I Somehow Survived the Darkest Years of AIDS

Summary

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What It Was Like – "I Somehow Survived the Darkest Years of AIDS"

Podcast Host: Julian Morgans (Superreal)
Guest: Mark S. King
Release Date: July 19, 2026

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Episode Overview

This powerful episode of "What It Was Like" features Mark S. King, a writer and advocate who lived through – and miraculously survived – the darkest years of the AIDS crisis in 1980s Los Angeles. Host Julian Morgans delves into King’s raw, honest, and often humorous memories of arriving in LA “full of hope,” only to be swept into a world where AIDS decimated the gay community, turning everyday life into a cycle of grief, activism, love, and searching for meaning. King’s story captures both the terror and the beauty of a generation fighting for its life, and ends on notes of hope, activism, and caution.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Arriving in LA as a Young Gay Man

• Mark's Early Life & Dreams: At 19, Mark moves to LA from Louisiana, eager to pursue acting and personal freedom (05:12).

  “I was just filled with hope and anticipation and joy…” (05:45, Mark)

• The Queer Scene in 1980s LA: Pre-AIDS, gay life centered around in-person socializing and a communal language of sex, with no awareness or vocabulary for “safe” or “unprotected” sex (07:50).
• Humorous Retrospective:

  “I got the clap so many times I called it the applause… unprotected is has no meaning in this context.” (10:18, Mark)

2. The Onset of AIDS – Gradual Horror

• First Whispers: Mark and friends hear murmurs of a mysterious 'gay cancer' – dismissed at first, then steadily encroaching as acquaintances and community members vanish (11:21).

  “The bartender that always served you… just disappeared. Gone. And you would later hear he died. And that’s when it got real… suddenly it was your friend... It became terrorizing very fast.” (13:28, Mark)

• Devastating Normal: Death and funerals quickly became routine. Those with spare rooms often ended up caring for dying friends rejected by their families (14:30).

3. Testing Positive in a Climate of Hopelessness

• The First HIV Test: Mark recounts the secrecy, fear, and lack of options after his 1985 diagnosis (19:45).

  “There was nothing but to know, just to know… maybe I’ll do nothing, maybe I’ll just pretend I didn’t get that phone call.” (19:45, Mark)

• No Treatment, Only Stigma: He navigates the loneliness and fog of that period, with no medications or real medical support.

4. An Unexpected Brush with Celebrity: Rock Hudson

• Meeting Rock Hudson (22:00–32:00): Mark tells a vivid, bittersweet story about meeting, socializing, and sleeping with Rock Hudson, who would later become the public face of AIDS.

  “Mo Mark, life is not the movies.” (28:55, Rock Hudson to Mark)

• The Symbolism of Hudson’s Decline: Watching Hudson die on television mirrored the community’s collective trauma (31:40).

5. Grieving and Surviving Amid Total Loss

• Cycle of Loss: King describes friends dying in his guest room, memorial services as acts of protest, and the foundational role of chosen families (35:56).
• AIDS Activism is Born:

  “That was what created the movement of AIDS activism… a movement that stands next to any social justice movement in the history of time.” (35:56, Mark)

6. The Emotional & Spiritual Cost

• The Weight of Stigma:

  “I was marked and degraded as a human being... Even to this day, people view people living with HIV as somehow untrustworthy.” (36:43, Mark)

• Spiritual Searching: In caring for dying friends, Mark searches for meaning, ultimately finding miracles in collective care and love (45:20).

  “The miracle was that Leslie died surrounded by his closest friends... That has my sense of spirituality...” (46:20, Mark)

7. Survivor’s Guilt and Randomness of Survival

• Why Did Mark Survive?: Despite testing positive in 1985, Mark never developed AIDS, a rare phenomenon with no clear explanation (55:06).

  “The human body is a mysterious thing... I never got sick. I never got sick. I have had some bouts of illness because of the medication—it’s not the disease so much as the cure.” (55:06, Mark)

8. Family, Shame, and Openness

• Coming Out as HIV+ to His Parents: Mark’s mother, a librarian, quietly researched HIV, while his father, a reserved military man, simply checked in (59:39).

  “I kind of live without shame... There are so many people who see me as some sort of diseased pariah… and I don’t take that on.” (60:25, Mark)

9. The Ongoing Crisis and the Politics of AIDS

• AIDS Isn’t Over: Mark stresses the ongoing prevalence and deaths from AIDS, especially among marginalized groups abandoned as mainstream activism waned (65:40).

  “It’s not finished… We have 7,000 people in the United States die of AIDS every year… We will see an enormous outbreak… It’s just getting started again.” (65:40, Mark)

• Call for Global Solidarity:

  “Health is global, disease is global… you can’t just limit it to one place and hope for the best.” (67:38, Mark)

10. Lessons Learned & Hopes for the Future

• Empathy as a Legacy:

  “Life is a bumpy ride… the best thing we can do while we’re here is to make it a little less scary for somebody else... if I can be kinder and more empathetic … then that’s a win.” (68:41, Mark)

• On Optimism and Warnings: Mark offers hope in humanity’s capacity to help each other, while also warning about the dangers of stigma, ignorance, and short-term thinking (72:01).

  “It’s going to come back and bite you in the ass, folks… more suffering, undeniable, unignorable suffering... People need somebody to blame… The other, the other.” (72:01, Mark)

• Reflection on the Reagan Era and Modern Ignorance:

  “Now we do know all of those things… but we’re willfully ignorant about it. Those in charge are willfully ignorant... so they can continue to discriminate and have bias and let people die that they don't care about.” (74:23, Mark)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Sex as Connection:

  “Our language was sex… It was the only way that we knew we were making a connection with one another.” (08:55, Mark)

• The Clinic Routine:

  “I got the clap so many times I called it the applause.” (10:18, Mark)

• On the HIV Test:

  “It’s like there was an envelope sitting on the table and inside it was going to tell me whether I would be alive or dead in two years.” (18:55, Mark)

• On the Miracle of Surviving:

  “Life is random — it’s like the guy in the foxhole, how come the guy next to me got shot and I didn’t?” (55:06, Mark)

• Empathy from Experience:

  “If I can have more empathy … if that can just inform me so that I am kinder… then that’s a win. Otherwise, what the hell was it all for?” (69:44, Mark)

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Important Timestamps

| Timestamp | Topic/Event | |:-------------:|------------------------------------------------------------------| | 05:12 | Mark’s arrival in LA, background | | 07:50 | Pre-AIDS gay culture and sex | | 11:21 | First news of AIDS in the community | | 13:28 | Realization as deaths become personal | | 19:45 | Mark's HIV test and diagnosis | | 22:00–32:00 | The Rock Hudson story | | 35:56 | AIDS activism and the birth of social justice movements | | 45:20 | Search for meaning and spirituality in the epidemic | | 55:06 | Survivor’s guilt and medical mystery | | 59:39 | Coming out to his parents as HIV+ | | 62:05 | The changing atmosphere in LA’s gay community, late 1980s | | 65:40 | The AIDS crisis: unfinished and global dimensions | | 68:41 | Life lessons and the importance of empathy | | 72:01 | Warning about stigma, politics, and willful ignorance |

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Tone and Language

Mark S. King’s narrative is candid, often darkly funny, deeply compassionate, and engaged. He shifts between irreverence (“I got the clap so many times I called it the applause”) and moving testament (“The miracle was that Leslie died surrounded by his closest friends...”). Julian’s questions are empathetic, at times gently probing, always respectful.

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Final Thoughts

Mark King’s story isn’t just a personal memoir of survival but a lens on community, courage, stigma, and human connection. He honors lost friends and activists and stresses that—even with medical advances—AIDS remains a public health and political crisis, especially for marginalized groups. The episode ends with calls for continued activism, empathy, and the importance of confronting both ignorance and stigma.

Recommended further reading:

• A Place Like This (2007) by Mark S. King
• My Fabulous Chronicles of a Gay Survivor (recently published)
• Mark’s blog: My Fabulous Disease

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Transcript

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[Podcast Host (Ad Reader)]

super

[Mark S. King]

real

[Podcast Host (Julian)]

hey welcome back so this week and last we've been looking at viruses last week we looked at the discovery of ebola that's a particularly nasty virus out of africa and this week we're onto a virus that's probably a bit more familiar to you hiv now hiv came out of the same stretch of african forest and savanna as ebola and it was transported to the united states sometime around the year nineteen seventy and by the early eighties it was causing havoc and particularly in the country's gay communities one study conducted in nineteen eighty nine actually found that up to fifty percent of gay men were hiv positive in some major us cities we're talking new york los angeles san francisco and at that time an hiv diagnosis was almost certainly fatal the median survival after a positive diagnosis was only eleven to twenty months now this is the period that my guest comes into the picture his name is mark s king and he'd moved to los angeles in the early eighties to make it as an actor but instead he spent the next decade burying his friends in nineteen eighty five mark actually tested positive for hiv but his people died around him he he just somehow carried on and he doesn't really know why he survived he's he's kind of a medical miracle he just never got sick and doctors have actually studied him to try to figure out why he is one of a very very small number of people who tested positive as part of the lgbt community in the eighties and he lived through it to tell the story now i'm going to warn you this is quite a sad episode but it's also a beautiful one mark has a way with words that i think is really special you're going to find yourself laughing out loud one minute and then you'll be tearing up the next so that's our main episode that's this episode that you're just about to hear but stick around because for subscribers this this week we're going to look at a virus much closer to home or certainly for me i'm an australian i'm recording this in australia and we actually have an indigenous virus here called hendra the hendra virus and in nineteen ninety four there was an outbreak in the racing community it killed a bunch of racehorses it killed a racehorse owner and it could have spread it could have turned into our version of COVID but the government acted quickly and it shut things down which is why you probably haven't heard of this virus i'm going to do a little story on that it's really interesting that's for subscribers this week but for now strap in because here is marc s king and how he lived through the nineteen eighties aids epidemic

[Podcast Host (Ad Reader)]

hey

[Interviewer (Julian)]

mark welcome to the show thank you

[Mark S. King]

very much julian thanks for having me

[Interviewer (Julian)]

thanks for joining me today so i want to start your story in la and you just arrived and you were a young actor and i want you to set the scene for me you know what were you like what was

[Mark S. King]

the city like well i was nineteen years old it was nineteen eighty i had traveled from shreveport louisiana where i grew up military family lots of kids i was the youngest and couldn't wait to get out by the way of louisiana being gay in the late eighties in the late seventies in louisiana wasn't ideal so i kept going to bigger and bigger cities and i had moved to new orleans already and then it was on to la i was a commercial actor and by that i mean i did television commercials and i had this all american look i was you know very opie taylor very howdy doody very all american very non threatening i kind of specialized in the counter boy you know welcome to mcdonald's you know sort of stuff and that was that was my that was my lane and so off to los angeles i went to pursue all of that and arrived there in nineteen eighty one and i had by then a boyfriend charlie who was a few years older than me and a little more settled and which was great because i needed that i was still just kind of in young adulthood myself and i thought i had my whole life ahead of me i mean i mean in the best possible way i had a career that was taking off and so off we went to pursue my dreams and get to los angeles and start that life and i was just filled with hope and anticipation and joy and where were you

[Interviewer (Julian)]

on sort of like your queer journey at this point you know you were pretty out and proud oh yes i

[Mark S. King]

i was i just came out that way you know i just started off like that i actually have an older gay brother he's fifteen years older than me and so when i was just a tot he said i knew you were gay before i knew i was gay it was that obvious you know and i i had kind of made peace with that gosh by the time i was fourteen fifteen i understood what what my desire was and i decided that there was nothing wrong with it and that was that i just kind of reconciled that can you give me

[Interviewer (Julian)]

a snapshot of just like a weekend or maybe a week in your life as a young gay man and tell me about the hookup culture

[Mark S. King]

well okay gather round boys and girls once upon a time before there was this thing called the internet or tinder or grindr or any of those or anything remotely like that before there was computers at all there were bars and you would go meet people in person and have furtive glances from across a crowded room you know and that's how it was done analog cruising and i so that was the culture it was the culture of you go out there was drinking there was playing pool at the pool table and standing in and i just enjoyed the hunt i enjoyed being noticed i enjoyed the validation of that now my more mature self would say and that should have been enough you know you don't you know it should be enough to be noticed it should be enough to be validated in that way but i was a horny little kid and i just wanted to you know you know you'd say let's go and i'd say let's go and and away i'd go i was just twenty years old you know and in a culture that it's very important to remember at this time that obviously this is pre hiv or any of that stuff and we only had a certain vocabulary as gay men there were there was only a certain vocabulary that we had and that was sex it was truly just about the only thing that held us together other than maybe whether or not we wore the five hundred and one jeans and the flannel shirt or whatever we were wearing during that time that you know was of the time our language was sex it was the only way that we knew we were making a connection with one another and so that's how we communicated that's how we made friends that's how we got our our sense of community from

[Interviewer (Julian)]

i want to establish okay so sex is your common language but then at the same time i guess hiv is bubbling up in some pocket of la unbeknownst to you so there's this kind of like there's this sort of unseen unheard threat that's happening here and i just i guess i want to just capture a sense of the danger here at a at a random guess how many times do you think you were having unprotected sex every week oh well first of

[Mark S. King]

all whether unprotected sex nobody would you could say that to someone in nineteen eighty and they would have no idea what you're talking about what do you mean unprotected protected from what from what getting gonorrhea you know we called it the clap i used to say i got the clap so many times i called it the applause you know i i was in that clinic you know every couple of months yeah you would go in you'd get a shot you'd feel a little embarrassed you'd cruise the other guys in the waiting room and you'd go home you know that was so so yes unprotected is has no meaning in this context you know but how many times i was hooking up i don't know you know at least at least a couple three maybe if it was a a busy a busy week and i was hanging out at the gold coast on santa monica boulevard and you know my luck was good more than that so what was the

[Interviewer (Julian)]

first moment that you heard about people getting sick

[Mark S. King]

i remember whether i read it myself or read of it the the in nineteen eighty one eighty a few months there was a medical journal that posted the first known cases of what would become known as hiv and aids about five gay men who all got pneumocystis pneumonia which is a very specific kind of pneumonia that nobody really gets and they all got it and died of it and it was very odd and that got written up in the new york times within a few months in nineteen eighty one and i remembered conversations about that and the friends and i'm sure it was well i know it was a very common conversation in you know amongst groups of gay friends and i think everybody just kind of collectively went huh well that that doesn't sound good but then we immediately played a game in which we we separated out and i remember specifically saying something like well you probably have to be into some weird you know you're probably in some really you know kinky places doing kinky things or something you know you know i mean as opposed to me who is simply getting laid five five times a week with strangers you know but you do what you can it's funny how quickly the defense mechanism the the the will to protect oneself takes over yeah and you make up stories or you create a narrative for yourself that tells you this has nothing to do with me and i i i remember that i remembered that all my life because it gives me more empathy for people who do it now yeah who see something bad and think well it's got nothing to do with me i'm just going to get

[Interviewer (Julian)]

on with it so then how did this sort of one mysterious case in the newspaper turn into something tangible in your own world

[Mark S. King]

it was twice thrice removed whereas after a while it became the guy at the bank that cashed your check and he was gay and you would flirt with him when you take in your check and he was there on friday and dead on monday and the bartender that always serve you that just disappeared gone and you would later hear he died and that's when it got real shit got real where it was still not anybody that you knew knew but it was somebody you had once seen or you were acquainted with and then very quickly almost overnight it's like it just moved in close it moved in close and suddenly it wasn't a friend of a friend of a friend it was your friend it was someone you knew it was your roommate it was people around you very close and it was suddenly suffocatingly close and it's the world changed it changed very quickly and dramatically and it became terrorizing very fast in nineteen eighty four they identified the virus hiv but and by nineteen eighty five they had a test for it where you could take the test and find out if you had it by then i knew people who were dead i knew people who were dead and they called it different things it was it started out as gay cancer and then gay related infectious disease should we close the sex clubs and the the bath houses is you know what do we do and people were fighting for our sexual freedom and then other people were scared to death that we were all killing each other and so there was all of this conflict over what do we do and how do we do it and what's the smart thing how do we protect ourselves how do we protect our rights how do we protect our dignity and while all of those big kind of policy questions were swirling around you were planning a memorial for a friend of yours and stopping by the grocery store to buy groceries for somebody who couldn't get out anymore because they were sick and somebody was dying in your guest room i had a guest room i was lucky enough to live in la and have an extra room and people died in it and they died in it because their family didn't want them they couldn't go back home to wherever they came from because their family was terrified and maybe homophobic and didn't want them and so those of us who had an extra room i always said if you lived in la in the eighties and you had a guest room somebody died in it and that was that was true for me more than one and it just it just wrapped its arms around us and started squeezing and squeezing the test came out in march of nineteen eighty five you weren't supposed to take it another big argument well don't take this test because they'll just cancel your insurance and and there's no medications anyway and you'll get kicked out by your roommate and that you can't get a manicure in west hollywood and and there's nothing good that can come out of knowing if you're hiv positive or not so activists people advocates in our own community were saying don't do it there's nothing that can be done anyway it can only mean bad things don't take it you know it's like there was an envelope sitting on the table and inside it was going to tell me what whether i would be alive or dead in two years and what are you going to do you're going to open it of course i'm going to open it i want to know i want to know how to plan what to plan for so i opened it i took the test it was a blood test it took two weeks to get the results i did it after hours at a at a doctor's office where a friend worked as a nurse he snuck me in like after the office closed and secretly took my blood to have the test done because god forbid it should be on my insurance records that wouldn't be good so let's do it secretly and he i i can i'm i can remember standing in my kitchen i had that phone on the wall you know the with the long cord and talking on the phone in the kitchen or just answering the call and it's my friend and he says mark i'm so sorry but your test is positive you have you have hiv and good luck goodbye click there was it's not like so we're going to get you into a doctor and start you on medication there was none there was none there were none there was nothing to do just there's nothing but to know just to know and god i i don't i don't even know that i had the presence of mind to cry in that moment it was so stunning was okay what do i do maybe nothing maybe i'll do nothing maybe i'll just pretend i didn't get that phone call maybe i will just go on as if nothing happened because what can i do i didn't know who to tell or what to do and i think i just lived in like in a fog i was just in a fog i wasn't present for anything i couldn't concentrate on watching a movie or something it was there it was there and side story about four years earlier i had met the actor rock hudson in a bar in a gay restaurant okay i am strapped in okay charlie and i were celebrating our anniversary in a gay restaurant in silver lake and it was a nice restaurant nice enough i mean for a gay restaurant it's not they're not often great and this one at least had tablecloths and a cable candle on the table and we were celebrating like our third anniversary we had just gotten to la it was nineteen eighty or so and charlie and i are talking and he's staring over my shoulder at something and he's like oh my god he was from texas oh my god i'm like charlie what is it he's like right there over your shoulder right there it's rock hudson and i'm like well stop staring at him charlie stop staring that's very rude you should not you should let people have their privacy and just because he's famous well i was just saying this because really i would have had to turn around and look at him and i couldn't really do that so i was just mad that charlie had such a great view of rock hudson and so we're having this argument about whether or not he should be paying any attention to him and i heard this voice say you men having any fun and it's rock hudson and i turned around and charlie says oh yeah we're having a great time it's our anniversary he says really he says because my friend and i here he was having dinner with a friend my friend and i were here we're just discussing it and we think you are having a fight and charlie says oh no we're having a great time it's our anniversary and all that he says well that's great why don't you come over this table today down we'll celebrate rock hudson was even then one of the most iconic movie stars of all time and even in middle age at this point because he was in his what fifties late fifties whatever he was was still an imposing man and very confident it wasn't the first time that he had started chatting with a young strawberry blonde at the next table i can assure you and we sat at his table and i take the seat next to rock okay now i'm calling him rock i'm sitting down next to rock because i would have broken charlie's arm if he had taken that seat and we're chatting and he is drinking a lot he was an accomplished drinker a lot of scotch and the game trivial pursuit had just come out recently and people it was all the rage everybody was playing trivial pursuit because no one was online or looking at their phones because there were none and this is how we play this is how we entertained ourselves back in the old days and so and charlie is telling him about trivial pursuit and rock says well i've heard about it i've never played it though and charlie says well you need to come by and play it sometime and rock says sure and charlie says how about tonight and rock says sure and i'm looking back and forth between the two of them going what okay and he is meanwhile giving me some glances that i would have taken very differently if it weren't for the fact that i was celebrating my anniversary with the man on my immediate right you know but it is what it is this is what's going down and it is then decided that charlie will take his friend home who has begged off and decided that he's tired and is going to go home and so charlie is going to take that one home and rock will drive me to our house to me and charlie's crappy walk up one bedroom apartment in west los angeles that i can't believe to this day that he parked his rolls on but he did and we had a bottle of scotch it was a full bottle because we don't drink scotch but he drank the whole thing by the way wow we did in fact play trivial pursuit and there was a doris day question there was a doris day question i don't think it was about him i don't think it was about rock but it was about doris day and he knew it and he was very good at the game he was filling us with great stories about places that he's been and people and and all of that and the night is getting long it is now late and charlie says well i am i am tired and i do have to work tomorrow i'm gonna go to bed and rock's like oh i should leave and i'm like oh no stay we'll play some more you know and so charlie goes to bed rock stays i said hey you want me to roll a joint and he says well you know pot kind of makes me horny so i don't know if i'm gonna and i am rolling a joint faster than you can say star you know just getting this thing rolled up and in his mouth and so anyway yada yada yada as they say how is the sex it's a good question well he was very well built let me put it that way so there was that but there was this is what i remember about the sex there was a moment where he was lying down and i was over him somehow and i don't remember the gymnastics of it but i was above him and maybe i had you know you know completed the task or whatever and it's dim it's kind of dark in the room and i'm looking down trying to make out his face in the dark and then i see it he's looking up at me and he says are you done and there was just this this world weariness in the man it was kind of like i'm tired the game has played out it's time to go home and all of the gregarious entertainer that i had been in the company of the previous few hours was gone it was he was now too drunk too tired and now he successfully another young strawberry blonde it's time to go home you know and i remember that because it was sad and it made me feel kind of bad i mean bad for a lot of reasons first of all it was perfectly okay with charlie that i stayed up and had sex with rock hudson it was fine with him i just felt bad because it had always been a game to me anyway the sex and the pursuit of it but he was so clearly a much better player and someone who had played it a lot longer and it was like seeing your future as somebody as an older gay man that was just tired of it just tired of it and tired of the the mystique that he carried because he could walk into any room and be rock hudson and point to a young man and away they would go you know i i'm i'm filling in the blanks here of course but there was just a lot in that and as he's getting dressed and preparing to go and i grabbed a envelope or something and i said excuse me before you go could could i could i get an autograph and he's like yeah sure and he's starting and he's writing it down i said you know it was so isn't that funny how doris day was was a was a question in the in the game you know and i'm still the puppy you know the puppy dog going wasn't that funny you know and he's like mo mark life is not the movies and he leaves god and on that paper in beautiful handwriting all my best rock hudson

[Podcast Host (Julian)]

hey we're going to take a quick ad break but stick around because we'll be back with more what it was like

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[Mark S. King]

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[Mark S. King]

the next time i saw his face was a few years later in the very famous imagery of him with doris day doing some appearance together and he looked ghastly he looked eighty sunken face he had the look he had aids face and i know that look and i know that face and there it was and as i am dealing with my hiv diagnosis or at least if you could call it a diagnosis i guess it was the test that came back with without the bother of a doctor involved you know as i'm dealing with coming to terms with what that means i am watching rock hudson die on television every day it was all they could talk about it was the biggest story of the year it was on entertainment tonight every day every day it was in the new york times it was it was on the nightly news there's dan rather talking about you know tom brokaw and the latest on rock hudson aerial views of him being lifted taken out of a helicopter in paris to to go try some experimental treatments and and all of that and and we all watched the death of rock hudson over those months and it was rough it was rough to see that and to have to be confronted with it i and by the way i i don't mean in any way to suggest that that that was how i became hiv positive that was one night among hundreds hundreds there were many suitors when it comes to who it was that might have infected me nor do i put any blame or responsibility on anybody else we are all responsible for our own actions we're all responsible for our own bodies and we didn't know again you ask what was the risk nothing oh maybe gonorrhea so even at the time that that i had my encounter with him there was we didn't know nothing there was nothing to to know but it was it was it was difficult to watch his demise and i had talked to my i had called everybody i know the day after he and i were together depending on who they were i would tell them part of the story or the whole story i told my parents guess what i played trivial pursuit with rock hudson that's all i told them and and when he got sick my dad bless his heart my dad air force colonel military dad on the phone from back home saying well i i heard rock hudson sick you know maybe you could go up to the hospital and take a trivial pursuit oh that's nice i thought oh my god you know what a sweet thought first of all ain't nobody letting me into cedar sinai to see rock hudson but the innocence of his and yeah i i'm still moved by it yeah yeah so yeah that was the environment in which i was dealing with it and i i i came out of my fog eventually within a year i guess i i those of us who were diagnosed by back then i think that we did one or two things we were just stunned and and and immobile and didn't know what to do and are we so terrified we didn't do anything and we quietly those people just kind of quietly faded away you know and died or not if they were very lucky or

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you

[Mark S. King]

said well i'm going to die anyway i'm going to go out fighting i have somebody has to do something somebody has to talk about this somebody has to educate somebody's got to get people involved and that was what created the movement of aids activism and a movement by the way that i think stands next to any social justice movement in the history of time that can stand proudly alongside any of the social justice movements in that we were a people who were feared often hated for who we were anyway abandoned by every our our government institution social institutions religious institutions everybody nobody came stood up for us and in the meantime we're turned into grotesque human beings through all of this terrible things that it did to our bodies the the skin covered in skin lesions i i i visited friends in the hospital that no longer looked quite human it was a horror show covered in so many lesions that you were could barely see their eyes oh god distribution of fat humpbacks the loss of the fat in your face so that you're you became withdrawn and so it it was cruel it's a cruel disease but it was cruel in the way it disfigured us especially in los angeles the capital of a physical beauty supposedly yeah and i was terrified of that you know i was terrified of wow what now the thing i'm going to cry about is the fact that i feared losing my looks and yet i was twenty four years old yeah i was twenty four years old i i every everything that i thought i knew or to expect that all of that that future you know that we talked about that happiness and joy where did that go i was marked and degraded as a human being yeah when i became hiv positive marked integrated people viewed me differently and even to this day people view people living with hiv as somehow untrustworthy wow clearly we did something wrong perhaps illegal and that's why we are suffering with this because we did something wrong and we're not trustworthy and don't believe them and i felt every bit of that so i stopped doing what i was doing i stopped doing the acting thing i was growing out of it anyway so i got a job at the first aids organization founded in los angeles in los angeles the la shanti foundation and get this this was our mission to help people die with dignity that should give you an idea of what we were dealing with no medications you know research just only beginning and so our job was to train volunteers to be with the dying and we had an extensive training process for volunteers and they would be assigned a client somebody with aids and our job was to be a compassionate presence for that person and not try to solve anything and not tell them it's going to be okay just be present with them and let them feel what they're going to feel the fear the anger whatever it is just be present and let be a sounding board and let them feel that and a lot of the people that were our clients they might have had significant others or even family but all of those people are going to say stick in there john you can fight this you're going to be okay you're going to be okay you know that the messages they were getting and they knew they were not going to be okay they saw the writing on the wall they knew it was happening they knew they weren't going to make it they had plenty of evidence all around them and they needed somebody that wouldn't tell them it was going to be okay that would just be there with them and show them a sense of love and understanding without saying but fight this yeah that was the organization i went to work for that's what we did wow and you would get a client and meet with him maybe two or three times and he would die and then you'd get another one and then you'd get another one and the people doing that work were superhuman and needed a lot of support themselves to process each one of those deaths because in many times they were the most intimate friend of that person yeah because they could be their most honest selves with that person they were often there for the death itself it was we all had a we all had our funeral mapped out i had a folder marked memorial and i must say i think maybe the gays had something to do with how memorial services are held these days because it was during the eighties when all these aids memorials were happening that we brought in singers but i mean pop singers and drag queens and funny videos and all of this because we're nothing of not creative people right yeah and not to mention going to funerals conducted by the family where there was no mention of it being gay no mention of the grieving partner sitting in the third row oh that's horrible and so you'd stand up and you'd say how dare you john was a gay man that was loved by all of us and that sitting right there is his loving partner of the last eleven years we would make social protest at funerals that refused to acknowledge who they actually were who had actually died you know my best friend died well i mean who your best friend was was a moving target depending on who was still alive my best friend today charles we joke because he was like fourth in line like to the throne fourth in line the other three died and you know he he died in my guest room i he couldn't talk to his family back home anymore because they would tell him on the phone he was going to hell and we would sing to him and hold his hand and wait and you know julian i'm a person in my mid twenties at this time i'm still trying to figure out life why are we here life's big questions what are we doing here what does it all mean is there a god the kind of questions that you figure you got your whole life to figure out and you'll take it you know one year at a time and you'll get to those things and then suddenly whoosh you've got no time at all what do you believe what do you believe now because tick tock and so yeah i remember leslie dying and looking around to see if maybe i would see i don't know some spirit you know i didn't know maybe there'd be a spirit or something a shadow or the curtains would rustle something that would say i'm here i i'm here after all he died and it was quiet and nothing happened now a much smarter person than me would later tell me mark stop looking for god in the drapes you know you're looking for a miracle and i'll tell you what the miracle was the miracle was that leslie died surrounded by his closest friends yeah that held his hand and sang to him and and provided comfort and love that has that has my sense of spirituality if you can call it that boils down to that i believe what i can see but i've seen beautiful things i have seen people who were physically lessened and maybe grotesque stand up and go to a protest and demand that something be done for research i've seen people load up cars with groceries and start food banks and start meeting in their homes and create support groups and march on the national institute institute of health and say where is the research yeah help us yeah

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i

[Mark S. King]

have seen beautiful things and and those are the miracles you know it's not hollywood it is very much right here in the here and now yeah

[Interviewer (Julian)]

hey

[Podcast Host (Julian)]

it's time for a quick ad break

[Interviewer (Julian)]

here but please don't go anywhere stick

[Podcast Host (Julian)]

around because we'll be right back

[Mark S. King]

this

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[Interviewer (Julian)]

during this period watching your friends just drop like flies i mean how were

[Mark S. King]

you feeling i tried my best to play invisible you know like okay if i just stay low maybe it won't happen to me even though i had plenty of evidence to suggest otherwise yeah i i every death every death was a preview of coming attractions you know every death and i would i would see people die different ways i would see them die because they had an emergency medical event at home rush to the hospital and die and i saw the people who died at home some died overnight in their sleep but i also saw my friend marcos woke up blind because the virus does terrible things to your body and one of the things it did is something called cmv retinitis and it attacks your eyes and he woke up blind and he could not take it imagine you have no preparation for this you wake up you cannot see and you won't see again and he put a plastic bag on his head and ended his life you know my older gay brother who also lived in los angeles during this time he and his partner emil were role models of of all that could be the kind of gay life i might have they were loving and successful and devoted and emil ended up in the hospital with aids and i was there when he died in the other room it was my brother stayed with him and i was waiting in the other room i could look out the window of their house and see the the medical examiner van come and take a meal away my brother was destroyed by that he's never been the same and it was a year or two later that he told me you know you were there i called you to the house as he was dying but you weren't there before don't you ever wonder what it was like i'm like well no i mean i guess it was bad he said yeah he said he said that day emil said today is the day and go get the pills and the book and the book was the book on how to kill yourself and his partner said go get scotch and get this brand of scotch which they didn't have in the house because they both stopped drinking when emil was diagnosed so my brother had to get in the car and drive across the valley to find this particular brand of scotch hoping that his partner would be alive when he got home so that he could kill him and and so my brother comes home and as he's explaining this to me he said i'm sitting there and i don't know how many capsules to open and put the powder in the drink i don't know how many and i want to do it right so and we're looking at the book and we're not sure and so i i just take all of them and open up all of them into the scotch god what was the

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powder

[Mark S. King]

second all what's that i think it's a sleeping pill or a pain pill but it was the recommended medication and and he put all that powder into the scotch he didn't want emile to drink it at least not yet he he says please don't don't drink it don't not yet i i want to say i love you again and emil couldn't wait he really was in so much pain he just wanted the drink and drank it and emil was not religious at all he had no sense of spirituality he thought when you're gone you're gone but my brother loves to tell the story of saying to him after he's drank drank it he says emil i'm going to miss you i'm going to miss you so much and emil says i'm going to miss

[Podcast Host (Julian)]

you too

[Mark S. King]

and that scene or something very close to it was being played

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out

[Mark S. King]

all over the city of los angeles during that time and in fact when anyone hospice care nurse increases the morphine to make you more comfortable they're doing essentially the same thing they know that increasing that shuts down the body and so we're all engaged in the same thing so i take no i have no sense of taboo any sense of guilt and certainly my brother doesn't for having helped emile and his life on his own terms and it happened all the time and at least this one was graceful compared to the men that jumped off bridges and shot themselves when they got their hiv test results and that happened a lot too

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this

[Mark S. King]

is hard stuff right i mean i'm sorry pete don't be sorry i it's

[Interviewer (Julian)]

beautiful in a way it's it's a sort of beautiful affirmation of humanity and

[Podcast Host (Julian)]

it's it is sad but that's that's part of the beauty of it mm i asked you before how you were

[Interviewer (Julian)]

feeling and i guess i'm also curious

[Podcast Host (Julian)]

how is it that you're still with

[Interviewer (Julian)]

us you know you're watching these people die all around you and you described it as like a ticking clock as well only it seemed to not tick

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for you

[Mark S. King]

you know the human body is a mysterious thing and we're all built a little different and who knows what it is science is interested i've certainly done my share of clinical trials in terms of why didn't mark die i don't know what the figure are figure is in terms of how many of us like me who tested hiv positive in nineteen eighty five are still alive i don't think it's very many that's for sure and we also know based on frozen blood from various other clinical trials for other things other studies they had blood samples left over from the sixties the seventies which tested hiv positive this virus has been around for a long time and because of its because of the period in which it's kind of inactive there was a delayed reaction but to answer your question i don't know i never got sick i never got sick i was never hospitalized i have had some bouts of illness because of the medication you know it's not the disease so much as the cure right medications are all toxic yeah and they're meant to go in and kill something in your body and they they present day medications do a pretty good job of that but i've been taking all the medications since the beginning including the ones that didn't work but were toxic anyway and so why am i still here i i stopped trying to figure out that one a long time ago there is no rhyme or reason the life is random life is random yeah it's like you know the guy in the foxhole how come the guy next to me got shot and i didn't yeah you can spend your whole life beating yourself up over that having survivor's guilt all of those things and i've experienced my share of that but i work it out right here sitting here with you yeah this is how i work it out i tell the story and i answer your questions yeah and i try to give you a sense of it was terrible and there was such beauty to it such beauty to it and and i'm proud of what my community did largely gay men but certainly not completely and standing side by side with other people by the way black men and women trans women heterosexual allies and heterosexual people living with the virus all of us creating this patchwork of advocacy and activism and a true sense of social justice i am certain that i would know much less about racial disparity inequity in the world what it feels like to be a trans person were it not for being involved in hiv for forty years when i was in los angeles and thousands of miles away from my family the people who mothered me were black trans women wow who were clients of ours or fellow lunch volunteers in the work that i was doing they were the ones drying my tears they were the ones holding me and telling me it was going to be okay when my own mom couldn't be near me there is there is no more in my experience powerful creature on earth than a black woman no completely completely and our world of advocacy today should lift up that community more than it has they're slowly being able to take on positions of leadership and given those opportunities should happen a lot more

[Interviewer (Julian)]

you've also mentioned your parents a few times through this can you tell me about when you came out as hiv positive to them but also give me a sense of you know did they realize the chaos that was happening in la

[Mark S. King]

my dad is this is the dynamic with my parents i've lost them both now but the dynamic at that time was my mother who was a librarian at a university well educated and very smart and if she didn't know something she went to the library and so as hiv was starting to happen she was looking into it she was taking note she had two gay sons we were on her mind yeah my dad was the retired military guy that everybody loved and he was a wonderful man who was the one who was on the phone extension and would never say anything and would pipe up every once in a while how you doing you eating enough you know and mom would do the talking you know that was the

[Interviewer (Julian)]

dynamic that provides such a clear image

[Mark S. King]

of their dynamic yes yes and so i called home when i got not long after i got the test result you know it's so i don't know what gives me i truly don't what gives me the sense of shamelessness and by that i mean i kind of live without shame you know you can't shame me it's impossible and and that served me well in terms of the hiv because there is so much stigma there are so many people who see me as some sort of diseased pariah you know and i don't take that on yeah at all i refuse but i called them a few days after getting the results and i remember saying now now a mom this doesn't mean anything bad will happen happen it just means that i've been exposed to the virus but it doesn't mean it'll ever do any anything bad to me and she's like huh okay well all right well then be good to yourself and get a lot of rest and you know and that was you know she was very pragmatic that way but she was learning and i remember asking her years later hey you know when i was telling you that i was going to be just fine did you buy it and she said oh no oh no i had i had clippings i already had newspaper clippings i knew what was going on i was just praying

[Interviewer (Julian)]

yeah as the nineteen eighties drew to a close how had los angeles changed through your eyes

[Mark S. King]

it got sad and quiet at least in the community i was going to the bars emptied out there was a sense of desperation and and as the eighties closed there was still no drug i think it was not until nineteen eighty nine that azt the first fda approved drug was you know approved and in use and it wasn't very good and made a lot of people sick so it was a sense of desperation there was a lot of advocacy going on you could go to the west hollywood plummer park auditorium once a week for a medical update rally sort of thing and everybody went there because that's where you would trade information pre internet if you wanted to find out you know where's the latest clinical trial and who's the new doctor that you should try out and how do i get crystals if i want to and by that i mean the rock rocks the minerals because people were doing everything we were we were doing we were doing holistic massage and laying on of crystals and taking supplements like shark cartilage yeah and you know every sort of you know anything anything that we thought might work you know acupuncture eastern medicine you know anything that might work and there you would go to the bulletin board and you would look at this this massive bulletin board with little things about there's a support group starting here or this doctor has a drug that he thinks will work you know so yeah it was a mixture of false hope and that's why even now today people talk about well is there going to be a cure probably not in my lifetime you know i i think that hiv is just a very complicated virus it's very hard to rid it of in all of the places that hides in the body we have a lot to be grateful for i i am not infectious i cannot give you hiv i cannot transmit the virus because my virus is so it's been you know the my my viral load is so depressed my the medications are so good that it keeps my virus at a level so low that i cannot transmit it to someone else and that has been proven now for the last fifteen years and it's a wonderful thing to know because when that science finally came out i i held my head up a little higher yeah you know i didn't feel like a disease pariah anymore i don't want to hurt anybody i don't want to put anybody at risk i don't want to do that but to know that i could have sex again and when you say what's protected and unprotected sex with

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me

[Mark S. King]

in regards to hiv is protected yeah because i am undetectable yeah and i am unable to transmit the virus that doesn't mean that people might not be a little nervous maybe they don't understand that they've just heard it for the first time they're like i don't know well i'm not gonna i'm not in the business of talking people into having sex with me okay so if you don't understand the science and i'm happy to educate you about it yeah but i'm not going to do it at the foot of my bed and then hope i get lucky you know i'll educate you or i'll you but

[Interviewer (Julian)]

not both yeah yeah so to so to your way of thinking when did the aids crisis finish it's not finished

[Mark S. King]

yeah it's not finished not at all i don't know about australia but we have seven thousand people in the united states in the united states die of aids every year seven thousand and by the way we're going to have a whole lot more because this fascist regime i am now living under in the united states doesn't care about me are people like me much less people who are black or brown and they have slashed prevention dollars they've slashed research there are research studies that were on their way to learning more to develop a cure that were canceled that cannot be restarted because they've just stopped it mid process and would have to start from scratch if they ever got funding to start again that's the not to mention all the global money that trump canceled so not only is did hiv not end or did aids not end it's just getting started again we will see an enormous outbreak we already have we have more deaths in the united states more deaths globally more new life for the first time in many years an increase a significant increase in new infections why because there's not promotion there's not prevention monies there's all of these things and by the way it's worth saying that gay white men like myself we got what we came for we got the money and the research and the support groups and the medications that worked and a lot of us left the playing field and we left behind our allies people that had fought alongside us black and brown people trans black women those folks we left them behind to fend for themselves and and that's shameful and it will only lead to more suffering and more infections i wish people could finally understand that health is global disease is global you can't just limit it to one place and hope for the best like our administration has done or we're going to ignore those shithole countries as if they have no value or by the way think that you can somehow contain their people or their diseases you can't all health is global and i'm afraid and and the kind of cuts to that sort of funding is being already being felt but it's going to be felt to a twofold and threefold as the years these years progress it's just getting started again yeah

[Interviewer (Julian)]

so what did your experience through the nineteen eighties and into the nineties too i guess teach you that you want people to know now

[Mark S. King]

what i want people to know now is that life is a bumpy ride and it's often scary and the best thing that we can do while we're here is to make it a little less scary for somebody else whatever that means and i know how corny that sounds it turns out that all the corny things they say are true at least that one is yeah i have helped make life less scary for people some of them were friends of mine some of them were just people living with hiv in general and that's the best we can do if you if you can do that even make life less scary for your partner or a family member that's the most we can do and as much as you think i had such a front row seat at mortality and all of that i am no more prepared now than i was when i was twenty four years old and just found out that i was living with a terminal virus i'm no more prepared now life is a wonderment and so is death and i don't know so the only thing i can take comfort in is that i am kind yeah so if i can have more empathy for any other people based on what i've been through if that can just inform me so that i am kinder and more empathetic to other people regardless of what their stuff is then that's a win otherwise what the hell was

[Interviewer (Julian)]

it all for yeah i mean it feels to me like there's a lot of optimism there or there's hope you know i think you believe in people that's that's what i'm reading yeah i

[Mark S. King]

do i think the good outweighs the bad yes i am one of those people that believes that that we should all be helping one another and those who are able to help other people should do it and i've seen what happens when people that would who would otherwise never meet are brought together for some sort of common purpose and work together for it and succeed because we have largely succeeded in many of the things that we faced around hiv in the eighties you know there are little things that we haven't overcome racism you know homophobia you know fascism you know those things no we have we have not overcome but we have their battles that we have won and so we

[Interviewer (Julian)]

keep plugging away yeah i mean i love that i'm i'm tempted to finish on this sort of optimistic cautionarily optimistic note but i'm also thinking that in some ways you live through hell you know this period that you're describing sounds just nightmarish to me i have i've never i've never seen death on a scale like you have so i'm wondering if you've also got maybe a bit of a warning you know you're talking about we're slashing funding for science at the moment and you know the the us is under the control of a fairly misguided administration do you have a warning for these kinds of people it's

[Mark S. King]

going to come back and bite you in the ass folks you know these short term oh let's take money away from this to make our rich friends richer it's going to come back and it's going to be suffering more suffering undeniable unignorable suffering this is throughout our history isn't it it's always been throughout our history that that people with power want to keep it yeah and and it's a cycle where finally there is a rising up right yeah but really what i think it speaks to is people need somebody to blame yeah you know blame the gays for having all of that perverse sex and that gave us aids blame the immigrants because they're taking our jobs away our economy's bad blame the poor people blame the black people for all that violence you know the other the other yeah stigma is such a powerful powerful thing because it's kind of a shorthand for helping us feel better about ourselves if i can stigmatize that person that group of people i can feel better about myself and i need to do that i need to find the other so that i can feel better about myself i'm no stranger to that i i i grew up in west hollywood where even gay guys were kicking their roommates out when they found out that they had hiv or aids we were all scared shitless fear is a powerful thing and and i remember that today when i encounter ignorance our stigma around hiv i remember that i remember i was afraid once too yeah i i didn't understand it and it was a scary time and i remember thinking oh it doesn't have anything to do with me those are they're probably really kinky people getting this i remember that and so i try to give a lot of grace to people who are honestly ignorant and and they just don't know yeah and it's the willful ignorance you gotta watch out

[Interviewer (Julian)]

for yes yeah the determined ignorant yes

[Mark S. King]

there a lot can be criticized about the reagan administration that was in charge when aids came along but i think a lot of that was ignorance of it was easier to to it was easier to misunderstand gay people because he didn't know any nobody was out you know so it was a different time and we didn't know what we didn't know and people were afraid about how the virus was transmitted because we didn't know i mean so that i understand during that period now we do know all of those things we've all been educated about lgbt people and turns out that they're not all terrible and they're and they are not child molesters and you know i mean and we know how this virus is transmitted and what we can do to stop it it but we're willfully ignorant about it those in charge are willfully ignorant of those facts so that they can continue to discriminate and have bias and let people die that they don't care about mark

[Interviewer (Julian)]

you've been amazing thank you so much this is this has been such an interesting and emotional and hilarious ride oh

[Mark S. King]

good you're welcome because that sounds like my life emotional and hilarious and terrifying

[Interviewer (Julian)]

yeah yeah yeah it's been a real fruit salad of feelings so so thanks for taking me along good

[Podcast Host (Julian)]

if you'd like to hear more of mark's story i highly highly recommend his two thousand seven memoir a place like this he also wrote a fantastic book just a few years ago it's called my fabulous chronicles of a gay survivor go and check them both out you can also follow him on social media and read his very popular blog you might already know it my fabulous disease links to all of these are in the show notes and for subscribers this week follow me as we explore a viral outbreak that you probably haven't heard of in nineteen ninety four racehorses in australia started dying and no one could figure out why and then this man this absolute legend of the racehorse industry a trainer named vic rail he died too and still no one could understand it well it turned out that all of them had been infected with this indigenous australian virus that had been living in the fruit bat population now some of you might recall that ebola also came from bats and this virus had crossed from bats into horses and then into people and it's a horrible virus i gotta say it looks like a horrible death but what's interesting is how fast the state government and the racing industry all moved in to contain it and what could have been a full blown epidemic was shut down thanks to some quick thinking and a quick response time so it's an interesting story because that's kind of the opposite to what happened in covid people didn't respond fast enough the chinese government put a lot more effort into trying to control the narrative rather than trying to control the virus so it's a it's a really interesting comparison story so come and check that out if you subscribe you can listen to it right now if you don't subscribe you know what to do and for the rest of you i'll see you all next week what it was like is produced by rachel tuffery this episode was edited by ellie dickey who also does our research our cover art is by rich akers our theme music was produced by jimmy saunders and this whole thing has been a super real production

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friends which is our podcast that is really just a long con to invite amazing guests onto our show and trick them into being our friends great guests like linda cardellini jeff hiller paulina porizkova other people and we'll also give you a sneak peek into what our text thread looks like the kind of stuff

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we write about like should i buy this am i a unicorn do you think i'm a unicorn follow here to make friends wherever you get your podcast

[Jessi Klein]

and watch us on youtube

[Mark S. King]

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