Staying Fit
Mark S. King has spent most of his years recounting living with HIV. The Atlanta resident was diagnosed with the human immunodeficiency virus at 24, during the height of the AIDS epidemic in 1985. Now 62, he’s lived longer with HIV than without.
According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the first cases of what was to be called AIDS were reported in the United States in June 1981. Nearly 1.2 million people in the U.S. were living with HIV at the end of 2019, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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“I am a 62-year-old who is navigating the perils of aging, who is in love and who has a history that is the journey of HIV,” King said.
Friends told King not to get tested because there wasn’t a single drug to treat HIV and the repercussions seemed dire — loss of job, disowning by family and loss of housing. He was sneaked into a doctor’s office after hours to be tested, “because you didn’t want that test to show up on your medical records. We were afraid of losing insurance just for taking the test.”
He saw the test results as something that could tell him whether he’d be alive in a couple of years.
“[He] had told me he said, ‘I knew I was going to be HIV positive before I even took the test,’ ” said Charles Green, King’s longtime friend.
Instead of going “inward” as Green said most gay men at the time did, King got to work.
After his diagnosis, King became an activist and talked about the latest developments with the disease.
Courtesy Mark S. King
“We started organizations,” King said. “We started support groups. We told the [National Institutes of Health] that they better get on it and start doing faster clinical trials of drugs ’cause we didn’t have four years to wait while something went through their pipeline.”
King eventually put his experiences in writing. “I was the guy that would speak as a person living with HIV about the latest development. As those years went on, I started writing columns about living with HIV. I realized that I was here to chronicle in real time what’s happening.”
He said he didn’t make plans, create a retirement account, or think about his career. It wasn’t until 1996, he said, that effective medication arrived and there was no longer the expectation of death. He could have stopped chronicling his HIV journey, but he decided to continue.
