Mark S. King on new book and surviving HIV and meth
HIV/AIDS writer Mark S. King, a GLAAD- and National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association award-winning author of the popular blog My Fabulous Disease has published a new book out Sept.
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. Pre-order “My Fabulous Disease: Chronicles of a Gay Survivor” at marksking.com/marks-new-book.
He’s appearing at the U.S. Conference on HIV/AIDS on Sept. 7 in D.C. Diagnosed with HIV in 1985, Mark has taken a lifetime of ups and downs and turned them into a, well, fabulous collection of 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.
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, “10 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.
