Mark S. King was 24 years old, fresh from Houston and chasing an acting career in West Hollywood, when he walked straight into the epicenter of the HIV outbreak. In 1985 he got the diagnosis. In those years, for gay men, that was a death sentence — and Mark watched his friends die around him, one after another.
But Mark survived. Nearly forty years later, he is one of the longest-living people living with HIV in the country. He became a writer and activist, chronicling it all in his memoir My Fabulous Disease, and dedicating his life to telling the truth about living with HIV — the grief, yes, but also the joy, the love, the sex, the community, and the hard-earned wisdom.
He writes about the millions of Black lives disproportionately lost to the epidemic, and he speaks openly about what survivors lost — and what they fought to keep.
His journey is a testament to something the plague years taught a generation: that you can outlive the worst thing that ever happened to you, and build a life so full that the diagnosis becomes just one chapter.
