QUEER4DECADES is the archive (not yet a “repository,” as he is still alive and kicking) of Mark Freeman’s unquenched desire to make sense of the world of Gay, then LGBT, Trans and full-on Queer Liberation as it evolved over the fifty-odd years since he came out.
Never a key figure in any one group, he was rather a lurking presence, a tongue-in-cheek commentator at a remarkable number of memorable moments, movements, and major events. I‘ll admit, it was me there. If “May you live in interesting times” is a Chinese curse, I‘d beg to differ. It has been a blessing to have been so often in the wrong place at the right time, and to have survived. It provides a jaundiced outlook, and a hopeful point of view.
Among those events are these.
- Learning to read before First Grade but having a rocky academic road; kicked out of one high school for an oral report on the Vietnam War and another for leading a school boycott.
- Attending the second Merry Pranksters/Ken Kesey “Acid Test” at the San Fernando Valley Unitarian Church as a drug-virgin adolescent but finding peers in its Liberal Religious Youth.
- Hitchhiking from LA during high school vacations to Berkeley/SF, panhandling for concert tickets, selling Aldous Huxley “doors of perception” block-print scrolls I’d carved at a store on Haight & Ashbury, thrift-shopping next to Janis, catching the “Death of Hippie” parade.
- Working as a Conscientious Objector and counselor at Draft Help during the 1968 SF State student strike that gave us the first Black Students Union, moving our office to the Mission.
- Participating in the Food Conspiracy guerrilla buyers’ club, started free film screenings at the branch library that paired “Black Panther Breakfast Program” with “The Blob”, travelled by land to South America with my girlfriend Susie Watts during the Allende era in Chile.
- Contributed to fight against anti-gay teacher CA Prop 6 1978) by mobilizing non-gay allies statewide under Harvey Milk and Sally Gearhart’s United Front Against Briggs with funds raised by organizing the first mixed Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, long before Frameline.
- Writing cover features, reviews and interviews for the Village Voice, Sierra magazine, Bay Times, SF Weekly, and Bay Area Reporter (BAR) during the decades of the HIV Epidemic.
- Pioneering the use of storytelling in pediatric hospital units, then with “people living with AIDS and those who care for them”, creating the radio show Healing Tales on KALW-FM.
- Bringing harm-reduction healthcare, including vaccines, needle exchange and wound care to underserved SRO hotels, and to the un-housed on the streets of San Francisco as an NP.
- Starting Transgender Tuesdays in ’93, the first public health TG clinic, with Dr. Barry Zevin, and RN Mary Monihan, in collaboration with Black, Asian and Latin activist AIDS groups, changing the “gatekeeper” model of TG care to self-determination and informed consent.
- Directing In one tumultuous year the documentary “Transgender Tuesdays: A Clinic in the Tenderloin” with editor Nathaniel Walters, filling SF’s Castro Theatre for its 2012 premiere.
- Writing the storybook for the anonymous art activist anti-censorship group Boy with Arms Akimbo in 1989; a comprehensive history in 1994 of the beloved STUD Bar in SF; and the backstory of “Mr. David” Glamamore for San Francisco Drag: A Coloring Book in 2015.
- Volunteering with SFUSD public school students for 35 years, including touch-typing skills, cooking, decorating a Burning Man art car, plus video storytelling during the COVID years.
- [Travel Blogging about the ‘Stans of Central Asia, Spain during the 500th year after its forced expulsion of its “Moors” and Jews; the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots in New York; New Orleans’ Jazz Fest, Havana and Santiago de Cuba, and Acapulco’s int’l LGBT confab.]