(Photo: Darrell Snedeger)
Writer, activist, and 40-year HIV survivor Mark S. King will be inducted into the LGBTQ+ Journalist Hall of Fame, it has been announced by the national journalist organization NLGJA. Also being inducted are Charles Blow, celebrated opinion columnist for the New York Times, and the late Lyra McKee, an investigative journalist and author from Belfast whose work gave voice to a new generation of queer writers.
“Mark S. King’s influence on AIDS history, queer sexual politics, and America’s political landscape is impossible to measure,” said Adam Pawlus, Executive Director of NLGJA. “His wit, brains and tireless advocacy not only changes hearts and minds, but saves lives and sanity. NLGJA has often honored his contributions, and it is now time to place his name among his peers in the LGBTQ+ Journalists Hall of Fame.”
“Writing has been my release, my therapy, and my attempt to chronicle what happened to us in the 1980s and how it reverberates today,” King said about the honor. “I love my community and I believe LGBTQ people are capable of achieving anything. I know. I was there when every national institution abandoned us, and when we built programs and organizations that saved us. Those organizations remain, helping countless others. When I look at young LGBTQ people today I have enormous confidence that they can achieve greatness, because I have seen it before with my own eyes.”
King has concerns, however. “We put our bodies on the line when we had no other choice,” he said. “That urgency has returned. White gay men like myself got what we came for in the 1980s; we got the research and the medications and the organizations and then far too many of us left the playing field. We left behind allies, like Black and brown people and trans women who are being harassed, prosecuted and murdered every single day.”
“These dangers proliferate when our own government has abandoned us, again. Why we are not engaged in daily mass civil disobedience in protest of this fascist regime is beyond me.”
King has been writing in real time as a gay man living with HIV since he was diagnosed in 1985, only weeks after the HIV antibody test became publicly available. His work has appeared on his ongoing site, My Fabulous Disease, as well as Newsweek, POZ Magazine, The Advocate, OUT, and others. King recently published an anthology of his essays for his book, My Fabulous Disease: Chronicles of a Gay Survivor.
King was honored by NLGJA in 2020 as their LGBTQ Journalist of the Year. His blog, My Fabulous Disease, has been awarded the NLGJA Outstanding Blog award three times, as well as honors for King’s individual pieces, including his signature piece about the AIDS crisis, “Once, When We Were Heroes,” which was awarded Outstanding Opinion Piece by NLGJA in 2008.
NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ+ Journalists is the premier network of LGBTQ+ media professionals, dedicated to the highest journalistic standards in the coverage of LGBTQ+ issues.
