As I say in my recent interview for Dennis Hensley’s podcast (“Dennis, Anyone?”), it’s hard to talk about this without sounding like a total dick.
But really, when has that ever stopped me before?
Dennis has a way of entertaining his audience with zippy one-liners while cleverly inviting revealing confessions from his guests. For me, aside from the usual tidbits about sex, Miss America, AIDS, and starring in a Mormon musical, our chat veered into what it was like for me to have once been hot.
As Dennis says, it’s the ultimate gay currency. The question is whether or not you have anything else of value in your spiritual wallet, as it were. For far too long I did not, so blithely satisfied was I with the value of looks alone. When those faded, as I tell Dennis, “I had a lot of catching up to do….”
Here is that exchange, lightly edited and found at the 28:00 mark during our lively chat:
Mark: I was fortunate in that I was pretty, and when you added the steroids and the gym membership and the trainer, I was set to go.
Dennis: You had the ultimate currency… It’s nice to have money but I think hotness trumps it…
Mark: I was obsessive about it. I was a big boy, I got BIG. You notice I mention that. I want you to know that.
Dennis: Yes! You call it the Gay Strut.
Mark: Any reason not to have my shirt on and strut around. Oh God, it was all about that. And I’ll tell you, it’s hard to talk about this without sounding like a complete dick. Which I was. But, I have friends who were not in that scene, for whom the gene pool had not been as kind. And they spent their time developing relationships, and family, and culture… as well as elevated personality traits like empathy. Things that were of no use to me whatsoever because I was too busy shaking my ass. A lot of it has been my process of recovery, and maturity, but I’ve had a lot of catching up to do. It’s funny, when you read A Place Like This, my first book (a memoir about coming of age in West Hollywood during the dawn of the AIDS epidemic), you see that self-absorbed guy for whom all relationships were transactional. I think I was self-aware enough when I wrote that to let you see that.
Dennis: I felt that when I was reading it, for sure.
Mark: Good. Good. So now, in my collection of essays in the new book, you get to see – at least I would like to think you get to see – what became of him, and the fact that I am capable of empathy and compassion, and all the stuff that maybe it would have been nice if I had had those capacities thirty years ago, even twenty, and I didn’t.
Dennis: You write about your therapist saying at one point, “You have no second act. You make a good impression and then that’s it.” That’s a harsh therapist!
Mark: Wasn’t that harsh?
Dennis: They’re supposed to be like, “Isn’t that interesting?” and “How does that make you feel?” and he’s like, “You’re shallow!”
Mark: Oh, he was done with me. He was ready to let go with some truth bombs. I was in active addiction, I believe, when he said that to me. And then many years later, I saw a therapist, about ten years ago, about an issue I wanted to work on, and we worked through it, and I remember the session in which he let me go, and him saying, “You know Mark, I really think our work here is done, as much as I would love to continue discussing your blog…” And I was like, okay, I guess we’re done.
I know how much this seems like an invitation to assure me I’m an attractive man. You know, for my age. I hereby release you from that responsibility. There is a far more important point to be made.
Good looks open doors and garner extended glances when you walk into a room. I was the beneficiary of both, for more years than is probably healthy. I think my writing at a furious pace, especially over the last twenty years as my appearance quotient lowered, has been a kind of amends for the selfishness with which I conducted myself, the vaunted attributes which I both took for granted and exploited with arrogant precision – in bars, in grocery stores, and most damagingly, in the intimacies of lovers and other strangers whom I exploited and used.
Harsh, indeed.
The privilege afforded me still lingers, in outsized proportion to the remnants of my now distant youth. I forget, or deny, the lack of furtive glances in my direction. This essay is meant to remind me.
Meanwhile, this posting has allowed me to include a photo of me when I was hot.
Made you look!
Mark
p.s. Have you posted an Amazon review yet for my new book, My Fabulous Disease: Chronicles of a Gay Survivor? Reviews help their mysterious algorithms a lot, in ways I cannot understand or explain. And the book makes a wonderfully provocative stocking stuffer, too!
