by Mark S. King | Jul 26, 2013 | Family and Friends, Gay Life, Living with HIV/AIDS, My Fabulous Disease
(This essay appears in my collection of essays, My Fabulous Disease: Chronicles of a Gay Survivor, available now at online outlets or your local bookstore.) “Did I ever tell you about the night that Emil died?” my brother Richard asked me. It was 1992, and...
by Mark S. King | Jul 10, 2013 | Family and Friends, Gay Life, Living with HIV/AIDS, My Fabulous Disease
“There were people who displayed remarkable courage then. People who lived and died by their promises and shared the intimacy of death…” — Once, When We Were Heroes My brother Richard would later refer to it as a “command...
by Mark S. King | Dec 17, 2012 | Family and Friends, Gay Life, My Fabulous Disease
There is so much distance in my mother’s eyes that I fear she may never come close to me again. Circling her stare are wrinkles of pain, betrayal even, and in her hand she holds the watch. It was December of my senior year of high school, and things had calmed...
by Mark S. King | Jun 14, 2012 | Family and Friends, Gay Life, My Fabulous Disease
“Now, people have their bat kites and their regular shaped kites,” Dad said to me when I was ten years old, “but the box kite, Mark, now there is the most aerodynamically sound of them all.” He demonstrated by making a box kite out of balsa wood and brown paper.... by Mark S. King | Dec 13, 2011 | Anita Mann and Acting Gigs, Family and Friends, Gay Life, Living with HIV/AIDS, My Fabulous Disease
My mother’s home here in Shreveport, Louisiana, was fraught with excitement last week. Christmas decorations littered the living room, the almond scent of cookies filled the air, and last minute phone calls and arrangements made it all feel like a major...