"My Fabulous Disease" Writer Mark S. King On His New Book, Surviving HIV and Meth, and That Night He Had Sex with Rock Hudson
For two decades, the Atlanta-based HIV longtimer has been putting all his shit out there with funny, unsparing honesty—and has built a massive readership along the way.
It’s August, Caftan readers. I can’t think of an “August” reference except The Whales of August, which, remiss older gay that I am, I have never seen!
Before we jump into the latest interview, I want to thank those of you who’ve bought my latest novel, Speech Team, which came out from Viking July 25.
It’s a twisty tale about four high school friends who reunite 25 years later to track down an influential but problematic teacher from their 1980s adolescence. If you do read and like it, would you be so kind as to post about it on social if you’re on social, and/or rate and review it on Goodreads? Those things really help to keep a new book alive out there. And if you haven’t bought it, would you consider doing so? In the woman-dominated literary/book-club fiction market, books by gay men (especially “of a certain age”) have an uphill battle and need a special boost from behind!
So thank you for that!
I guess you’d call the following interview a special late-summer bonus round, because we already had porn entrepreneur Michael Lucas earlier this month, and I’ve already got someone really exciting lined up for both September and October. So here’s my longtime fellow HIV/AIDS writer Mark S. King, GLAAD- and National Lesbian and Gay Journalist Association (NLGJA)-award winning author of the very popular blog My Fabulous Disease …and now, of a book out September 1 that’s a compendium of the blog’s best pieces, as well as pieces he wrote well before the blog, back in the 1990s. (You can pre-order it here; as well as keep track of where Mark will be appearing—including, of course, Caftan capitals Palm Springs and Wilton Manors—in coming weeks and months.)
Diagnosed with HIV in 1985, Mark has taken a lifetime of ups and downs and turned them into a, well, fabulous collection of very pithy, witty, often brutally honest and self-critical short essays on everything from how we gay men are so good at shaming and judging one another for all sorts of things…to his gay brother’s tale of helping his lover, who was dying of AIDS, end his own life with a Seconal cocktail…to what it was like starting his own gay erotic phone line in the 1980s…to how he’s morphed into a total top who wants sex only a fraction as often as when he was young…to the shame of a relapse after a long period of time off crystal meth…to that time he appeared at 19 on “The Price is Right” to…well, you get the gist, which is that the essays range from quite raw and painful to utterly hilarious. King has that perfect Oscar Wilde/Paul Lynde way with a quip: “I got The Clap so many times that I started calling it The Applause.” Or, marveling at how little sexual energy he has currently, at 62, compared to his youth, that these days, “ten minutes is a triumph of passion and stamina.”
I like Mark’s writing because he doesn’t shy away from examining aspects of himself that many of us gay men would rather look away from: His vanity, narcissism and need for attention. Things he’s done in the past that have hurt people, including family members and lovers. Even what he sees as his own manipulativeness in seducing a 30-year-old man when he was 15—this in an age when we would almost unanimously agree that all the responsibility for a statutory-rape situation lies with the legal adult, not the child.
Thankfully, Mark can also realize that he has used his platform to bring attention to the challenges and accomplishments of people living with HIV other than middle-class white men like him- (and my-) self. His latest post, in fact, is called “How Do We Support Black Women in an HIV Arena Once Run by Gay White Men?”
What follows is my favorite kind of Caftan talk, uncensored and raunchy but also unsparingly candid, funny and self-deprecating. Thank you, Mark! Congrats on the new book! And thank you, readers! Now, as ever, I THANK those of you who pay for a subscription, which allows me the luxury of time away from my paid gigs in order to do this, and I ASK those of who free-subscribe to consider the $5/month version—if, indeed, you think it’s worth it. It would mean a lot because I’m hoping to keep up this project for years to come.
And now…let’s get into it with Mark S. King. Enjoy the rest of August—and if you see those whales, mouth a silent hello to dear departed Bette and Lillian!
Tim: Mark, thanks for talking to Caftan! So you and your husband Michael, a federal healthcare worker, live in Atlanta, yes?
Mark: As we speak, I'm surrounded by boxes because we're moving in a few days from an apartment in Midtown to a home in North Decatur. Michael's currently holed up in his home office and he doesn't come out until after five.
Tim: What's a typical day like for you?
Mark: My cat Henry wakes me up around 6:30am, but fortunately Michael feeds him breakfast and starts the coffee, so I can sleep longer. I stumble out around 7am, have my coffee and look at my emails. Or sometimes, if I'm writing something, if the solution I've been looking for occurs to me around 6:30am, I'm at the keyboard making it work even before I have coffee. If I'm in the zone like that, I can forget to have breakfast. But then I have my go-to daily conversations with usually two out of three people: my brother, Dick, who's gay and lives in Shreveport, Louisiana, with [TheBody.com writer] Charles Sanchez, and with my friend Lynn.
Then I go to the gym to work on any part of my body that is visible in a tank top. As long as my chest is bigger than my stomach, I'm fine. I play racquetball, so that takes care of the legs. Things like calves, you either have them or you don't. I know I should be doing yoga and stretching and working on what they call your core, whatever that is. At some point as I age it's going to be more important to be able to bend over and pick things up, not lift a large weight above my head.
Tim: Why don't you do any of that stretching and flexibility stuff?
Mark: Because it's not visible in a tank top. I'm just being honest. I'm a child of the '70s, of button-fly jeans and a black tank. I'm a victim of gay culture, which means hanging on for dear life to upper-body musculature.
Tim: The happiest moment of my day is when I abandon the laptop and go to the gym. If it makes you happy, what's wrong with it?
Mark: Nothing! I did a photo shoot for an article in HIV Plus that came out last month and I prepared for it like an Olympic event. I was going to the gym every day, I had my trainer, I was on my testosterone. As you can see, I wore a black tank top for the shoot.
Tim: Do you do steroids?
Mark: I have—I don't any more. Testosterone is not steroids.
Tim: Oh, I know. Why no more steroids?
Mark: Age, and the fact that they can damage your liver and kidneys. it's also true that taking testosterone has made my prostate the size of a grapefruit, but I haven't stopped that.
Tim: When you first went on testosterone, did you notice changes in your mood, libido and strength?
Mark: Yes, all those things. I take it because it works. I've been on it for 20 years. But I actually haven't been back to the gym since that photo shoot, and when I'm not working out, I deflate like a balloon. I feel like the Grindr hookup that doesn't look like his pictures.
Tim: What do you do the rest of the day and night?
Mark: Play with my cats and write a little bit. I sound like a man of leisure, and I kind of am. After Michael finishes work, we cook dinner. I'm a much better cook than I was when I met him. He taught me how to cook a chicken breast, which is to beat the hell out of it and put some Tony Chachere on it and grill it.
Tim: What is Tony Chachere?
Mark: It's Creole seasoning.
I can also make a whole chicken now. I know how to stick my fingers under the skin and shove in the butter and garlic. That is a major milestone for me. For a long time, I'd always choose partners who could cook and I was just the pretty one.
Then in the evening I'll go to a 12-step meeting because I'm in recovery, then I'll stay up too late watching horror movies, which Michael doesn't care for.
Tim: Which are your favorites?
Mark: Re-Animator if you want good cartoonish gore. Hereditary with Toni Collette is great for existential dread.
Tim: I love the first The Conjuring. Do you?
Mark: It's okay. They have to be a little sicker. For me, horror really means horrific, like I can't believe they've done that. I love gore that pulls no punches. In Hereditary, the little girl is decapitated, for God's sake.
Tim: Why do you love extreme horror films?
Mark: I like to be scared. They're an exciting ride. And they have a lot of creativity. Some of our greatest directors started in that genre. Look at Talk to Me, a great new horror movie directed by twins from Australia who have a YouTube channel called RackaRacka where they do outrageously violent, silly stuff.
Talk to Me is about a group of friend who entertain themselves by becoming possessed by this haunted hand. It's really almost about drug addiction—become addicted to the thrill of being possessed, and then what happens when they take it too far.
And then I go to bed around midnight.
Tim: Mark, you grew up Louisiana?
Mark: My dad was an Air Force officer so we lived all over the place, but when he retired when I was in fifth grade—I'm the youngest of six—we moved to Louisiana.
Tim: When did you start writing?
Mark: I wrote silly little stories when I was a kid, and then when I went to work for an AIDS agency in 1986, [the now defunct] L.A. Shanti, it was growing so fast that I became the media guy, the one writing the newsletter and press releases. But it's only been in the last 20 years that I've really been able to identify as a writer. The turning point was when I started writing My Fabulous Disease consistently. Prior to that, I'd write columns for Frontiers and then send them to different gay papers around the country who would print them.
Of all the editors I ever worked with, Bonnie Goldman, who founded [the HIV/AIDS site] TheBody, challenged me the most. "Why are you saying it this way?" she'd ask. She told me that the more warts, faults and doubts I revealed, the more I'd draw people in. She really worked for me and asked me to write a blog for TheBody.
It was after Bonnie left TheBody that I started My Fabulous Disease. I'd actually started it as a website to promote my first book, "A Place Like This," and my web designer told me to blog on that page to keep it fresh and bring people to it. For a long time, I had to keep telling myself, "If you continue to build it, they will come." Now, in a good month, I'll get 100,000 hits. I'll also share my content with HIV Plus, Poz—it doesn't matter. It's about building my brand, which is talking about myself. How self-centered can you get? [laughs] I often ask myself, "How have I gotten away with being a self-absorbed guy who writes only from my experience?" I think it's that I tell the truth about myself and let the chips fall where they may.
But along the way I've expanded the spotlight and written about other people and programs that interested me or that I wanted to cheerlead for.
Tim: One thing I like about your writing is that you are ruthlessly honest. What's been one good and one bad outcome of that?
Mark: Certainly I felt good about writing about addiction. I wrote a piece about a relapse I had when I was still dealing with its fallout. That felt good because I suffer, as many of us do, with imposter syndrome. I'd think, "If they only saw behind the curtain, that I struggle with drug addiction and have ruined relationships and have all sorts of wreckage in my wake, then they wouldn't like me anymore." So to have been able to write that piece only days after coming to—some might say it's dangerous to write about such a thing so soon, but my writing is my therapy, my way of sorting out my own feelings. So I wrote it and then pressed the button.