 Hey everyone, I'm Rajiv Dharazi and in this video I'm excited to bring back our very special guest Mark S. King, whom we sat down and chatted with earlier in the year, but this time we'll be discussing his new book, officially released today. The book is titled My Fabulous Disease Chronicles of a Gay Survivor. About Mark's book, Sean Stroop, author of Body Counts, said if the AIDS pandemic had a Mark Twain, it would be Mark S. King. And Peter Staley, prominent activist and author of Never Silent Act Up and My Life in Activism, said start with queer attitude, add a spoonful of humor, camp and or dark and top it all off with a heart of gold and you'll still be missing some secret ingredients found in My Fabulous Disease. Mark's writing is a diary of survival and a beautiful example of giving back. I know his words have helped me over the years and he has my thanks. Bon appetit. My Fabulous Disease is also the name of Mark's award-winning blog, which I highly recommend signing up for so you can receive those posts via email. Just visit www.marksking.com and I'll have that link below in the description box as well. To recap, Mark S. King is an award-winning blogger, author, speaker and HIV AIDS activist who has been involved in HIV causes since testing positive during my birth year 1985. And he's won numerous awards for his work. If you haven't seen our previous interview in which we got to know him and his story, living through the early days of the AIDS epidemic, talking about addiction and aging with HIV, I'll put up a card here so you can watch that as well. Mark, welcome back. So happy to have you. Thank you very much. Rafe is so great to be here and see you again. How are you? I'm doing wonderfully and I see that you are in your very beautiful new home. Congrats. Thank you. We moved. Yes. Thank you very much. Yeah. I can pick up the computer and give you a tour all around. I have a great bathroom if you want to see it. We'll have to reschedule for that one because I really want to get to your book. All right. Okay. Will you tell me, let's start off by going into what inspired you to put this book together? The same thing that's always inspired me, I guess, and that is just to tell the story, right? Of those of us living with HIV or all of the aspects of ourselves because I never want to reduce us to just that, of course, our diagnosis or even the fact that I made it out of the 80s alive. I want to make sure that we cover all aspects. And so there's like, there's five big sections of the book and only one is specifically devoted to HIV. The rest is about well addiction, but family and love and sex and a lot of sex in the book, I gotta tell you. And so, yeah, what's inspired me is to tell the truth and have some fun along the way, do it in an entertaining way. And was this a goal that you've always had in mind, putting a book together or did this kind of just come organically later on? You know, I am certainly immediate gratification in terms of what's been great about the blog is when I write something, I don't have to wait for an editor and for a publishing house and then a year later, you get to read it. I just press a button. But it's also true that over the years and this in the book represents four decades of writing over the years, there's been some pieces that are really near and dear to me. Some of them are very funny. And I didn't want you to have to scrounge through 40 years of my blog to find them. And so I have collected them from my site and from magazines, the advocate pause magazine, others other websites that I have contributed to and put them all very conveniently for you between two covers. Amazing. And I'm so glad you did that. I absolutely cannot stress how much I love Mark's book and everything that he and we'll get into that right now. Okay, so I want to start with I'm going to start with some excerpts because I took a bunch of notes. I hope you don't mind me revealing just little snippets here and there that I want to by all means reveal. I'm an open book and and and to Mark's credit, I haven't given him any of the talking points. So he has no idea what I'm talking about here. Okay, you said there was a time when old friends called to say goodbye and by goodbye, they meant forever when all of us had a file folder marked Memorial that outlined how we wanted our service to be conducted when people shot themselves or jumped off bridges after getting their test results. It's very clear from the beginning of your book that we're going to read what we're about to embark on what we're going to read will be brutally honest. And it's a bit shocking and also and also in a way like an invitation to to really understand in a different way that time and in a way that we often don't really get insight to. You know, I thank you for that. I I want I feel like a lot of people know the statistics so they know intellectually what happened. Oh, there's this thing that happened and it caught us all by surprise. A lot of people died and it was really bad. I want people to know how it felt. And when I that quote there, you know, it is is completely true. I would get calls at night and the phone would ring and if the phone rang after 11, someone was dead. It's funny because that sounds like, you know, I don't know, some anxious mother grandmother's story kind of story. And that's the irony of it because that's who we were at that time. We were elderly. In other words, we had as much death commonly as would your grandmother and her friends, you know. And then the memorial thing is also true. I had my, you know, it's funny, I haven't updated it in a while, which shows you the fact that things have gotten better. But I would keep it updated and thank God that I'm still alive because I have so much more content for my memorial in terms of video. I might show a clip of this. Who knows? We'll see how it goes. We'll see how you rank. And, you know, video clips of me through the years doing crazy things. And I haven't updated it in a while. I have a feeling that it's going to stay tucked away for a while longer. Well, good. I hope so. I also noticed very early on that there is a constant tension between the immediacy of what was happening in the 80s and how important, traumatic, devastating it was. Contrasting with the present moment and life kind of just continuing on, life is indifferent, and it just moves forward. You mentioned regarding the term long-term survivor. I quote, I have misgivings about that unsettling designation because it doesn't speak to my other parallel life experiences and it suggests a dismissal of my relevance in the here and now. I mean, that's true. It's funny. On the one hand, I've got HIV tattooed on my forehead, man, because it is what I do. And so it is the first thing people know me for and I'm okay with that. All right. Made my peace with that because it's kind of my vocation and that's all right. I guess what I'm saying there is just reducing me to that doesn't take into account all the other episodes that you're going to read about in the book about sexual misadventures and falling in love and my family dealing with a very kind of outrageous gay son, all of that stuff. I think I'm doing myself an all-long-term of survivors of disservice if I am only talking about that and I don't paint us with a broad brush in terms of all of our other life experiences. I've gone through a lot of shit, right? You know, it has nothing to do with HIV. Yes, I agree. And you bring up a really good point because I've had people actually say directly to me in the past when I kind of showed that my content was focused heavily on living with HIV and they're like, well, you don't want to be pigeonholed as someone who is the HIV guy. And there's so much more to that. And I've kind of wrestled with that a little bit and gotten back and forth because I think, yes, I am. I am so much more than that. And I have so much more to offer and give. But in the same vein, I'm kind of being called in this way. And so what if people see me as that person? You know, it's an immutable characteristic about us. And it's a character trait as much as my being a redhead. Or you being, what is that, Burnett? Whatever you want to call it. The fact that there are other aspects of you, you are a natural bodybuilder. I am not. But the point is, there's a lot more. You're right. And you know, there are worse things, I guess. In other words, if people need a shorthand and they go, oh, Mark, he's that funny guy with HIV, you know, that's fair. It's fair. That's okay. And I don't feel any stigma from that. If they want to reduce me, so that's my elevator pitch. Well, I write these funny nostalgic pieces of many of which are about living with HIV. That's fair. That's pretty much, you got it, you know. In other words, I'm not going to soak in any of the stigma as a result of that. You know, what the famous quote about no one can make you feel badly about yourself without your permission. Yeah. And you hit, I think you hit the nail on the head by mentioning stigma because I think that is subconsciously what is driving people to say that because when we hear about an economist or a prolific historian or something, we don't go, oh, you don't want to be the guy that's known as an economist. You're so much more than that, right? It's like, this is the same thing. Why is this different? And we are both in arenas. We are both in this particular arena in which we are excelling. And by that, I mean, we are in kind of a media landscape where we aren't afraid to put HIV forward. And we're doing it successfully and with meaning and intention. And that's great. Good for us. Okay. In another essay entitled Once When We Were Heroes, and for those of you who actually, let's take a step back. So this book is a collection of essays over 40 years, correct? Yes. And so I thought, I was surprised because I didn't realize that that was the structure of the book. And I thought, this is so great because you can sit down and curl up into bed at night and read an essay and then have so much to kind of soak in and think about. And it's over. It's like, I always say, I like to do what I do in about 800 words. I want to tell you a story and make a point and goodbye. So it's perfect reading for anyone who doesn't have a long attention span. Or like you say, you want to have a little read at night. Whatever the circumstances are, it is they're bite-sized. They're easily digestible. But within them, there's going to be some stuff. And what I like about it, about the structure of it, is when you turn the page to the next one, you have no idea what you're going to get. It may be something sweet and nostalgic. It may be scary. It may be very funny. It's there's no talent and you'll have to turn the page and find out. Okay. So back to this essay entitled, Once When We Were Heroes, you speak to the bravery that existed during the early days of the epidemic and how bravery in your experience does exist today, but nothing like it did then. And how, quote, you said, your most courageous self, the best man you'll ever be, lived more than two decades ago during the first years of a horrific plague. It sounds like it gave you an incredible sense of purpose, all that tragedy, having to survive moment by moment and help others survive and sometimes pass away with some sense of dignity, one moment to the neck and how it grounded you in the present like nothing else. Almost like what you would hear from someone who had survived a war. I love the honesty of admitting that something so horrific also gave you a visceral sense of purpose and made you feel like, in your words, a hero. I don't think that's an easy thing to admit. None of us wants to admit we gained some sense of self-satisfaction or meaning from a tragedy. It's not politically correct. There's an expectation that we would only view that time as something very negative. But what you're describing is something I think is very human and very real. Can you speak to that a bit? I think heroism is what you do when you have no other choice. Often, I don't think people just say, I'm going to go be a hero and I don't think it's premeditated. I think it's circumstantial. I pulled the idea out of the burning car because I was there. I had to. I feel as if, yes, the best man I will ever be existed during those horrific years. When I stepped up, when I faced the things that terrified me most, death, dying, disfigurement, all of these things that came along with AIDS, because of our response to it. The most you can ask about life and your own behavior is how you respond to things. It's not like, oh, this terrible thing that happened to me. It's how did I respond to this thing that happened? I think that we behaved, we responded heroically and with incredible compassion for one another. Especially when the odds were stacked against us and a lot of people didn't care and a lot of people wanted to be done with us and quarantine us and not deliver meals into our hospital rooms and all of these terrible things. Despite all of that, we behaved admirably and did great work. I will say this though, tragedy is not a contest and younger people today are going to have their stuff, whatever it is. They're going to have their stuff. I have absolute faith in whatever that is for you, Rafe, for the next generation. They're going to respond wonderfully because I've seen the very best of human spirit. I've seen the very best of humanity and we stepped up and we did it. That tells me that you can do it too. This is not all about work. We grate. It's wow. Humanity. Humanity. Look what we're capable of when we're backs are against the wall. It gave me faith in humanity and that's shared with all of us. Again, we had no other choice. It was a situation where we were called up. We were called to do it. There will be other things. There will be more situations. For that matter, I think that this is a very dangerous time we live in right now socially, politically, etc. It's very dangerous and it's going to take a lot of that sort of courage. It's going to take a lot of people standing up going, whoa, I draw the line here. We're seeing a lot of it. We are seeing a renewed excitement and strength among women having agency over their own bodies. We are seeing enormous new energy amongst young people about climate change and about the world that is being handed to them and they're not thrilled. There are many, many challenges ahead. At the end of the day, I have faith in people. I think it's rough. I think these times are rough and maybe it's harder today because the enemy is at war. The thing we're fighting maybe it isn't as, it doesn't feel as, I think you used the word immediate. In the 80s, it was immediate. There's my best friend. There he is in bed dying. That's immediate. I can see that. It makes me angry. I want to go do something about it. Things like climate change. Well, the latest brush fire that kills people or the latest megastorm, maybe that's immediate enough for people to rise up. I think that we're seeing that. And like you said, it's born out of necessity. Yes. The flip side of that, isn't that right? That is, heroism is when you have no other choice, meaning it's only until we absolutely have to that we say, okay, enough. When is that point? It's a bit human nature and that's what will hopefully drive us to rediscover our humanity because I think that's been lost along the way. There's so much cynicism. There is, okay, I'll get, can I get a little political and say this, back in the day, in the early 80s when we were facing AIDS and all of that, there was a lot of ignorance and stigma and homophobia and all of those things about gay men who were getting, bearing the brunt of this new disease. And I give the people there a little slack, the people there that were showing such ignorance because they were truly ignorant. There weren't a lot of people out in the early 80s. We didn't have shows on TV. We didn't have movies that were showing positive characterization of the LGBTQ people. So there was a lot of education to do just so they would see us as worthy human beings. What's happening today is willful ignorance about who we are. What's happening today is so much more devious than then because when people are discriminating against us, when they are throwing hatred our way, it used to be out of ignorance and fear. Now it's out of political expediency and just this devious hatred because of being, I think it's still driven by fear. Oh, you're going to take away something from me that I have. I don't want to share whatever that is, rights, who knows, whatever it is. And so I think this landscape is more dangerous than the landscape I came of age in during AIDS. It puts it in perspective and it makes me so happy that like every third essay in my book is funny because we go there. I go there in terms of those dark years of the epidemic and helping you understand how it felt. But then I want to give you a break. I want to, okay, let's laugh because I got this hilarious story about shopping for socks in the mall with Larry Kramer, the great AIDS activist, or all the times I used to be in the health clinic when I was a tot in West Hollywood before HIV came along. And we were all just having a great time, getting busy on the weekends and then come Thursday we would have to visit the clinic. I used to say I got the clap so many times I called it the applause. Well, and isn't that life, it's not all doom and gloom. It's all not one note either. It's very, you're a three-dimensional human being and I think that you expressed that very, very well. Okay, I just want to, before we move on, I do have another follow-up question and that is when you say that you're the best manual you'll ever be lived more than two decades ago, what does that leave moving forward? Because I think that this is a very relevant question, not just people who survived the AIDS epidemic, but anyone who is professional athletes, people who have like risen to the occasion, risen in it during a tragedy at some point in their life, and then have to live, go about living the rest of their life. How do you make peace with that and how do you find purpose moving forward? Well, you know, I don't feel as if, okay, I did it and now my life is over and I'm going to coast my way through the rest. In other words, first of all, something else may come along and does. I participate in other cause related things. I think all of us are on a search for meaning. We're all trying to figure out what does this all mean? Why are we here? What are we doing? And for me, it's simple. We're here to help somebody else. It's simple as that. Help, help make the road a little simpler for the next person. As corny as that is, it's the truth. So I did that during AIDS in this big dramatic way, you know, holding friends, hands while they died. I mean, that's a pretty, okay, so that's high drama. It doesn't mean that I don't continue to kind of what meaning is or my search doesn't evolve as we go along. Okay, yes, I did that. Yes, it may be like the most high drama thing that ever happened to me. But there are simple things day to day. I have friends now that need help for whatever reason. I have, you know, I have friends dealing with addiction and recovery, which I know something about. I am able to help them through that. There might be somebody, there may be a neighbor or a sister or somebody for whom you're going to help. And that's it. That's, you know, we all don't get these front page stories of our die-ins back in the day, you know. It doesn't mean our lives aren't worthy and that our capacity to help other people isn't there and isn't useful. I think that really crystallized that notion really well in my head because it makes me think of even just something we can all relate to is just getting older and how, when you mentioned drama, that instantly makes me think of like teenage years or early 20s. Life is so passionate and intense and relationships are so like at max level. And then as you get older, you realize, okay, like life is experienced not as intensely in a very different way. And it's, it's just as special and it's in a different way. Well, because when you're younger, like you, Rafe, when you're younger, there's still so many life experiences that you're having for the first time. And so your response to it is very heightened and it's exciting or it's horrible or it's whatever it is. And as you age, yeah, it's true that with maturity, it's kind of like, you've kind of seen it all. You know, you are you've experienced, whatever that is, you've experienced it before, you remember that it turned out okay. It's funny, I used to get all caught up in righteous indignation, my favorite emotion. Act up, fight back, you know, that was such a great example of righteous indignation. I was young and had a lot of energy and it was great. And I invested all of that emotion into that. Today, I am more, I have more of a budget of how much of that righteous indignation that I'm willing to expel. And it's not that it doesn't, that people out there don't need it. I treat it more economically these days. It takes a lot to get me riled up. And it's not that I don't care. It's that I'm older. I've got so much energy. I'm not going to wear myself out. I'm going to be here as a resource for those who are younger and are willing to go out there and do it. And it's also true that in my recovery process from addiction, I have to be careful about becoming unsettled, about becoming angry and discontent. It makes me want to change the way I feel. And I have some real great shortcuts for doing that. So I have to be, I have to be careful. And the attitude I've developed is, okay, there's that thing over there and it's a real outrage. And there's other people over there and they appear to be handling it. I think it's going to be fine. They don't need me. They'll let me know if they do. I will finish watching my Netflix movie. And that's not a cop out. That's me just showing, you know, budgeting what it is I can afford to take on. Jumping into another essay, Surviving Life Itself. You talked about overhearing a woman on the bus who knew someone who died and she was having this kind of quiet conversation with someone next to her. And I was completely listening in. And your thought, your response was, quote, just one. You know, just one person who died, question mark. And again, it reminds me of what I imagine those that come from war or other major tragedies must have felt that perspective. Most of us today could never truly understand. I told you earlier, tragedy isn't a contest. And now here I am contradicting myself because I was kind of putting my life, preparing, comparing my life experience to hers. She was, I'm going to interrupt you before you, before you explain, I want to say that these contradictions are what make us human. Both these, these contradictions can exist in the same person. And most people, they narrate that out. They, they, they, they make it one thing, but it's, we have these contradictions. So thank you for doing it. Okay, continue. You're absolutely right. She was having this conversation that I was eavesdropping on. And she was saying, Oh, I have this friend that died and it was really bad. And she, she started by saying, Oh, I know somebody who died like, like one person, I know someone who died. It was a motorcycle accident and all of that. And yes, I was thinking to myself, one, you know, one person who died, right? And because back then, you know, geez, you know, the number of people I know who have died, even when I was young, was, you know, a commercial airline tragedy figure, you know, and then I realized hearing her talk about it, she was telling all the details about how he died and how people reacted and who went to the funeral and what they said and all of that. And I'm listening to this going, wow, you know, he got a death of his very own. His, his was a singular death. I didn't get that in terms of the friends of ours, because there was everybody was doing it. There were so many people dying at the same time that, you know, memorials were sometimes stacked, you know, over the weekend. And this guy is, he had a singular tragedy, his death. And people will tell stories about him and they'll remember him and he'll remember his, his singular death. And, and it made me realize, wow, you know, how, how nice for him, you know, how nice for him that his, that his family and his parents could really take care of one another and focus on him and on that and on the loss of him, that person. And because we weren't afforded that for a long time. And now we kind of are, you know, now, you know, life has turned to some form of normalcy. I'm in my 60s. So death among my friends, my social circle is starting to accelerate. Again, it's nothing like it was in the 80s. It's starting to, it's starting to tick up a little bit, I'll say. Well, and the big importance for me as a younger person, I wouldn't say young necessarily, there's now a lot of people that are younger than me these days. That's right. It's all relative is learning and through your words, experiencing your wisdom and your experience, your experience. And okay, so there's this quote where you said our heartbreaking past is important history that should be preserved. It is not a prevention strategy. Another quote, our influence as long term survivors may be limited, but we can find meaning and engagement as cultural elders and mentors. And it's one thing that our society, at least here in the US, in large part lacks, is valuing age and the wisdom and the experience that comes with age. We value youth disproportionately. And this idea of having and appreciating cultural elders and mentors is not a given. It's something that has to be taught. We need to speak to the importance of that and insist on reintroducing that as a part of a way of our life, not just as it relates to HIV AIDS. Well, and of course, this applies first of all to all of society, whether you're gay or straight or what have you, but it is also true that in the gay community that I belong to, that I came of age in, your sexual attractiveness, number one, right? Very tip top of the list of things. And thank goodness in the last, you know, 10 or 20 years, we've started to kind of welcome other type, body types, age types, started to give them cute little names, you know, like Ginger and Daddy. And so I check off two boxes now right away. And thank God for that, you know, as long as we're not using those labels, you know, those kind of shortcuts, the way we've branded people, as a way of excluding anybody, it's a way of including, you know, life is about addition, not subtraction, it's about addition. And so in a way, you know, the bears and the cubs and the puppies and the this and the that, and the daddies and the, you know, if we found a way to celebrate different kinds, that's great, because that all said, I sure hope that I will learn to value myself beyond whether or not I'm physically pretty, you know, or desirable, desirable, because we're telling you, we're getting to the end of that road. And I don't mean that to be funny. And I don't mean for you to say, Oh, Mark, but you look great for your age. I don't mean any of that. I mean that I've had a good run. I was an adorable little twink. And then I became the circuit boy and the muscle gym bunny, you know, I've done all of the stages, well, the stages of gay community. Okay, because I bought into that completely. And to my detriment. But nevertheless, I've kind of bought into how do I need to look what do I need to do as I enter this new stage of my life and now I need to look like this and all of it. And I still do because it's just inherent in the way I was raised in this community. We are we're getting to the end of that road. There's only so much longer that I can turn up the enhance your appearance button on zoom, you know, or use a filter, you know, and there's only so long that can go on. By the way, I've let my beard grow out. This usually I have my ginger dye because I am a ginger, but I would bring it back to my original. This is very gray, you know, and the next time you see me, it won't it'll be ginger again, you just caught me in between rinses, you know, because I still I still take those steps and I don't think there's anything wrong with that in particular. The question is, what are my intentions? Do I want to until the last dog dies? Do I want to hope that someone finds me desirable? Okay, first of all, I'm married. He thinks I'm terrific. So we got that. Okay. And so certainly if you're single and you're looking for a partner, I can understand, you know, you know, you keep yourself, you know, the best you can. But even then, at what point do I say, okay, all right, you know what? I'm just I'm wearing the stretch sweatpants. I'll be on the sofa and I'm good. You know, there's a Facebook page devoted to older ginger people. And they're admirers. I will post on it sometimes if I get a new picture and I in my beard looked really good and I look kind of redheaded. I don't post on it sometimes just some guys will go, oh, woof, woof. What am I doing? What am I doing? You know, okay, that was a quick, quick jolt of immediate gratification. But what am I doing? I am going to be 63 in a couple of months. Will I be doing this when I'm seven? You know, at what point do I say, okay, all right, that's enough. I'm comfortable in my own skin. This is how I look. Take it or leave it because I have all these other things to offer. Well, and to continue on that look, that's exactly the point. How important is physical attraction really at the end of the day? And and the whole point of bringing this up is that I hope we get to a point, especially now that demographically in the US, our older generation is just is ballooning and the amount of young people we have is shrinking. So hopefully we can allocate a little bit of the resources of our attention to older folks and really understanding the inherent value there, which isn't connected to physical attraction. You know, and this, this is going to sound like, woe is me, I'm so pretty. This just get ready because that's how this is about to sound. I feel as if I came of age and walked through most of my adulthood, aids aside and tragedy. And yeah, we're all, you know, there was that too. But I negotiated life as a very attractive strawberry blonde. And I walked into a room and people looked and I got used to it. I just don't really think and my friends would go, oh, Mark, they'd roll their eyes because people would, you know, want to come up to whatever, you know, that whole social scene where they could see who, you know, oh, Mark's getting cruised in the bar, you know, whatever it was. And I just got used to it and I just blithely swept through rooms with this sense of kind of, you know, hot privilege or something, whatever that was. And when I say to my detriment, I mean it. And that's where it sounds like I'm complaining because I was so pretty. I didn't develop my friendships as closely as I might have because I was busy collecting chips, collecting, collecting looks, you know, making sure my arms looks really great in this certain position, you know, whatever it was, I was obsessed. And because I saw what I gave me. And look, I grew up as a gay boy in Louisiana, who thought that I was going to hell and felt terrible about myself. And so then now I'm getting all of this attention because I'm pretty, I'll take it. I took it, you know, but then it became an obsession where that's all I thought about. And so all of the, you know, I'm your typical gay guy that only works out what shows in a tank top. That's it. If it isn't showing my tank top, I don't work it out. That's it. So I wasn't there for health. I was there for narcissism. And I feel as if in the last, you know, I'm 63. I feel like as if in the last 20 years, I've had to play catch up in my personal relationships. I've had to build better relationships with my family, better relationships with the friends that I have who have either survived or stuck around and spend more time just, just paying attention to them and listening to them and not always looking over their shoulders. See, who else is here that likes me? You know, I hope the right people are here are watching this and hearing this because I think there's a lot of people that can relate to that. And, and hopefully that will inspire some people to like reevaluate maybe their priorities as as they're getting older or even being young. And, and I know I have to put this delicately. Those friends I've had that didn't enjoy that sort of adoration who enriched themselves through meaningful careers and reading and the development of personal relationships with people, you know, those few friends that remained my friends with me, you know, thank God. It's almost as if I got to a certain age and they went, well, welcome into the room, Mark. Oh, finally, you're going to pay attention to life and culture and friendships. Are you done being pretty? Are you done? Can we move on? And yes, I've moved on. Okay, you also mentioned in that essay, feeling unwelcome as long-term survivors in the modern advocacy movement. Can you speak to that a little bit? What makes you feel that way? You know, it's funny. I wrote that piece about 10 years ago and much has been improved. We were kind of the afterthought because either you were focused on preventing new HIV infections. So everybody was focused on that, you know, among people who were negative or finding more and successful treatments for people who were positive. But for those of us who were aging, it's funny. We're like the guinea pigs. We are, we are the generation that started out where, you know, I was diagnosed in 85. There weren't, you know, treatments for 10 years. Wow, I wonder how long he'll live. Let's see. And they studied us and, you know, and then, oh, these new drugs came out. How long will he live now? You know, we've always been examined in that way. And, and now they're like, okay, well, now Mark 63 and he's been on these drugs for a while. I wonder how long until his, he gets osteoporosis or heart disease or these other things that tend to happen to older people with HIV. Let's find out. You know, in other words, after all these years, we're still the guinea pigs, long term survivors. We're still the ones being kind of examined closely. And I'm okay with that. I'm a lot better about it than I used to be. It's like, you know, and again, this is maturity. Okay, well, they're going to learn something about me and might the trajectory of the rest of my life, that's going to help the people coming up. You know, I'm good with that. And speaking with long term survivors, I, and folks hearing, seeing comments and DMs online, I've noticed that there is a desire and a need for hearing more of these stories and experiences such as yourself through the 80s epidemic. But I've always kind of struggled a little bit and been a little bit timid and afraid of being perceived as exploiting the stories. Do you have any advice for that? Because I know that it's important and I should, but I also don't want to be that guy that's like, tell me all your juicy hardships. You know, it reminds me, I got a new therapist about, I don't know, I don't have many more, but I had was I had had a first visit with a new therapist about five years ago. And as soon as he found out, I was diagnosed, you know, 35 years earlier, he was like licking his chops. He was so excited. He wanted to hear all about it. Oh, tell me about the pain of that. I'm like, no, no, no, no, you got the wrong guy. I'm good with that. I'm actually here to talk about, you know, my anxiety over what or whatever the hell it was, you know, yeah, people is the go to story. If you know he's a long term survivor, you're naturally interested. So I'm not offended by it. And if you're interested enough to want to tell our stories or hear it from somebody, I don't feel like that's exploitative at all. As long as you're treating them respectfully, like a whole person, you know, it's like, you don't want to objectify anybody for any particular characteristic and ignore all the rest. So go for it. Just be respectful. Okay. Good, good succinct words. I appreciate that. I actually have a lot, I have a lot of more notes that I wanted to get to, but you and I can gab easily for so long. And I know you have a very tight schedule. So I propose maybe in a few months from now, after I've read the rest, so that we you're not just covering HIV as well, we can do this. Any time you want, I enjoy these conversations very much. And it's exactly the sort of intergenerational stuff that we've both been talking about. And how often this doesn't happen, because I think the point I wanted to make earlier is it doesn't happen because there's always the sexual component of, oh, I'm a daddy and he's a whatever. In other words, we always want to oversimplify what it is, you know, as opposed to maybe we're just friends. Maybe this is that we could talk to each other in an intimate way without it being reduced to something else, something as lazy as sex, right? So I enjoy these very much. And let's do it again, whatever it works for you. I'm so happy you said that. And it reminded me of something that I thought about recently, because when I was late teen and exploring my sexuality, I went, I discovered that there's a gay beach in Southern California in Laguna Beach. And I would drive there as often as I could because I had no other gay experience. And I found when I went there, there was all the really young, hot, sexy guys in their little, like, cool, popular groups milling about on the beach. And then there was also this big setup. And they were always there, same guys, much older, upwards of 80 years old. And they would play volleyball and they all congregated together as well. And I found that I was so much more comfortable with these older men. And maybe on some level, they did ogle me a little bit. But by and large, it was very respectful. And they were very kind and friendly and accepting and mentored me in a way. And I felt so comfortable that I would come back every time and I would go, and it wasn't about sex. But I found out later on, as I met some of these younger folks that they all just assumed that I was just some, like, sex slave to these dudes. And that I couldn't possibly have a meaningful friendship with these guys that were older than me. Okay. So as I'm starting to wrap up here, I wanted to ask, what are you hoping that people will walk away with after reading your book? They will walk away with a sense of pleasure, a sense of satisfaction, because so much of what they will have read includes them. Includes them. And they will feel like, wow, that was my story too. There's a part there that I really related to, which I've been hearing, by the way, from, oh, I have a friend who's Mormon and married and has many kids. And he read the book and he's like, oh my gosh, this is so hilarious. And this happened to me too. In other words, the best I can do is try to reveal with honesty about myself and hope that you go, oh yeah, yeah, I know that to be true. So much of life lessons are universal. And that's the universal nature of writing, the kind of writing I like to do. So that's it. Just a sense of satisfaction. And then, oh my gosh, this is so great. I need to buy copies for all my friends. Absolutely. Are there any future works in mind? I'm going to keep doing exactly what I'm doing. I just posted on my fabulous disease yesterday. I will continue doing that. I love it as an outlet. I love being able to write something and just press a button. And bang, you read it. I'm so immediate gratification. It killed me to write a book and have to wait for it to come out. Okay. And then from our last video, I did have, well, it was a couple people that asked a similar question, which is they wanted to know, credit to you, what is your daily routine because you look so healthy and so strong for your age? Well, thank you. First of all, I did a big photo shoot for a magazine about three months ago. And prior to it, I trained for it like an Olympic event. I was training every day. I was working my ass off. I have not been back to the gym since the day of that photo shoot. And A, it's because my back started going out. And I don't know, now I feel like the guy that doesn't look like his photos. But to answer your question, I think a lot of it is positive mental attitude. I think that you're more attractive when you smile. Oh, that sounds like I'm telling people to smile. What I'm saying is for me, I'm happy to be here. And I have a sense of happiness and purpose. And I think that's what they're seeing. Otherwise, my routine is regular household stuff and feed the cats and get to the grocery store. And now that I'm in physical therapy for my back, as soon as I get that worked out, I will be back to the gym too. Maybe I'll work on my core. I hear there's this thing called your core, Rafe. This might be important for you to know. There's a core that helps you bend over and pick up things when you get old. And you need to work on that. It's one of those things you can't see while wearing a tank top. That's right. That's right. Well, it turns out that physical therapy, they're telling me I need to work on my core. And you're right, you can't see it. So I hate that. But I will work on it. So that's my normal day is very mundane. I promise you, other than the cats and the husband and the snuggling. Okay. Is there anything we haven't discussed today that you'd like to talk about? Not at all. I look forward to talking to you again, Rafe. I really appreciate it. Okay. Well, Mark, thank you so much for agreeing to sit down with me to discuss your book release. I will have links to your website, to your blog, to your link tree, your Twitter, your Instagram, Facebook, all the things in the description box below so anybody can find those there. Everyone at home, please comment below your thoughts, comments, and questions. Do not miss checking out Mark's book. Do not miss it. The digital version is only $5.99. That is a steal. That is so awesome. Otherwise, you can get it in paperback for $19.99. Mark, thank you again, everyone at home. Thank you so much for watching. Be sure to like, subscribe, and hit the bell. So you get a notification every time a new video comes out and share this video with people who in your life who might find this information to be valuable. If you care to donate in support of this channel, you can send me a super thanks below. As some of you have done, thank you so much, or there's a new PayPal link as well. Until next time, cheers.