I’ve had conversations with nieces and nephews, and it feels good to get the issue out in the open.
As always, my friends, thanks for watching, and please be well.
Mark
Tags: culture, gay, help others, Sexuality
Posted in All Other Video Postings, Family and Friends, Gay Life, My Fabulous Disease, News | 6 Comments »
My Forbidden Love for Gay Monsters
Tuesday, September 28th, 2010
Zombies are deeply misunderstood, in my mind. They’re outcasts, picked on, and are the perfect stand-ins for things we fear or don’t understand. Things like death. Or gay people. Or disease. Or getting a disease from gay people that could lead to death. Work with me here.
When “Night of the Living Dead” opened in 1968 as a cheap matinee feature in movie theaters, it wasn’t what the teenage crowd expected. It didn’t have guys in rubber monster costumes or gigantic spiders. Audiences simply watched a group of terrified people in a farmhouse being attacked by flesh-eating dead people. Hungry, ordinary dead people. We met the ghouls, and they were us. The critics that bothered considering its meaning drew comparisons to the horrors of Vietnam coming home to roost.
The film had a fatalism that was hard to believe for its time. Everyone dies. Everyone is shot or eaten. Even the casting of the heroic lead as a black man was something provocative, and when he is the only survivor of the farmhouse, he is arbitrarily shot by rednecks who mistake him for a zombie. The End.
When Day of the Dead opened in 1985, zombies and their deadly contagion were forever associated with the growing horror of AIDS. It was a connection that took me many years to shake.
I just finished creating video segments (still, left) for a stage production for Halloween in Shreveport, Louisiana of “Night of the Living Dead.” The show, directed by my brother Dick King, takes place in the farmhouse, and the action outside their close quarters — the graveyard, the scenes in the basement — is shown as video projections onto the set. It’s a cool concept, actually, and allowed me to pay homage to the film by recreating its scenes as best I could.
Dick is remounting the production after a smashing run last year, during which my brother and I appeared on the local morning news — I played straight man while Dick hammed it up as a hungry zombie gnawing body parts. It was hilarious but perhaps a bit gruesome for the breakfast hour. (Check the highlighted links to watch the interview or view my video handiwork.)
I totally loved this project, because I have been attracted to all manner of monsters as long as I can remember. But to recreate the scene in which the dead little girl comes back to life and stabs her mother to death with a trowel? Priceless. But again, it’s the outcasts, even the murderous ones, that always get my attention.
For your guilty pleasure, here’s a :55 second promo I produced for the production at East Bank Theater. If you’ve ever dreamed of visiting beautiful downtown Bossier City, home of the Horse Shoe Casino and plenty of Narcotics Anonymous meetings, there are zombies (live?) onstage calling your name…
My first boyhood crush was on a dead man. He was a zombie named Quentin Collins, with eyes that pierced my gay soul and sideburns the size of the Florida peninsula. He stalked across my TV screen on weekday afternoons at precisely 3:30, when the series “Dark Shadows” introduced me to all manner of vampires, werewolves and ghouls.
Quentin was dreamy (literally, since he spent a lot of time staring into space in a zombie trance), and had a lonesome, lost quality I recognized but couldn’t yet identify. I saved allowance money for the album (“Quentin’s Theme” should be played at my wedding, or my memorial, whichever comes first), and replaced the Bobby Sherman poster in my bedroom for one of Barnabas Collins, the series’ vampire star.
But I set aside boyish things — and graduated to horror films. Slashers did the trick for a while because I delighted in those oversexed straight couples getting whacked. If my love dared not speak its name, I found it satisfying that straight love was so damn hazardous.
But it was never the killing that attracted me. It was the mysterious, gruesome, self-loathing monster. Here I was, in the midst of full pubescent hormonal freak out, with a body revolting against me and villainous carnal desires. I didn’t just sympathize with the Alien and Pinhead and Freddy, I wanted to take them to lunch and find out how they managed to make it through the day.
My taste for cinematic horror took a break in the mid 1980′s, during the worst of the AIDS crisis. Something about watching “Re-Animator” on VHS while my friend Lesley lay dying in the guest room, well, let’s say it severely reduced the fun factor. AIDS had become the monster, and my sympathy was spent. For at least ten dreary years I stuck to lame romantic comedies.
So if the state of my personal AIDS crisis can be measured in movie genres, my trauma must have subsided because movie monsters are back with a vengeance. I’ve been popcorn-munching to zombies, saw killers and Halloween remakes and having a ball. Critics be damned, the recent remake of Clash of the Titans delivered the monsters (look! killer scorpions the size of Winnebagos!) and had its share of thrilling moments.
Consider Liam Neeson as Zeus, growling with magnificence as he commands “Release the Kraken!” No three cinematic words since “you complete me” have so enraptured my senses, and they are worth the wait. The Kraken gets unleashed and all manner of body parts start flying.
I stand by my gay monster metaphors, because the Kraken is just a lonely gay kid, too. You should have seen the stir I created at the 1977 Junior Homecoming when I arrived, the school’s weird gay creature, wearing platform boots with tight khakis tucked into them at the knee. I relished in unsettling the crowd and seeing the jaws drop and the fingers pointing at the beast. No Kraken could have cleared the dance floor as fast as my solo disco moment, just before being chased to my car.
It’s hard running in platform boots. I could have used some monster scorpions for backup.
(This is a revised posting from early in my blog history, with the addition of the stage production project. I thought I’d bring the posting “back from the dead.” — Mark)
Tags: acting, culture, family
Posted in All Other Video Postings, Anita Mann and Acting Gigs, Family and Friends, Gay Life, My Fabulous Disease | 4 Comments »
My 2010 Gay Pride PSA (that will never air!).
Tuesday, June 15th, 2010
What would I talk about if I had my very own public service announcement?
I’d probably waste the whole thing telling some embarrassing story about growing up gay. Or how much I hate being a queer man pushing 50. What if, though, I really allowed myself to cut the crap and get real?
The result, as it turns out, would be something like this: a little humor, a pinch of honesty, and a punch in the gut. Happy Gay Pride Month!
Tags: acting, Aging, aids, culture, gay, help others, hiv, meth, recovery, Sexuality
Posted in All Other Video Postings, Gay Life, Living with HIV/AIDS, Meth and Recovery, My Fabulous Disease, News, Prevention and Policy | 21 Comments »