Categories
Blog

Full Day in the Windy City

The heroism of the gay community during the worst years of the AIDS Pandemic was nothing short of miraculous. And it is in danger of being forgotten so soon, only three decades later—just as I have forgotten the last names of the amazing Chris and Andy. If this rings a bell for anyone reading it, […]

Categories
Travels

An Ethnic at Stonewall 25

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 […]

Categories
Characters we have known

The House of MORE!

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. […]

Categories
Characters we have known

Phoebe Liebig & the Lachrymae of L.A.

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 […]

Categories
Travels

Silk Roads

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”

Categories
Characters we have known

My Dad Budgie

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 […]

Categories
Feature-length writing

Cirque du Soleil 1989: In, Under and Up On the Big Top

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 […]

Categories
Characters we have known

The Quilt Goes to Motown 1988

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, […]

Categories
Travels

Paradise Beyond Road’s End

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 […]

Categories
Feature-length writing

Searching For a Gay Hero

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 […]