Clouds with Scattered Thrusts of Light
A Memoir of Mark Thompson
William Stewart
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R E V I S E D 2 0 2 1
AS IT HAPPENS, I don’t have to describe the circumstances of my first meeting with Mark Thompson. Here, in his own words, is a picture of that evening of February 1980, extracted from his most personal book, Gay Body:
I was in a storefront loft in the Mission district, attending a reunion of radical fairies who had been at the previous summer’s gathering in Arizona. [I, William, had not been at the gathering, but was a guest at the reunion anyway – ed.] …A canopy of exotic fabrics hung over the dimly lit space, sheltering the men below who were languidly piled on dunes of oversized cushions. I felt myself floating away in the scented twilight, as if on a cloud.
My detachment was partly induced by the intoxicating spell of soft light and brotherly bonhomie cast around me, but a certain indifference had set in as well. A week before, an invitation to another event for the same evening had mysteriously arrived in my mailbox. A newly formed fraternity of leathermen was hosting an inaugural party and the announcement was my ticket in.
Finally, something in me spoke: I had to get out of the room. Giving vent to the abandoned kid inside would not happen through comfort, but through risk. With great care and attention, I needed to be ripped apart.
An expert at self-sabotage, I couldn’t resist betraying even this one honest insight. Feeling remorse over leaving, guilt for being bored, I slid off my cushion and stealthily departed the room hoping no one would notice. But once I pushed through the door onto Valencia Street, the stranglehold of suffocating emotion ceased. Crossing that threshold represented more than accepting an unusual invitation.
With methodical moves I went to my Volkswagen bug, opened the front hood, stripped off my drawstring pants, silk blouse, and t’ai chi slippers. Standing naked in the quiet alley, even for a minute, felt exhilarating.
I noticed myself becoming aroused, a miraculous thing considering the chill. My erection signaled spontaneous delight more than calculated eros, for I was being remade by the moment. I stood motionless for another few seconds, then pulled on jeans, a leather jacket, and boots, got in the car, and drove off humming, transformed and ready for whatever fortune the night might still hold.
I treasure these words, not only because they evoke the setting of our initial encounter, but also because they reveal a bit of Mark’s complexity, the competing inclinations and urges that forged his soul. It was my good fortune to be an intimate of this generous and brilliant man, from the time of our first date in 1980 until his death in the summer of 2016. During those thirty-six years, I came to see the reserves of strength and the hidden fears, the public achievements and private griefs, of a life that contained much richness, but also more hurt than anyone should have had to endure, and more courage than I, for one, can fully fathom.
I won’t dwell on Mark’s family story, since he has portrayed it in such painstaking detail in his own writing. When we became lovers, he was still marveling that he had achieved escape velocity from the toxic atmosphere of his parents’ disintegrating marriage, his mother’s mental breakdown, and the isolation of queer adolescence in the shadow of Carmel, California—that oceanfront village of understated good taste, built on reserves of wealth whose culture was omnipresent, and/but utterly alien to the experience of a plumber’s son who’d grown up in peripheral working-class and semi-rural areas, far from the picture-postcard rich folks’ homes. A tiny handful of friends and communion with nature were precious, but he needed to get away—to more worldliness, more gayness, more life.
San Francisco! That was the gravitational center to which he was irresistibly drawn. There, starting as a student journalist at San Francisco State, and then more explicitly when he became cultural editor of The Advocate, he created his first career. His unwavering focus: an ongoing in-depth exploration of his own tribe and its burgeoning, fomenting culture. He had the good fortune, for a brief moment in the mid-seventies, to acquire an abundance of experience and insight in tandem with the expansion of the Lesbian-Gay community. Almost immediately, he realized that his life’s work was to document that culture—and, mostly invisibly, working from behind the keyboard, he also helped shape it as well.
Throughout his writing, there is a connecting thread. His underlying subject is queer consciousness, as manifested in any number of forms: the specific trajectories of individual queer lives; the evolution of queer politics and movements and grassroots activism; the self-empowerment of groups marginalized by the LGBT mainstream; and the realms of archetype and spirit, especially in their queerer configurations. This was his terrain, which he crisscrossed assiduously for the duration of his life.
Mark’s interest in the experience of marginalized folk was by not, as they say, strictly academic. From an early age, he felt the pull of the psychosexual realm in its darker aspect, which later coalesced in his attraction to the world of radical sexuality and its ritual corollaries—gateways, in his view, to shamanic and transcendent experience. In fact, Mark’s taste for leather and sacred kink was developing exponentially at the time of our first encounter, as the above-quoted vignette makes clear, though I knew nothing about it at the time.
* * *
I WAS THE ONE who went after him, not the other way round, and at first he received my courting with considerable reluctance. He was just out of a relationship that had left him feeling wary, and he wasn’t looking to partner again any time soon. I persisted, though, because I was deeply attracted: to his intelligence, to his wit, to his sophistication, to his depth, to his unabashed gay identity, to his career success, to his circle of connections, and, not least, to his good looks—a sturdy blondish handsomeness that he attributed to his mother’s Nebraska pioneer forebears.
Our first real “date” involved a trip to North Beach, in that baby-blue Volkswagen beetle, named Toots. We were going to the San Francisco Art Institute, to attend a birthday tribute to James Broughton, already Mark’s cherished mentor and close personal friend. It was a chilly night in early November, slippery with leaves wet from rain. We waited outside the modern theater, on the cement deck behind the original Italianate building, until a Cinematheque staffer came along to unlock the doors. I remember Mark introducing me, James’s embrace, the opening of magic vistas, the window-mobile (James’s word) of film and poetry and collaboration and intimate delight. The friendships that I forged with James and his beloved Joel Singer, with Will Roscoe and Bradley Rose and with many other faeries and kindred folk, were gifts that came to me through Mark, and I’m grateful for the pleasures and projects that I shared with them—the many dead, and the relatively few who remain.
I think Mark would want me to tell you that I seduced him after serving onion pie as the main course of his first dinner at my table—he referred to it often enough, so I figure I should mention it. I know he would want me to tell you about how we were approached by a handsome uniformed and booted park policeman on the slopes of Land’s End, just as we were starting to have sex—he told the story dramatically himself, on the stage at my 60th birthday party, replete with salacious details. We were fined, as I recall, $50 each, and no, the officer did not join in.
Most of our private time we spent in his studio apartment overlooking the lower eastern corner of Buena Vista Park. He lived high up in an art-deco building; one took a tiny, slow elevator to the seventh floor. Very exotic, this seemed to me, from the vantage point of the funky semi-communal flats that I had lived in—indeed, it still brings pleasure to recollect.
The apartment had a somewhat irregular layout, corresponding to the angles of the streets below. The main window offered the bijou vista into the treetops, while to the left, at a more-than-90-degree angle to the parkside view, a shallow bay extended over a sheer cliff of stucco down to Waller Street, here just a flight of steps, seemingly half a mile below. Beyond, a panorama over the whole southeast quadrant of the city opened out, in dramatic contrast to the green of the park diagonally opposite. When he first invited me over, he had just acquired a new couch, a very big and grown-up purchase. I was somewhat overawed, and thoroughly excited about this new relationship with a very grown-up and handsome young man. I was 30, he was 29.
Along with buying the new couch, Mark had replaced a second-hand bed with a good mattress on a platform that he had constructed in the window alcove (butch points for carpentry skills). From the bed, sitting up, one saw the trees; to the left was the window high above Waller Street. Happy nights I spent there, in that boat-like bay—the lights of the city over our shoulders, preferably shrouded in fog, and at the bow—or was it the stern?—the darkness of the forest, sometimes with moonlight slanting over, often with clouds rolling in. Whatever our other schedule constraints, we always tried to spend Sunday nights together there, so that we could drift off listening to Music from the Hearts of Space. It was a live radio show back then, three hours on KPFA starting at 11, and we’d maybe make love and then always fall into a kind of trance, until eventually one of us would groggily turn off the radio, awakened by a BBC voice cutting short whatever leitmotif might have been weaving in and out of our shared sacramental dreamtime from the show.
Aside from the windows, the apartment offered another visual that drew my attention on a regular basis. In the tiny vestibule outside the bathroom there were two pieces of framed art, both ink on paper. One was a drawing of a chorus line of fishnet-stockinged Playboy bunnies (that is to say, rabbits); but it was the other one that held my eye. This was a depiction of a sleazy sex scene set in a graffiti-covered, cracked-tile bathroom, signed “Rex”. Rendered in countless pinpoint black dots, this fastidiously-made masturbatory fantasy-image intrigued me—a reflecting glass, perhaps, of my own sexual ambivalence, in which I saw myself as embarrassingly juvenile (that is to say, squeamish and limited) and at the same time fetishistic in an offbeat sort of way, too, um, petty to warrant mention—or at least, that’s how I’ve often construed it, though the narrative hasn’t been particularly helpful.
We were probably a few months into our relationship before we started talking in depth about our different sexual realities. It had been clear from the outset that our tastes weren’t particularly compatible, but we were caring lovers, and had found ways to enjoy each other physically as well as in other respects. Also, being sensible people, we weren’t attempting monogamy, since it was obvious that neither of us could completely meet the other’s needs.
One evening, Mark opened up the topic of his kinky tastes, telling me of a date he had arranged for a subsequent night. He was awkward and diffident; I sensed that he was fearing judgment, but my response was unequivocally affirming. I intuitively knew that this was an essential part of his journey, and I encouraged him without reservation. Our trust deepened, as Mark came to realize that I had no desire to limit his exploring, but on the contrary, wanted to support his unique path of individuation, wherever it might lead.
* * *
SADLY, BY THEN a shadow was already spreading over that path, although we couldn’t foresee how dark our sky would eventually turn. Indeed, Mark’s magic moment was already starting to end, even before it could be said to have truly begun. There may have been a near-perfect season, perhaps the summer he went to Crete, but soon enough there was the Briggs amendment, and then there were the assassinations, and the trial, and the riots—and although gay San Francisco continued to party, it was clear that the course of liberation wasn’t going to be as smooth as we might have wished. Mark was more determined than ever to foster queer consciousness and self-empowerment, and in many ways his most powerful days were still ahead of him, but his hour of sunshine had passed. Observing current events, and as always looking for corollaries in his own psyche, he unflinchingly named and “called out,” as we would say nowadays, the power of homophobia, external and internal, and its capacity for destroying lives.
And then, AIDS happened. It’s graven on my memory, that late afternoon in the spring of 1981, May or June I think, when I came to his apartment after his workday, and he told me about seeing a fellow-worker from The Advocate in the hospital, covered with KS lesions. “They’re calling it the gay cancer,” he said. As per the familiar trope, a metaphorical chill came over the room, despite the golden sunlight slanting in over dusty Buena Vista Park. We didn’t know what it meant, but we knew in our bones that it couldn’t be good.
We could mostly ignore it at first. We went to a faerie gathering together over Labor Day of 1981, the third of the “national gatherings,” this one held in national forest at an altitude of some 7000 feet, an hour outside of Pecos, New Mexico; perhaps not surprisingly, it was cold and rainy the entire week we were there. James and Joel slept in their Volkswagen camper-bus at 5000 feet, and came up for a couple of daytimes, but James couldn’t tolerate the altitude, and then somehow they got word that James’s teenage son Orion had suffered serious head injuries in a motorcycle accident. Storm clouds. Rain. Reagan. GRID. Soggy heart circles, soggy tent, dubious food, and a sweatlodge which made me realize that sweatlodges are definitely not my thing. Oh, and a bunch of people who decided to call themselves the Revolting Hagettes.
That fall, wanting to reinvent myself as someone I wasn’t really equipped to be, I left my hippie flat and rented a loft space on the edge of SOMA, at 12th and Bryant. It wasn’t a happy choice, as it turned out, and although Mark did his best to support me, my depression was hard for both of us. Still, we continued doing things together—like starting a ’zine, I guess you’d call it, named Vortex, with a long-and-narrow format on newsprint, which we cooked up with Bradley Rose and Will Roscoe. With Will and Brad, James and Joel, and various other brilliantly insightful free spirits, a shared interest in words and design and meaning brought heartfelt connection that extended far beyond any specific project, often till death did us part.
After my year of living without car or coziness in a big empty loft, leaning unreasonably hard on Mark, I eagerly agreed when my dear friend and ex-lover Mica Kindman suggested that he and I co-create a faerie household in San Francisco. Within a few weeks of my move into the house that became Touchstone, Mark and I broke up. In the context of the epidemic and Reaganism and Mark’s deteriorating work situation, and my own embarkation on a new chapter after a year of serious depression, our breakup was gentle and matter-of-fact. Nothing much changed, in fact, except that we stopped sleeping together.
Already at the time of our meeting, Mark was beginning to feel scapegoated at The Advocate. The paper’s publisher and owner, a petty tyrant who recognized a good target when he saw one, took advantage of Mark’s carefully hidden vulnerability, insisting on calling him “arts editor” instead of Mark’s preferred “cultural editor,” and generally denigrating the second section, which of course included the infamous pink pages (where people found each other before the internet came along). Once again, as in his growing-up years, he was experiencing unanticipated slings and arrows, a pattern that sadly recurred all too often in his life.
* * *
THERE WAS REAL satisfaction for Mark in the relationship he developed with Barry Cundiff, a sweet, unassuming man with a passion for intense body sensation and kink. Their sexual connection met some powerful needs that Mark had become attuned to, and their participation in the rites of the faerie offshoot group Black Leather Wings was a profound experience for both of them. But the shadow of death was becoming omnipresent, and nothing was untouched. I can’t remember when Barry first got sick, but his health was already a concern, even before the next bomb hit.
As if the death all around us wasn’t enough, in 1985 the Advocate publisher announced that he was moving the paper to Los Angeles. With deep reluctance, Mark decided to keep the job, and to leave his beloved Bay Area home. The first year that he lived in L. A. he was desperately lonely, and I tried to call him every Saturday morning, from a corner phone booth where I could make free untraceable long-distance calls, using a code stolen by a bike-messenger friend from a corporate law office. With the sense of doom all around us, we got a bit of dark pleasure from knowing that those calls were paid for by some evil lawyers’ dime.
As always, his antidote to suffering was work. In addition to his interviews and articles for The Advocate, he published his first book, Gay Spirit, in 1987. In it, he compiled a selection of writings focused on the psychic and spiritual aspects of queer experience. Consider this, from the introduction:
In a time of so much dying, the creation of consciousness born out of love is a miraculous act. [...] Where even hope has been betrayed as disposable commodity, there stands a vision of the future as magnificent and shimmering as the silver sword plunged into stone. The sword is known by many names. For some people the name is gay, and it has released them from a long-buried past. [...] This is parable, of course, but told in the manner best known to such storytelling: out of a compelling need. It is for this same reason that this book exists.
Here, as in many other places, Mark makes clear his overarching theme: that we queer folk have some special calling to bring to the world, something that the world needs, which we ourselves need to discover. That quest, that poking-around for whatever its essence might be, never stopped beckoning him, despite all the pain along the way.
Over time, he began to make his peace with Los Angeles. His meeting with Malcolm Boyd was certainly a turning-point for him, as it was for Malcolm as well. Once again, Mark was the pursued. At first he was thoroughly ambivalent about the attentions of this well-known Anglican priest, thirty years his senior, who was a substantial public figure: Mr. Gay Episcopal U. S. A., columnist, bestselling author, former associate of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and before that, personal assistant to Mary Pickford, a classic reclusive aging silent-screen star.
For Mark, who found religion in the tidepools of the Monterey Peninsula and whose dearest intimates included multiply-pierced sex shamans, the idea of partnering with a mainstream Christian clergyman was a big stretch—but Malcolm persisted, and Mark accepted Malcolm’s suit, and together they bought a little house in Silverlake, where they made a happy home together until Malcolm’s death some thirty years later.
Not that their partnership was always easy. In the early years, Mark sometimes complained to me that Malcolm was like a spoiled child, and that he (Mark) felt like the housekeeper—but they softened into one another, and their reciprocal love and commitment were never in doubt. Mark did, indeed, do almost all the cooking and housework, but I think he came to accept it as just one of the costs of continuing to live, almost enjoyable in comparison with a disastrous new HIV cocktail or finding a voodoo paquette on the doorstep along with the daily newspaper.
Those were hard years, when his own deteriorating health dovetailed with vicious harassment, against a background of ongoing death and dying. That story is too distasteful to dwell on, but in essence, a couple of troubled people started projecting an imagined “betrayal of the faeries” onto Mark, presumably because he’d achieved a modicum of public success. The petty private humiliations and insulting public abuse they inflicted on him made his life miserable for something like a decade. Once again, as at so many other junctures of his life, Mark experienced underserved hostility, the product of others’ unexamined shadow.
Did he bring this on himself? I don’t buy the finger-pointing implication, but we both agreed that certain pathologies seek out certain kinds of “screens” onto which to smear their unresolved shit/script—and as self-doubters, folks like Mark and I are subliminally recognized by people in the grip of these pathologies, and are targeted because we will eat the suffering they inflict instead of responding in kind. In this respect, both he and I were socialized “female” in the simplistic (but useful) binary paradigm, where female-socialized people internalize trouble and male-socialized people externalize it, looking for outside things/folks/events to blame.
Internalization cost Mark a lot, especially in combination with HIV/AIDS. He paid dearly, in terms of both health and career. It became impossible for him to continue the trajectory he might otherwise have followed: that of a vigorous middle-aged writer bolstering his literary efforts with increasingly visible speaking engagements and an expanding public audience. He did his best, and his writing continued to rip open readers’ hearts with its honesty and courage; but his health, his nerves, his stamina were all precarious, and much of his energy was dedicated to Malcolm, who needed a good deal of backstage support.
In effect, Mark became a kind of personal assistant to an aging celebrity. Not that Mark was jealous, since he never wanted the spotlight for himself; but supporting a husband sought by the spotlight was surely at times not easy for my old friend hovering in the wings. He fulfilled his duties as an Important Episcopal Spouse with remarkable grace, and I think he rather enjoyed cavorting with bishops and their wives; but I know there was a part of him that looked forward to communing with his own gods, naked at the ocean’s edge, or in a sacred grove with needles in his chest.
There was no space for that, though, in his burdened life. Consider the combination: behind-the-scenes caregiving duties; severe health challenges related to HIV and medication side-effects; long-term erratic harassment and subsequent PTSD; loss of editorial support; inability to continue full-time work and decision to go on disability with all of its financial constraints; ongoing responsibility for a certifiably crazy mother; more (thankfully, fewer) deaths of friends and acquaintances, even with a new generation of drugs; and, as the ubiquitous dark-grey background, an unimaginable burden of accumulated grief and loss. Small wonder that he felt moments of bitterness—the marvel of it is, not only did he (always) continue to write, but beyond that, he went and got himself a master’s degree in psychology and a therapist’s license, to help troubled queer youth and to add to his already extensive shamanic toolbag.
This would have been something like his third, maybe fourth, career. Did I mention photography? As a journalist at a low-budget weekly tabloid, he was expected to photograph the subjects of his interviews himself, and thanks to his studies in film and darkroom technique, he was already a good photographer when he took the Advocate job. His skills grew more sophisticated with the years, and his photo portfolio with accompanying texts, Fellow Travelers, is a masterpiece which is luckily available in digital form, as well as in a numbered edition of original prints.
* * *
WRITING, EDITING, PHOTOGRAPHY, clinical psychology, and then, in 2010, a new book project. Originally conceived in conjunction with Don Kilhefner, a Jungian psychologist who had started the L. A. Gay Community Services Center and co-organized the first “Spiritual Conference for Radical Fairies” in 1979, the book was intended to fill a gap in the literature about and by the faerie tribe. Both initial plan and final product included essays, poetry, and reminiscences by a wide diversity of fae folk, ultimately brought to life through Mark’s persistence and skill.
Once again with this project, as with so many others, a painful episode intervened. For reasons he never publicly explained, Dr. Kilhefner withdrew from co-editorship and took an adversarial stance towards Mark and the book’s completion. In frustration and feeling that the work was too important to be abandoned, Mark pursued the project as editor in collaboration with Bo Young of White Crane Books, who ultimately published it under the title The Fire in Moonlight. It was a triumph, but a shadowed one, with personal hostility from a previously supportive colleague leaving him shaky and hurt.
In our private conversations, he called The Fire in Moonlight our love-child. I had no part in its conception, but maybe I was a foster-parent. Almost weekly, by phone and by email, I witnessed his initial enthusiasm, his distress at Don’s volte-face, and his resolve to see it completed. He sought my feedback, welcomed my essay about queers and global collapse, and asked me to organize the resource directory that Bo felt belonged in such a book—a perfect assignment for me at that moment, as I began a quest after my twenty-year leave of absence from the faeries, seeking queer intentional community. Mark supported me in that quest, just as I tried to support him in birthing his book—perhaps that’s why he called it our love-child, I’m not sure, but it feels sweet to think of it that way.
The publication of The Fire in Moonlight wasn’t the only bright spot in those later years with Malcolm. Their renewal of vows and legal marriage, celebrated with all the pomp that the Episcopal Church could lay on, was another; and there were occasional honors for each of them, and time with cherished friends, old and new, that offered respite from the exhaustion of living. Martinis were another solace, a reasonable source of comfort in an often adversarial world.
As Malcolm approached his ninetieth birthday, interest in his life-story increased. Documentary filmmakers approached him about being the subject of a biographical feature, to which he agreed, and in short order Mark had become a central figure in the team that was creating the film. The plan was to follow Malcolm on a tour of places where he had worked in the South, but when the time came, he was too frail to make the trip. Consequently it was Mark who went with the filmmakers to interview the seventy-, eighty-, and ninety-year-olds who during the Freedom Summer of 1963 had hosted the charismatic, radical, recently-ordained white minister who was traveling round the region as a liaison to Dr. King, providing much-needed psychological and practical support. Mark spoke feelingly about the emotional welcome he’d received, as Malcolm’s husband, in the homes of these elderly veterans of the civil rights movement, who remembered Malcolm with gratitude and something approaching reverence.
* * *
DESPITE ONGOING CHALLENGES, things were mostly stable until Malcolm’s health finally broke down as he turned ninety. A brutal year followed, with hospitalizations and confusion and re-infections and all the rest of it, until he died in February of 2015. Mark was taxed to the limit, and although the death was in some ways a relief, it was also a devastating emotional loss for him—greater than I had imagined it would be. He was hit by a tsunami of grief. This was made additionally complicated by the fact that he was now an Important Episcopal Widow. There was something like a state funeral, and all kinds of responsibility—archives to be contacted, letters to be answered, who knows what-all that needed to be done. He was, I expect, very alone with his sorrow. But he devised a plan for moving forward with his life, realistic and firm.
Once upon a time, Mark and I had speculated about whether we might have another chapter together, under the same roof—but over time, it had become clear that our lives weren’t going to twine that way. I was looking for rural queer intentional community, and he needed financial security and reliable health care. He made a calculation: sell the house in Silverlake, buy a condo in Palm Springs, invest the difference (along with the small inheritance from Malcolm; there wasn’t much), and live off the interest. His life would need to be very modest, but there would be enough, and his health needs would be adequately covered.
He outlined the plan to me during his one visit to Groundswell, the community that I helped co-found in Mendocino County north of San Francisco. It was a sweet and poignant couple of days and nights that we shared then, his frailty obvious but his spirit strong, his support for the Groundswell experiment abundant. Soon after his visit, he sold the L. A. house and disposed of all the effects, everything except for the small amount of furniture and housewares, and large quantity of books, with which he would furnish the condo.
As I understand it, during the move he fell and injured himself, quite badly. For the first few months in Palm Springs he evidently saw no one except for the couple of close friends who had urged and facilitated his move, and doctors and surgeons. He didn’t tell me at the time; I suppose he was too embarrassed, and I didn’t call as often as I might have done.
And then, a miracle happened. On his doctor’s advice, he switched to a new combination of HIV meds, and for the first time in fifteen years or twenty years, he felt good. The constant plague of diarrhea was gone. he had begun to meet people, and life without Malcolm was beginning to feel normal.
The return of well-being was miracle enough, but then, through the Black Leather Wings family/tribe, he was introduced to a highly intelligent, sensible, big-hearted and highly skilled kink practitioner, also recently moved to Palm Springs, who was ready to meet Mark more than halfway, as he hadn’t been met in at least a decade, maybe two.
They hit it off. It was evidently good—very, very good. My last phone call with Mark took place as he was preparing for their second date.
I called because I had something important to tell him. For the second year in a row, Black Leather Wings was holding its annual summer gathering at Groundswell. Ever since I’d renewed my engagement with Bay Area queer life in March 2011, when I dramatically bonded with much of Mark’s kink family, I knew that I’d be welcome at BLW events, if I ever chose to participate. Up till the summer of 2016, I’d never felt called, but then, in celebration of Mark’s re-emergence into the light, and with his tribe gathered at the retreat center I’d helped found, it seemed important for me to do something for/with him in his physical absence, and I accepted the invitation to be a rare guest in their central rite, the hook pull.
For maybe three hours, I moved through time and space with sturdy needles through the skin above my heart, the attached cords available for linking by carabiners to wires suspended from trees, to the cords of another person or persons, or to be used in other ways, as impulse might suggest. I did my best to investigate the pain, to make friends with it, and though I experienced no transcendent breakthroughs, it felt momentous nevertheless.
“I’m so proud of you!” said Mark when I called him to tell him about it, as I knew he would. Then, the last words he spoke to me: “I’m sorry I can’t talk more now, but I have a date in an hour, and I need to douche.”
Their second date happened, and Mark died a few days before their scheduled third. So, the existential question: was this a terrible time to die, or, on the contrary, a perfect one? Imagine: you’re finally on an upswing, after seemingly endless exhaustion and recurrent despair. Obviously, if you could be guaranteed twenty years on a plateau like that, you’d say yes to the offer—but life’s not like that, as Mark knew very well. So I like to think of it as good timing, as far as his own trajectory was concerned. The hole he left in his survivors’ hearts is big, but my first impulse was to wish him bon voyage, and that’s the vision I still hold. I see him joyous and free, gradually merging into the universal flow, leaving abundant blessings available for anyone open to receiving them.
* * *
HIS WORK, OF COURSE, is his legacy. I have been re-reading his books, and am struck anew by the unflinching honesty of his exploration, the depth with which he probes inherited trauma, dubious truisms, and emergent insights. It saddens me that his writing has largely fallen out of view; my hope is that it will be “rediscovered” by a new generation of readers, who will recognize the ongoing value of his words:
The point is, gay men like myself have much tending of our psychic houses to do. One hundred years after the invention of the term homosexuality in the modern west, and a quarter century past rebelling against its stupefying effects, we’re either dazed from sorting out fact from too much fiction or are lost in the woods with no moral compass. Some live in denial, a kind of willful deep sleep induced by sex, drugs, or lack of reflection, while others have abdicated caring altogether, riding along on the wrong bus.
As deeply feeling men who have been robbed of feelings, we have no choice now but to know ourselves completely. Where is our joy? Our rage? Where are the stories and myths that will lead us back to where our true self lies? Asking these questions is the better act of survival.
One critique that can be made of Mark’s work is that it disproportionately privileges the gay male experience, and doesn’t fully recognize the value of situating it within the larger, more diverse reality that some of us now call “queer.” Mark would say that, as an essayist writing out of his own experience, he didn’t want to stray too far from his home ground, and he didn’t, in fact, have much contact with the “big-tent queerdom” that’s been emerging in recent years, which saddens me, because I think he would have been excited to witness it.
Mark has also been criticized for an essentialist view, as if he were entirely dismissive of the lines of thought which see homosexuality as a social construct. In fact, he readily acknowledged the value of that schema, but he refused to accept it as the whole story. He saw nothing simplistically or mono-dimensionally. This was one of his strengths as a thinker; and, unlike many thinkers, he was at home both with theory and with the insights of the heart. “I finally saw that my homosexuality possessed its own immutable truth, an inner reality existing beyond any outside reason. […] I persist in my belief that queer eros holds multiple purpose in our lives—pedagogic, religious, creative, even altruistic—beyond the near-meaningless context it’s been assigned.”
So, how to sum up this one queer life? That it was hard, I know; also multi-faceted, presumably in more ways than I’m aware of. I’m sure there were many moments of joy, but despite all his public self-disclosure, he was a very private person, and doubtless there were significant realms of his psyche that I never heard anything about. On the other hand, he was consistently vulnerable with me, indeed often raw, and I tried to offer succor as I could.
I wonder how many others saw as much of his vulnerability as I did. I ask this question not as a competitive counting game of who knew what, but as a portal into some of his archetypes: loneliness, autonomy, authority, the shaman’s path.
This last is what I want to leave you with; it’s the piece that matters most to me. In this era when consciousness is debased at every turn, his commitment to truth-telling seems not unlike a shamanic calling, a mediation between realms of experience. Mark led a profoundly examined life. The best tribute any of us can pay him is to do the same.
