>BIO
Mark Abramson was a Midwestern farm boy who joined the great gay migration to San Francisco in the 1970s. His writing has appeared in the gay press as far back as Christopher Street, Fag Rag, Gay Sunshine, Mouth of the Dragon and more recently in Lethe Press’ acclaimed anthology Charmed Lives, gay spirit in storytelling.
Photo:
Donald Nelson
Like Tim Snow, Mark Abramson grew up in Minnesota and once worked as a waiter in the Castro, but Mark is better known as a bartender and a co-producer with the late Jim Cvitanich of “MEN BEHIND BARS, the bartenders' folly” an annual AIDS benefit, as well as “PIER PRESSURE” and “HIGH TEA” both mega-dance parties on the piers of San Francisco.
Like Tim Snow, Mark had an Aunt Ruth Taylor, but Mark's late maternal grandmother wasn’t a psychic. His other grandmother might have been, but she died before he was born. And his mother doesn’t drink, unfortunately.
In addition to writing the Beach Reading series, he is also editing a memoir, Castro Street Diaries recounting true tales from the great gay Mecca before AIDS - including adventures with old friends such as John Preston, Rita Rockett, Randy Shilts and Al Parker.
From the introduction to Castro Street Diaries:
Eager young men had flocked to northern California for the Gold Rush of 1849. A hundred years later San Francisco hosted the beatniks, fueled on cigarettes and coffee, followed by the hippies in the 1960s with utopian dreams of peace and free love while they got high on pot and LSD. That same sense of freedom must have lured us in the 1970s, stoked on beer and poppers and libidos running wild. I might have told my family I was heading to graduate school at San Francisco State, but like the thousands of other gay men who arrived here during those years, I was going west in search of one thing – thousands of other gay men.