Hosted by author Mark S. King brings together a gathering of long-time HIV survivors with readings from his book “My Wonderful Disease” at the West Hollywood Library Community Room meeting (625 N San Vicente Blvd), on Monday, April 8, 2024, from 7:00 p.m. – 8:30 p.m. Evening (doors open at 6:30pm).
The event is free to attend and is sponsored by Being Alive and The City of West Hollywood. It is not necessary to respond to the invitation. Guests will include Sandra Rogers, Russell Alexander Orozco, Brian Thomas, Sherry Lewis, Michelle Simic, Dean Testerman and Carl Schmid.
My Wonderful Illness: Chronicles of a Gay Survivor Published September 1, 2023 With an introduction by Olympic gold medalist Greg Louganis. The anthology spans four decades of King's deeply personal writing on sexual politics, the dual epidemics of addiction and AIDS, and how the writer approached sex, love, and family as a gay man living with HIV for nearly forty years.
King's award-winning collection of essays is a manifesto for survival, but it also refers to a man laughing in the graveyard. There is joy, farce, and cheeky optimism that permeates even the darkest episodes of King's life. His combination of inspiration, confession, and forthright transparency has made King one of the LGBTQ community's most trusted and valuable storytellers.
Mark S. was King writes his personal thoughts about gay life, sex, addiction, and his family shortly after testing positive for HIV in 1985, just weeks after the test was made available to the public. “I wanted to get something down on paper while I could,” King explains, “something that said we were here and this is how I felt. No one is more surprised than me that I'm still writing that.”
The result is nearly four decades of poignant, and sometimes funny, accounts of what it was like for a young gay man to make it out alive from the 1980s—and what happened next.
King's ongoing blog, My Fabulous Disease, has received seven GLAAD Media Award nominations, winning Outstanding Blog in 2020, the same year King was named LGBTQ Journalist of the Year by the NLGJA, the LGBTQ Journalists Association.
To learn more, visit MyFabulousDisease.com.
