Queer4Decades - Mark H. FreemanEver wonder what it was like to manage safe sex before there was a cure for HIV? Walk on top of the Cirque du Soleil giant tent? See movies before there were any positive queer role models? Be in a gay Maoist cell while mostly just wanting to get laid? Dare to enter the gay male world of ‘70s-‘90s and meet its denizens.
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 […]
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 […]
Queer Featuring COMING OUT AS AN ACTIVIST IN A GAY MAOIST CELL WHO MOSTLY JUST WANTED TO GET LAID A chapter from “Smash the Church, Smash the State! The Early Years of Gay Liberation, edited by Tommi Avicolli Mecca, City Lights Books 2009 As a not-yet 20-year-old, I was in many of the right places […]
GAY SEX IN THE AIDS ERA An Update “Passion with Audacity” by Mark Freeman, FNP was published in November of 1988 in Coming Up! newspaper, a precursor to San Francisco Bay Times.1 Two years later I began work at a new Tenderloin HIV Clinic at Tom Waddell Health Center, and by 1993 we started Transgender […]