QUEER4DECADES is the archive (not yet a “repository”– he is still alive and kicking!) of Mark Freeman’s unquenched thirst to explore the world of Gay, then LGBT, Trans and full-on Queer Liberation (all in the historical context of Women’s and Black liberation) as it evolved over the fifty-odd years since he came out.
Never a central figure in any one group, he was a participant, or at least a lurking presence, and a tongue-in-cheek commentator at a remarkable number of memorable moments, Movements, and major events. I‘ll admit it, that was me there. If “May you live in interesting times” is a Chinese curse, I‘d beg to differ. It has been a blessing to have often been in so many wrong places at the right times. And to have survived; it provides a jaundiced outlook, and a hopeful point of view.
Among those events are these.
- Learning to read books before First Grade but having a rocky academic road– kicked out of one high school for an oral report on the Vietnam War and another for leading a school boycott.
- Attending the second Merry Pranksters/Ken Kesey “Acid Test” at the San Fernando Valley Unitarian Church as a drug-virgin adolescent, but finding my peers in its Liberal Religious Youth.
- While hitchhiking from LA during high school vacation to Berkeley/SF: panhandling for concert tickets; selling Aldous Huxley “doors of perception” block-print scrolls I’d carved at a store on Haight & Ashbury; thrift-shopping next to Janis Joplin; catching both the “Be-In” and the “Death of Hippie” parade.
- Working as a Conscientious Objector and counselor at Draft Help during the 1968 SF State student strike (called by the first Black Students Union), then moving our office to the Mission.
- Participating in the Food Conspiracy guerrilla buyers’ club, starting free film screenings at the branch library that paired “Black Panther Breakfast Program” with “The Blob”, travelling by land to South America with my girlfriend Susie to witness the socialist Allende era in Chile before the CIA took it down.
- Researching with a homegrown team the devastation of real estate speculation on housing in working-class neighborhoods of SF and then printing the broadside “Who’s Moving.”
- Contributing to fight against anti-gay teacher CA Prop 6 (1978) by mobilizing non-gay allies statewide under Harvey Milk and Sally Gearhart’s United Front Against Briggs, with my lover Michael Ward and Amber Hollibaugh. Funds were raised by organizing with Allan Sawyer the first mixed Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, years before Frameline had mixed screenings.
- Writing cover features, reviews and interviews for the Village Voice, Sierra magazine, Spring: a Journal of Jungian Thought, and regularly in the SF Weekly, Bay Times and Bay Area Reporter (BAR) during the decades of the HIV Epidemic.
- Pioneering the use of storytelling in pediatric hospital units, plus to adult “people living with AIDS and those who care for them”, creating the radio show Healing Tales on KALW-FM.
- Bringing harm-reduction healthcare, including vaccines, abscess care and referral into primary care to needle exchanges, SRO hotels, and the un-housed on the streets of SF (out of a fish-tackle box and a tiny cold carrier meant for soda or beer).
- Starting Transgender Tuesdays in ’93, the first free public health TG clinic with Dr. Barry Zevin, and RN Mary Monihan, in collaboration with Black, Asian and Latin activist AIDS groups, changing the restrictive “gatekeeper” model of trans care to one based on self-determination and informed consent.
- Directing during a tumultuous year the feature documentary “Transgender Tuesdays: A Clinic in the Tenderloin” with editor Nathaniel Walters, and filling SF’s Castro Theatre for its 2012 premiere.
- Writing the storybook for the anonymous art activist anti-censorship group Boy with Arms Akimbo in 1989; a detailed history in 1994 of the beloved STUD Bar and “Mr. David” Glamamore’s backstory for Megan Murray’s San Francisco Drag: A Coloring Book in 2015; a visit to an amazing character with Tourette’s in Chicago on the eve of his brother’s funeral.
- Volunteering with SFUSD public school students for 35 years, including touch-typing skills, cooking, decorating a Burning Man art car, plus video storytelling during the COVID years.
- Travel Blogging about: the ‘Stans of Central Asia; Spain during the 500th year after the forced expulsion of its Moors and Jews; the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots in New York; New Orleans’ Jazz Fest; nights in Havana and Santiago de Cuba; and Acapulco’s International Lesbian and Gay Association confab.