How I F*ck while HIV-Positive

NATALIE RIVERA: This is How I F*ck, a podcast about how we have sex, sponsored by Fembot magazine and produced by Kodiac Productions. I’m your host, Natalie Rivera. It’s October 2020 when you’re hearing this and we’re still many, many months into a pandemic. I say many because six to seven months seems like many right now. It seems like a long ass time. The pandemic has pretty much affected almost every part of our lives: our job, our daily routine, the way we grocery shop, and for some, even our relationship with politics. It’s also affected our sex life. I’m sure you’ve read a headline or two about what it’s like to date during COVID, or maybe this pandemic has impacted a relationship you were already in when the pandemic started. But what was it like to date during the global pandemic of the 80s? A pandemic that resulted in the death of more than 100,000 people between 1981 and 1990. A time when communities had to ban together as a result of the incompetence of the then-current administration, and a time when Dr. Anthony Fauci was, dare I say, unpopular. Writer and speaker Mark King remembers this time pretty well. 

MARK S. KING: My name is Mark S. King, and I am a long term survivor of HIV and a writer and activist.

NR: Mark King was born into a large family that settled in Louisiana. One of six kids, Mark, who identifies as gay, had a pretty limited understanding of what sex was growing up. He didn’t really have much of a sex education when he was in school. So he did what most people before the age of the internet did back then: he asked his older siblings.

MSK: I found out what intercourse was by my sister explaining it to me. And she was a little older. And I had it all wrong. By the way. I thought that the guy peed in the girl. And then she she had a baby.

NR: Seriously?

MSK: Well, yeah…because I had no concept of what semen might be. So I just figured you must pee in her. 

NR: Mark never peed inside any girls. It’s not that kind of episode this week, you guys. But he did have sex young. Pretty young.

MSK: I'm a little embarrassed to say that I was sexually active, fairly young. And, and by that, I mean, I guess 13 and I mean gay, gay sex. 

NR: Even though Mark was hooking up with guys as a teen, he still had a girlfriend. 

MSK: I dated a girl just to kind of have a placeholder. And, uh, and we ended up having sex. And so I got so I'm not what they call a gold star gay because I have had sex with a woman. And, and it was fumbling and, and, and we had sex a few times, it was something to do. But it was not my authentic sexuality.

NR: While Mark wasn’t living his authentic self around his girlfriend, he was being himself in other places.

MSK:  I remember distinctly one day, I had been out to the gay bar the night before, and hooked up with somebody. And I was driving my girlfriend home. And I was trying to hide a hickey that I had on the side of my neck. And she saw it and was terribly hurt, and immediately knew, because she knew me well and knew some things that it didn't come from a girl and that she had lost. She had waged a war and lost. And it was it was sad. 

NR: Mark broke up with the girlfriend and came out to his family his junior year of high school. At this point Mark is over the tiptoeing around his sexuality. No more girls, no more sneaking off to gay bars. It’s time to start living openly gay. 

MSK: I just figured if there was nothing wrong with being gay— and I decided there wasn't—then why shouldn't everybody know about it? My family weren't pleased primarily as I was, to find out, not because I was gay. But because my life would be difficult. You know, it was it was 1976 at that time, and there wasn't any indication that it was going to be smooth sailing as a gay man. 

NR: I mean… they weren’t wrong. The board of the American Psychiatric Association had just voted to remove “homosexuality” from its list of psychiatric disorders just a few years prior, yet LGBTQ+ people were still considered a threat to children in some states, gay educators were being fired from their jobs, and there were still cases of gay men being killed on the street. Concerned for what struggles would lie ahead for him, Mark’s parents wanted to make sure that he was absolutely certain he was gay.

MSK: They at the time, wanted to put me in therapy. That was their first kind of gut reaction. You need to go to a therapist for that because maybe this is a phase. And I was already well informed enough to say to them, “If you want me to go to a therapist, so that he can tell you to leave me alone. Be my guest.” I was I was an arrogant little sh*t.

NR: Mark ditched the therapy and started dating guys instead. Much older guys. 

MSK: My family took it in stride, they discovered that I had a boyfriend when I was a junior in high school. Unfortunately, he was 24 years old. And I guess I could have thrown him in jail…now that I think about it. 

NR: Yeah, Mark is a rebel, but this “I’m going to f*ck who I want” attitude wasn’t something that happened overnight. Like I said, being openly gay wasn’t easy back then. Keep in mind Mark was living in the south during the 70s when he came out. 

MSK: Can you imagine how terrifying it is just coming into your sexuality anyway, right? When you're an adolescent, and then realizing that your sexuality is perverse, somehow. The cylinders are not firing the way they're supposed to. And you come to that realization, and you're horrified. I mean, I remember, I can remember being horrified at myself. Oh, my God, this is so this is how it is, um, and, and not being able to do anything about that. And then… it's hard enough getting the girl that you like to kiss you. How are you supposed to, you know, figure out if the the boy you like, A. will kiss you and B. has any interest because he's homosexual, or will punch you in the face. We say being gay is a gift. And I'm certain I believe that my sexuality is a gift. But I certainly understand people that would say, “Yeah, you know, if I had to choose, I'd probably go the easier route, you know, and be able to focus more on the rest of my life and not have to battle discrimination and homophobia.”

NR: While the possibility of being discriminated against or attacked loomed around, Mark can’t ignore just how monumental the 70s were for the LGBT movement. 

MSK: We were just becoming more visible. There were gay prides, you know, Stonewall had happened in 1969. So we had… the entire decade of the 70s, post-Stonewall to start. We had that time to start really making an impact and standing up for ourselves and naming ourselves and coming out. Coming out became a thing in the 70s. You know, it was absurd to even think about coming out prior to that. And it became a political thing to come out. And thank god those people did because it works. 

NR: The 70s was also a decade of some good-looking gay attire.

MSK: It was a sexy decade. It was disco. It was tight 501 jeans. It was, you know, guys in San Francisco, going to the gym and showing off their heavy chests and starting to project this kind of hyper-masculinity in direct contrast to the sissy boy that gays had been perceived up till then remember, you know, 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s gay men were considered Nancy boys. Nancy boys, you know. They were trying to be women. That's how we were perceived, as extremely feminine. And men, many of us just bought into that. Now, in the 70s, we said, “You know what, we're men. And we're gay because we like other men,” and we started to exert our masculinity, and our and more overt sexuality.

NR: Mark went on to get a theater degree in college, and began booking acting gigs in New Orleans immediately after graduation. In 1980, eager to work with the big leagues, Mark packed his bags and moved to Los Angeles…

MSK:: to pursue my dream of being in every McDonald's commercial there was, and did well. I worked a lot and that was good. 

NR: Oh, it was really good for Mark back then. You see, Mark moved to West Hollywood. Yeah, West Hollywood in the 80s.

NR: What was West Hollywood like in 1980, 1981, because I have an idea…

MSK: Well, it's suffered the same fate of so many other wonderful communities that the gays have come in and thrown fairy dust around. We fixed it all up and made it fabulous and increased property values so much so that we could no longer afford to live there. And it became a very much a heterosexual, a very much kind of a straight sort of thing. And and we had to go find some other area of town to fix up. But during that time, West Hollywood was still gay and cut off shorts and doc Marten boots, and lots of tank tops and the bars were hopping. Because that's how we met one another. Hookups… meeting people was easily had at any time of the day or night, and by the way, in that day, we knew how to cruise in person; that is show someone in person that you were interested in them, whether in a bar situation, or walking down the street, you know. There's an art to walking down the street and making eye contact and then having the guts five paces later to turn around. And look again, and see if he's looking back. It was still the sexual revolution. And there was still a lot of fun to be had. And it was abandonment, and kind of this whole sense of the community of staking our claim, and celebrating our sexuality, maybe going a little overboard, because we had been so repressed for so long. But yeah, and and I was very promiscuous.

NR: Mark was also in a long-term relationship with his boyfriend, Charlie during this golden age of hookups. They had been together a couple years before Mark moved to West Hollywood and stayed together even through the hookups and the “cruising.”

MSK: I was in West Hollywood with that relationship, also being promiscuous, because I was young and stupid and horny. 

NR: But that boyfriend stuck by Marks’ side even through the young and stupid and horny period. He was there for him the summer of 1981 or what Mark refers to as...

MSK: The Gathering Storm, where suddenly, news reports started leaking out of something that might be killing gay guys. It was a matter of kind of hearing a news report and then seeing something on NBC News and wondering, “Oh, that's just too terrible to believe. There's some sort of cancer that's killing gay guys…wouldn't that be awful.” It was, it was just too awful to really take too seriously. You figured it would be something that, you know, came in the news cycle and would be gone in a few weeks. 

NR: The news about this new “cancer” didn’t go away. More and more reports of what was described as a lung infection and a weakened immune system appeared in medical reports, newspapers, and news programs across the nation. It was in New York, in San Francisco, in Los Angeles. By the following year, public health officials started referring to this “gay men’s pneumonia” as acquired immunodeficiency syndrome.

MSK: AIDS is just a disorder of that, that destroys your immune system. And then one of a host of other diseases is the one that comes in and actually kills you. So, guys were waking up in the morning blind because they got cryptococcal meningitis overnight, because of the HIV. They were dying over the weekend because of pneumonia. They were discovering lesions on their body, black lesions, because of Kaposi sarcoma, all of these were rare diseases people didn't get, but only attacked us because our immune systems were destroyed. And then people I knew, people I knew, started getting sick.

NR: Experts still didn’t understand much about the disease at first, but it wasn’t long before they started connecting the virus with sex. By 1984, cities like Los Angeles were starting to implement bans on locations where they felt there would be a lot of sexual activity. A lot of gay sexual activity. 

MSK: The bath houses closed, the bars emptied out. So, the venues that we would use to socialize or meet guys for sex dried up, and sex became synonymous with this disease that was killing us. Our sex was was deadly, literally. 

NR: A lot of gay men refused to let this new virus tamper with their sexual expression. Most of them spent decades feeling deprived of their sexuality because of the gay taboo in America, and so this sexual freedom of the 70s and 80s was just too precious for them to give up. 

MSK: It was kind of like our “big f*ck you” to AIDS. You're not going to destroy this part of me. I'm still going to exercise my sexuality. I'm going to do it in ways that are healthy and helped me remain healthy, but I'm still going to have sex. So there was a lot of that. But yeah, by and large, publicly in terms of the big venues, sex dried up, it was gone.

NR: The virus was finally identified as HIV in 1984. Mark was understandably scared. He started looking at his body in a different way. Was my body capable of getting this sick? Was it capable of getting someone else that sick?

MSK: Our own semen. Semen was the number one delivery system of HIV. And so this thing that was, I don't know, I guess many people find a pleasurable part, some people might say the best part of having sex is now a weapon, is now a deadly weapon. And just the very sight of it became a lot because it reminded us that this was the delivery system for HIV. Obviously, there were other bodily fluids that could transmit HIV, but they didn't do it nearly as often.

NR: Because the virus was identified late, the first ever HIV test didn’t arrive until 1985, almost four years after the first reports of AIDS-related deaths made the news. Mark decided he would take it. He was 24 now and he was done with not knowing if he had it or not. 

MSK: I was scared to death anyway. I was so frightened anyway, because it was creeping into my social circle. My favorite bartender at my favorite game bar just disappeared over the weekend. That happened a lot. People just disappeared like the rapture, just poof, they were gone. And they might have been a friend of a friend that you used to see all the time and you didn't really know what happened and then you heard, “Oh, he died.” So the fear of not knowing for sure was bad enough. It didn't feel like it was going to be any worse to find out for sure. So go ahead, take the test. It's like, “What if there was an envelope on the table right in front of you right now that would tell you, if you would be dead in three years?” Would you open that envelope? I opened it. I wanted to know, because I wanted to know how to plan my life. Do I need to be planning my funeral? Or do I need to be doing something else. And unfortunately, the news was, I should be planning my funeral. 

NR: Mark tested positive. His boyfriend tested negative. Mark wasn’t just sorrowful about his results… he was angry. 

MSK: When HIV happens, what we've quickly found out is that the the most direct way to get it is for the virus to literally be injected into your body. What does that mean? That means you get f*cked. You get f*cked by somebody who has HIV, and their sperm is injected into your body and infects you. That is the number one way to get it. So there was this sense of, you know, here we had just barely accepted ourselves as gay people and come to terms with it and hoped our parents liked our boyfriends. Now, HIV, one of the many things that it said was, “Oh, so you were f*cked in the ass and somebody came in your ass.” And it was so terribly personal. 

NR: Having HIV was almost like a scarlet letter. People speculated things about Mark’s personal life just from knowing his status. 

MSK: It was like, oh, my god, they know something very intimate about my sex life, because I'm HIV-positive and Charlie wasn't. So what did that mean? Oh, that means that Charlie probably is a top, he probably was the insertive partner, and he wasn't under as much risk and Mark must be getting f*cked because he got HIV. And so HIV itself during this time, told people very intimate things about our sex lives. That was just one of the many kind of terrible things, you know, not to mention all the guys that had to call their parents and say, “I'm gay.” And I have AIDS. You know, it was hard to tell which piece of news you delivered first, you know, what would be the worst news. 

NR: Soon after, Mark started hearing news about former lovers also disappearing.

MSK: I remember the moment when the first person died, that I had had sex with. It wasn't you for a while it was like you heard somebody died. And you're like, “Oh, shoot, I had sex with him who had sex with the other guy who had sex with him.” You know, it was twice, three times removed. 

NR: So the sex culture in West Hollywood dried up. Not only did it seem dangerous to have sex at this time, but the community was too busy trying to save each other to even think about sex. 

MSK: It was just trips to the emergency room, and then over to intensive care to see Ron, and then picking up things for Leslie who is dying in my guest room. And, you know, that's not that's not exactly sexy. So we had other things to think about. 

NR: What was masturbation like, during this scare?

MSK: You know, that's funny, you should ask. You know, jacking off is not a kind of a stream of consciousness exercise, right? It's kind of like, who knows what kind of thoughts just kind of go blinking in your head, you know, while you're searching for whatever that favorite thought that will, you know, lead you to your orgasm. But amongst all of that, you're seeing images of of your old sex partners covered in lesions. The last time you saw them are in tubes. Coming out of them in intensive care, or all of these, you know, all of these images are floating around in your head about death and mortality. And so I don't have a strong recollection of whether or not I jacked off less, but I can pretty much guarantee I did, because I was spending so much damn time at hospitals and funerals and stuff, and I can't imagine that you know, that I would jack off so that I can produce this bodily fluid that reminds me of how HIV is transmitted, and I am literally a walking, walking vector of disease. That is what I am. How in the world do I reconcile that with a healthy sexuality?

NR: Even though Mark was HIV-positive, he still hadn’t developed AIDS… but he still could, of course, he thought. It was just a matter of time. 

MSK: I knew that on any given day I would wake up tomorrow morning, and I'll have a spot or I'll have a cough or something will happen and say, “Oh, the countdown has begun. And you've got two years on the outside. So I lived with that every day. And there it was, and there were no long range plans. It was like living with a blank space ahead of me. There was no plans for the future. There was no plans for relationships. There was no plans for career, nothing, there was just blank ahead of me. 

NR: Were you having sex, and if you did, was that like?

MSK: Not only was I having sex, I met and began a relationship with a new person. That long term relationship was breaking up, it was kind of a long break up, and there was some overlap between him and the new guy. And ironically, get this, the new guy was HIV-negative, just like my previous partner was, and knew he was getting himself involved with a guy who was HIV positive, who could up and die on him at any given time. But trust me when I tell you that was a real factor, in our deciding whether to pursue our relationship, as well as how do you feel about hospice care? Or are you going to care for me at home? That's like the third date conversation. For us, not to mention, oh, my god, did we spill anything? Oh, did condom come off? Is the condom off? You know, it's not just a matter of “oops, we might have a baby,” it's “I don't want to kill you.” You know? So, ha, you know, that man, he loved me. I will say that, because there were a lot of complexities he was willing to put up with to pursue our relationship. And I didn't die on him.

NR: Sex with this new partner was good but it was also very limited, and even stressful at some points. 

MSK: There were many times in that new relationship with that HIV-negative person, that…and we, we f*cked each other, we were versatile, we, you know, we both were topping and bottoming. Whatever we felt like at the moment. And there were times when he just, he just wanted my d*ck. And there was a moment where, I don't know… don't reach, don't stop everything to reach over and look through the nightstand and find one and pull it out and see if I can keep you hard while you put it on. You know, I mean, there were times when he slipped and there was kind of an excitement and horror, while he slid my penis inside of him. And I'd have to say, “No, I love you, you're killing me, but I don't want to kill you.”

NR: Mark lived like this with HIV for the rest of 1985. As well 1986. Oh and 87. This looming feeling of dread that Mark had, he actually lived with that for about 11 years. 

MSK: Year after year, until 1996 when at long last medications came out that actually did the job and reversed the damage and didn't cure us but has kept me alive since then. 

NR: When asked why he thinks he’s lived this long with HIV, Mark's response is that it’s...

MSK: The luck of the draw. Everybody's different. Our immune systems are slightly different. And some of us are, as we now know, a little better equipped at fighting HIV in our body, which for most people, mounts this enormous battle and your body on its way to destroying your immune system, which makes you get something and die. Some of us are just better at fighting that off. And, and I am what they call a long term non progressor, meaning I never progressed to AIDS, I'm just HIV positive. I never got an AIDS diagnosis, because I never got one of those terrible diseases. 

NR: Mark will live with HIV for the rest of his life until a cure is discovered. While there haven't been many advances towards a potential cure any time soon, experts are still learning new things about this virus. 

MSK: In the last six years, we have found out conclusively that those of us who are HIV-positive, when we're on successful medication, you know, they measure the amount of virus in your blood. And that's based on how well your medications are working. Well, when they're working, they can't even measure it in your blood, you still have it, they just can't measure it. Because you have so little. Those of us who have an undetectable viral load, that's what it's called. You cannot transmit the virus to our partners. We know that they studied tens of thousands of couples who are positive and negative. And found this out conclusively. So remember, I'm talking about all those years scared to death of being a vector of disease, or hurting someone I care about. I have only learned in the last few years that that's no longer an issue. It's like the biggest, most profound weight lifted off of me.

NR: For Mark this didn’t just mean more sex. It meant more sex without a condom. 

MSK: I can now have sex like anybody else and not have to worry about bringing, you know, the Angel of Death into the bedroom. And wow, after having lived that way for so long, it's amazing. It's amazing. And it's affected my sex life, it's affected my self-esteem. I walk with my head held a little higher. 

MSK: You might still feel like you're carrying around a nuclear weapon, even if you never shoot it off. So I still feel this way even though I'm in a positive-positive relationship. And I you know, as an activist, I work with countless couples who are positive, negative, gay, straight, who this means a great deal to them and to their sexual satisfaction and to the quality of their sex life because they no longer have to have a barrier between them in the form of a condom. If the positive partner is on medications and undetectable, it's amazing. And is it affecting your sex life? Let me tell you, it is. I cannot tell you the number of men and women, especially the straight ones, speaking at conferences, talking about pleasure. Sexual pleasure, that's like the hot topic now at AIDS conferences. After 20 years of talking about how many people died this year, and will this new drug work, the biggest topic is sexual pleasure. Because we get to have it now.

NR: Well, Mark, that was my last question. How can people find you?

MSK: Well, I have an award winning blog called my fabulous disease about living with HIV and the people that inspire me. And I invite anyone to come visit me at myfabulousdisease.com. 

NR: Perfect mark. Thank you.

MSK: You're welcome. Thanks a lot. It was really a pleasure. I'm I appreciate your podcast. You go! 

NR: And that was our episode. This episode was produced by me, Natalie Rivera. I’m also the host and creator. Ben Quiles is our audio engineer. Shyanne Lopez did copy and fact check. Music is by Miguel Gutierrez. Find his music online under his artist name Magh. Chelsea Kwoka is our vocal coach. Our marketing team includes Gabriela Sanchez and Alissa Medina. Our sponsorship manager is Mouna Coulibaly. Make sure to check out our sponsor Fembot Magazine. We’re also on Instagram and Twitter at howickpodcast, that’s “How I F*ck,” without the “u” so “fck.” We also have a website, howifckpodcast.com, again without the “u” where you can find all of our latest episodes, show notes and our list of articles and stats we used in this episode. And if you like this podcast please subscribe to it, rate it, review it. Reviews are a big deal for podcasts. They help us gain more listeners which then helps us do more of what we do, so we’d really appreciate it if you took a couple minutes to rate us on Apple podcasts. Help us keep doing what we’re doing. Thanks again, and stay tuned for our next episode!