by Mark S. King | Jun 5, 2016 | Family and Friends, Gay Life, Living with HIV/AIDS, Meth and Recovery, My Fabulous Disease, News, Prevention and Policy
The young woman sitting across from me on the bus is in her mid-20s. She turns to her companion and her voice grows serious. “I know someone who died,” she says in the hushed tone reserved for tales of mortality. Her friend looks up from his phone. “He was a good... 
by Mark S. King | May 12, 2016 | Book Review, Gay Life, Living with HIV/AIDS, My Fabulous Disease, News
Daniel Cardone’s essential but relentlessly grim documentary about longtime AIDS survivors, Desert Migration, is fascinated with the bodies of the gay men it profiles. The film begins with lingering shots of each of the subjects as they begin their day. It follows... 
by Mark S. King | Apr 12, 2016 | Gay Life, Living with HIV/AIDS, Meth and Recovery, My Fabulous Disease, Prevention and Policy
Stigma is insidiously quiet. It is conjured in the mind, born of discomfort and fear, and then it is projected at “the other” among us. It judges them and isolates them. And it happens without a sound. Stigma lets us take comfort in seeing things in others about... 
by Mark S. King | Apr 4, 2016 | Family and Friends, Living with HIV/AIDS, My Fabulous Disease
When the health of my close friend Ron began to rapidly decline in 1987, he made the decision to leave Los Angeles to return home to rural New York to be near his family. “Just long enough to feel a little better,” he told me at the time. It was a common trajectory in... 
by Mark S. King | Mar 8, 2016 | Anita Mann and Acting Gigs, Family and Friends, Gay Life, My Fabulous Disease, News
It was 1975 and I was 14 years old, all gangly limbs and stubborn acne, and I was sitting in the passenger seat of a parked car. Splayed across my lap was the magazine, open to the page my companion had selected. I was staring at the photo with something like...
