by Mark S. King | Apr 5, 2025 | Family and Friends, Gay Life, Living with HIV/AIDS, My Fabulous Disease, News, Trump
More than ten years ago, when pop icon Donna Summer died, I wrote a tribute to the impact her music had made on me as a young gay man growing up in Louisiana in 1977. A few weeks ago, producer Becky Ripley at BBC Radio 4 in Bristol, UK somehow ran across that essay... 
by Mark S. King | Mar 14, 2025 | Gay Life, Living with HIV/AIDS, My Fabulous Disease, News, Prevention and Policy, Trump
“If this article doesn’t scare the shit out of you, we’re in real trouble… Our continued existence depends on just how angry you can get.” – Larry Kramer, “1,112 and Counting,” The New York Native, 1983 Forty years ago, on March 15th, 1985, I received my... 
by Mark S. King | Feb 19, 2025 | Family and Friends, Living with HIV/AIDS, My Fabulous Disease, News, Prevention and Policy, Trump
The phrase sat there on my Facebook feed, staring back at me like an accusation. “If you aren’t resisting, you are assisting,” the post read. I felt flush with self-conscious guilt. It wasn’t a familiar feeling, not after nearly forty years of speaking up and... 
by Mark S. King | Jun 28, 2024 | Gay Life, Living with HIV/AIDS, My Fabulous Disease, News, Prevention and Policy, Trump
Honestly, I was flattered to see a photo of me on Jennifer Vaughan’s social media feed. She posted it a few weeks ago, during the first days of Pride Month, and it showed me at the 2013 Atlanta Pride parade. I was a Grand Marshal that year, and in the picture... 
by Mark S. King | Feb 27, 2024 | Family and Friends, Gay Life, Living with HIV/AIDS, Meth and Recovery, My Fabulous Disease, News, Prevention and Policy, Trump
When an audience member gives a dollar bill to a drag performer in Oklahoma City, they bow ever so slightly in a kind of reverent curtsy when handing it over. Here at the County Line nightclub on a recent Saturday night, I watch it happen again and again. Maybe... 
by Mark S. King | Oct 11, 2021 | Book Review, Gay Life, Living with HIV/AIDS, Meth and Recovery, My Fabulous Disease, News, Prevention and Policy, Trump
Activist Peter Staley’s much-anticipated new memoir, Never Silent, opens with almost unbearable nail-biting suspense, sweeping us into the behind-the-scenes machinations of an ACT UP takeover of the New York Stock Exchange at opening bell. It’s...
