Mark King has had the clap so many times he’s renamed it ‘the applause’. The first time King had gonorrhoea, he was a teenager in the late 1970s, growing up with his five siblings in Louisiana.
He had the telltale signs: burning and discomfort when he urinated and a thick discharge that left a stain in his underwear.
King visited a clinic and gave a fake name and phone number. He was treated quickly with antibiotics and sent on his way.
A few years later, the same symptoms reappeared. By this time, the 22-year-old was living in West Hollywood, hoping to launch his acting career.
While King had come out to his parents, being gay in Louisiana was poles apart from being gay in Los Angeles. For one, homosexuality was illegal in Louisiana until 2003, whereas California had legalised it in 1976.
In Los Angeles there was a thriving a gay scene where King, for the first time, could embrace his sexuality freely. He frequented bathhouses and also met men in dance clubs and along the bustling sidewalks. There was lots of sex to be had.
“The fact that we weren’t a fully formed culture beyond those spaces… was what brought us together as people. Sex was the only expression we had to claim ourselves as LGBT people,” King says.
When he stepped into the brick clinic just a few strides away from the heart of the city’s gay nightlife in Santa Monica, King, with his thick sandy blond hair with a tinge of red through it, looked around the room. It was filled with other gay men.
“What do you do when you’re 22 and gay? You cruise other men. I remember sitting in the lobby cruising other men,” King recalls, laughing. “My Summer of Love was 1982. It was a playground. I was young and on the prowl.”
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