Mark Thompson (author)

Thompson was honored in 2017 along with other notables, named on bronze bootprints, as part of San Francisco South of Market Leather History Alley.

Thompson died on August 23, 2016, in Palm Springs, California, where he moved after his husband's death. His cause of death was undetermined, but it was believed he fell or fainted due to illness or side effects from his medication.

Thompson was the recipient of the Pioneer Award from the Lambda Literary Foundation in 2008.

Thompson was married to Malcolm Boyd, an Episcopal priest who was 30 years older than him and predeceased him. They met in 1984 and married in 2013. They lived in Silver Lake, a neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. Boyd's role as spiritual leader inspired Thompson to explore his own spirituality. Mark, in the course of writing books on queer spirituality, began to see and believe that gay people had a "magical, deep, mysterious quality". This viewpoint, along with the emotional support of his husband, invigorated his sense of self esteem and the belief that given the choice he would "never have chosen to be any other way" than gay. It was Thompson's hope that his work would serve to help other queer people with their spiritual struggles.

Thompson had HIV/AIDS. In an oral history interview with the Lavender Effect, Thompson described himself as "serial monogamous" at the time he contracted the virus, but admitted to having several boyfriends in a short period of time. He contracted the virus from one of them in 1979 or 1980. Many of his lovers died of the disease, as did his own brother, Kirk. Thompson states that his brother died in his arms in 1987, months before the first effective AIDS medications were released to the public.

Thompson became a journalist for The Advocate, the main LGBT magazine in the United States, in 1975. For two decades, he wrote many articles about gay activism and the responses to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. He also conducted many interviews, including gay British painter David Hockney and gay politician Harvey Milk.

Mark Thompson (August 19, 1952 – August 23, 2016) was an American journalist and author. He was a senior editor for The Advocate and the author of several books about LGBT culture. He received the Pioneer Award from the Lambda Literary Foundation in 2008.