Mark S. King: HIV Activist & Writer

When members of the Colorado community first gathered 35 years ago to create a living memorial for friends and family who lost their lives from AIDS-related complications, no one could have anticipated this act of solidarity would grow into a yearly event now known as the Festival for Life. 

Hosted by Colorado Health Network (CHN), a statewide organization serving more than 5,000 individuals annually who are living with HIV, as well as providing prevention and education programs, this year’s Festival for Life will be a hybrid virtual and in-person event scheduled for Aug. 21.  

Helping CHN with one of its pre-festival promotions is Mark S. King, an award-winning writer, author, speaker, and activist who has been involved with HIV causes since testing positive in 1985. Last year, King was named the 2020 LGBTQ Journalist of the Year by the National Lesbian and Gay Journalist Association (NLGJA) for his blog, My Fabulous Disease, and was the recipient of the GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Blog. King also contributes regularly to several HIV related publications including POZ and The Body.

OFM had the opportunity to connect with King and talk about the Festival for Life, being a long-term survivor, and what he hopes to accomplish as an activist and writer.

Can you begin by telling us more about your involvement with the Colorado Festival for Life Benefit?

I am very grateful that I get to be an aging, gay man living with HIV and representing all of whom are 50 and above, in my case, 60 and above, who are living happy, healthy lives many years later. My involvement is to tell that story and deliver that message about how far we have come and what our lives are like today as long-term survivors, but also to encourage everybody to keep it up. This sort of fundraising and community-based support, education, and prevention is why I am sitting here. I have absolutely no doubt about that.

What are you looking forward to the most about this event?

I am looking forward to being exposed to all those people who still give a shit [laughs]. I am looking forward to getting to be a part of this community of people that still care an awful lot about ending the HIV epidemic once and for all, and again, represent those of us who are still walking and talking. I am so grateful for that. 

In my lifetime living with HIV, which has been a very long time—over 35 years—I have had to reach out for help along the way. I have had to get help with my insurance premiums, housing, food, and just helping me kind of navigate the whole healthcare system. Like, what do I need? All that stuff, I was guided every step of the way by the kinds of organizations that are raising money at this thing. It absolutely saves lives and helps people navigate at a time when they are freaked out, in crisis, and don’t know which way to go. 

You tested positive in 1985 and immediately became an AIDS activist. How did you have the courage to be so open about your diagnosis?

People made one of two choices during that time. Either we were shocked into silence and could not process it, and that was true for me for a period of time. When I got my test results, they literally said, ‘We’re sorry to tell you, you have HIV. Good luck to you.’ There were no medications or anything, and all that I knew was, I would die soon. I was shocked into silence for a short period of time, but I chose the other route, which was, do something. Fight. What would I have to lose? I’m going to be dead in a couple years. I might as well fight with everything I’ve got. Get the word out, and talk about it. It was not being spoken about. 

Because we did not have a president who was talking about it, there was no congressional money, and there wasn’t this huge effort for research; it was really in the hands of us living with HIV, our friends, families, and allies to speak up. That was the choice that I made. I was diagnosed when I was 24, and you think you have your whole life ahead of you, but the party stopped. We were all forced into this position of trying to understand the meaning of it all. Why is this happening to us? Why are we all dying? Why are gay men dying? Were the Evangelicals right? All these serious questions you thought you had your whole life to figure out, but now, you have this much time. 

So, when you asked how I had the courage to be open about it, I did it because I was sorting through my own trauma. The only way I knew how to sort through my own trauma was to help somebody else, get the word out, and share with people that we were going through this. I have just been doing it ever since. Obviously, things have improved, but there are still things happening to us. 

So many people were dying around you. Why do you think you were chosen to live long-term? Why do you think you survived all these years?

The secret is, life is random, and it is quite arbitrary. I survived when many, many people who worked harder than I did and were very empowered died. People who made all the right choices died. Life is arbitrary, and it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t find meaning in the cards we are dealt. If I am to provide meaning to my survival, then I must say, regardless of why, there will never be an answer to why. For most things in life, there is not going to be an answer to why. All we can do is make the most of the time we are here.

Although the stigma has drastically changed since the 80s and 90s, there is still a lot of negativity surrounding HIV. What are some of today’s most common misconceptions?

There remains a stigma against people living with HIV, including gay men, even though our community is no better. We are viewed as inherently untrustworthy. We are viewed as people who have behaved badly. That we have been either promiscuous or have done something that this is a judgment call against us. Of course, this is all wrong because the virus couldn’t give a shit. The virus could care less who it is traveling from and to. People are infected in several scenarios, but only a few of them might be because they are having a lot of sex.

I would like to say that I contracted HIV on my wedding night with the man of my dreams and that was the first time I had ever had sex, but that would be untrue. I was extremely sexually active. It was the early 80s. The sexual revolution for gay men was just getting going, baby. Out of the closet, we were all proud of who we were, and we had this common language, which was sex. It is interesting how we have changed and evolved as a culture and community. We don’t have to rely on just that sexual language anymore. You can be all these other things and find meaning and engagement in your life and with other gay men. We had limited options in my generation, so we were relying on the few options we had, and one of them was sex.

Also, people are not paying attention as much as they once did, which is understandable. They may not be up on the science, they may not know that there is a daily pill that you can get that will prevent you from getting HIV, which is great for anybody of any sexual activity level. They may not know that I am incapable of transmitting HIV to you sexually. That it is impossible for me to do that, and we know that for a fact. It is still scary because we have been raised our whole lives to fear it, and fear can be so powerful.

You have also been very open about your addiction to drugs and alcohol. How is your recovery going, and did your positive status lead you down that path?

I think there are always co-factors. There are always factors that relate to our ability to not engage in self harm, and all of us are probably vulnerable at different times in our lives to self-harm. We are not feeling great about ourselves. For me, I drank a lot in the 80s because I was walking through a graveyard and self-medicated. Then I pulled it together for a long period of time, and ironically, it wasn’t until AIDS got better and the medications came along. It is a very personal thing in terms of what leads us to addiction and what leads us out of it, but in my case, first of all, I certainly liked the nightlife. I like my nightlife, I like my dance floors, I liked my dance floor drugs. Some people can walk away from that when it is an appropriate time to stop doing that, but I wasn’t. So, one drug led to another until, eventually, I was shooting up crystal meth every day.

I know what propelled me during that time was, oh, we are all going to live. Let’s have a party because I missed most of my 20s and 30s. I felt very entitled to get back into the scene. I felt as if I missed out on all that, but you cannot go home again. It is kind of a waste of time to think that you are going to recreate something that you missed out on a decade earlier as opposed to living in the right here and the right now. So, let’s just say it did not work out well for me.

I very much see crystal meth as an epidemic, and it has a lot in common with HIV. We all know what’s going on, we see it online, we most likely see it on dating apps, but it is this whole thing that we are kind of averting our eyes from because we are not quite sure what to do about it, and it scares us. I have friends who dropped off the map because of crystal meth, just like they did with AIDS. We just are not sure how to get a handle on it because it is uncomfortable and scary. Like AIDS, we kind of blame them. We kind of think this is an epidemic of our own design. It is behavioral based. Why don’t they just stop doing that? It is a complicated thing.

You publish a video blog called My Fabulous Disease, and you are a contributing writer to several HIV-related publications including POZ and The Body. What do you hope audiences take away from your work?

That our history as a community is a legendary story of courage and love, and I want that history to be accessible. I do not want it to be like, ‘Back in my day, we all died of AIDS.’ That is just not my story. That is not what I am here for. I am here to tell you about your legacy, as a gay man, and what we did for one another. How triumphant, courageous, and heroic it all was, and it was. It will forever influence who I am and my sense of self-esteem as a human being because I was there when we did all those things and helped one another. We were called up to do it. 

Let’s hope that in your lifetime, you don’t have to face something like that sort of annihilation, but if you do, you will be able to step up because we have seen it, and we did it before. Just knowing we are capable of that is a wonderful story. It is an amazing story, and it should make all LGBTQ people feel so proud, so capable, and so powerful. We have a history that shows that we kicked death. If we have to do it again, we will. To me, this is a story of our triumphs, compassion, and humanity.

Last year, My Fabulous Disease received the GLAAD Media Award for “Outstanding Blog,” and the NLGJA named you 2020’s “Journalist of the Year.” How meaningful was it for you to receive both these recognitions?

It was fucking great. My only regret is that it happened during COVID and there were no red carpets. I can rock a red carpet [laughs]. It was meaningful because representation matters. I always say I am a writer, but I am a person living with HIV first. That is kind of my calling card. That is who I am. For both of these organizations to honor the writing of a person living with HIV, recognizing it as the best we had this year, is great. Hopefully, it is encouraging to everybody working in the field of HIV, saying that these institutes believe that our history is important.

What more do you hope to accomplish with your platform as a writer and activist?

I don’t have any big changes in mind. I am going to keep doing exactly what I have been doing all along, and that is telling the truth about what life is like for this gay man. This gay man just happens to have HIV, is recovering from addiction, all of that. I am a storyteller, and I just keep telling the story. However, the story keeps changing because I keep getting older. In 30 years, I will keep telling it, but I’ll be a hologram! I am never going to stop, and I just want to chronicle it for as long as I am here to tell it. 

Stay up-to-date with King by following My Fabulous Disease. For more information on the Festival of Life and to register, visit ColoradoHealthNetwork.org.

Photos Courtesy of Matt Roth