Queer4Decades - Mark H. Freeman
Revised 2022 from a personal essay in Bay Area Reporter’s Arts & Entertainment section July 7, 1994. “Are you from New York?” is a question people frequently ask me. My response: “Nope. I’m just Jewish.” Even my Filipino-Portuguese boyfriend Ken laughs, although he’s heard it more than once. Today we have flown from San Francisco […]
THE HOUSE OF MORE Just a few blocks from the newly gentrified Twitter-verse of Mid-Market Street, on one of the realest corners that San Francisco’s Sixth Street has to offer, is the abode of Mr. David, aka Glamamore. The honorific ‘Mister’ is a throwback to a mid-century usage, applied only to hairdressers or costume designers. […]
May 26, 2022 Los Angeles has less of a pull on me every decade. I went to four high schools there, though my parents never moved during those years in the Sixties, other than apart from each other. Both passed away in their nineties, my dad 21 years ago and my mom five. In between […]
IN CENTRAL ASIA: KAZAKHSTAN People keep asking why we went to Central Asia and Berlin last year, and the easiest answer was “For the food.” Yes, I have always been interested in the land where stone fruit originated: those “Golden Apples of the Sun”
Being a history of my father, Ben Baruch Freeman better known as Budgie, written while I was passing through his hometown on a train in winter, fifteen years before he died. Following that, a series of appreciative vignettes I wrote out for him as his memory was faltering, about ten years later. “I’m Just a […]
The sight of that yellow-and-blue Big Top meant that the five-year old Cirque du Soleil was back in town again. For me it brought back my fondest childhood desire: to run away and join the circus, just like Toby Tyler did in a favorite childhood book.. By the time I had read the strangely spiritual yet earthier […]
Mark Freeman, originally published August, 1988 in Coming Up! (now Bay Times). Revised December 2014 INVOCATIONS “I can’t bear to be losing you, ‘cause I’ve loved you my whole life through. Somebody shake me, wake me, when it’s over.” “Now if you feel that you can’t go on, because all of your hope is gone, […]
by Mark Freeman Sierra Magazine Sept/Oct 1987 The ideal trail begins where pavement can go no farther. It’s not merely an alternative route to a destination, but the only overland route available. Such a trail leaves the last beach parking lot on the rainy northwest side of Kauai and follows the soaring volcanic cliffs and […]
Will Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia make up for his Silence Of the Lambs— and Hollywood’s history of homophobic cowardice? Mark Freeman looks at Movieland’s hidden queer history in this cover feature of SF Weekly from January 12, 1994 ********** OK, I’m gay and I demand movie heroes who are, too. Is that so much to ask? I’ve […]
by Mark Freeman @1994, revised 2021 As a member in fairly good standing in one of history’s earliest immigrant groups—we Wandering Jews—I visited one of our older stomping grounds two summers back. That ground being Spain. The occasion: the 500th Anniversary of the Expulsion of the Jews and Arabs by Ferdinando and Isabella, known as the […]