Readers of Marc Foster’s weekly column in Gay Chicago have become well acquainted with the intimate details of his life since he began writing three years ago. Like a dutiful diarist, Foster’s chronicled his coming-out story each week in painfully honest installments. Regular followers of the column can tell you how Marc fretted that his appearance alone might give away his homosexuality. Or about the time he introduced his first girlfriend to his new boyfriend. They might recall his trip to get an HIV test. And they know that his mother sobbed over the phone when he told her he was gay.
“I have to admit I’m terrified,” Friess told the crowd, rubbing his hands on his jeans. He said he figured only his friends would bother to show up, so he hadn’t prepared any notes for the occasion.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
During his sophomore year Friess secretly mailed a resume and writing samples to Ralph Paul Gernhardt, publisher of Gay Chicago. “I thought if nobody else is going to write from inside the closet what it’s like, I thought I would,” he explains. Gernhardt immediately gave Friess a column. A couple of years earlier Gay Chicago carried another closeted columnist, who had to quit when his guardian grandparents learned he was gay. Gernhardt says he hoped the column would give support to other gay people who felt isolated socially or geographically. “I went through it as a teenager, I fought the same things,” says Gernhardt, who founded the magazine in 1976. “I never overcame it until I was married and had children and got divorced in my 30s.”
When he began writing the column, Friess says, he was still deep in denial. He felt lonely that winter, “one of the most miserable times of my life.” He’d alienated his few gay friends because he wouldn’t associate too closely with them for fear of what others would think. He’d also pushed away his straight friends because he was tired of keeping up a facade. “My closet was always socially constructed,” Friess says. “A lot of people’s closets are morally based or religiously based. They care what God thinks. I was just fearful what the neighbors would think. God was probably OK with it.”
In column after column Friess was coming out to various friends and family. Much of it was rather mundane day-to-day stuff, like a “literary version of MTV’s The Real World,” he says. “I know the camera’s running. I should do something interesting.” He told people one at a time: a Northwestern friend, a longtime pen pal, an old high school buddy, and eventually a relative. “My coming out was starting out on the fringes and working closer to people who had known me longer and longer until I got to the middle, which was my mother and father and the rest of my family. It’s kind of like peeling one layer after another.” Friess says it became hard to tell whether his coming-out process propelled the column or whether the column nudged him to tell people. “I would sometimes feel like, gee, my life is kind of boring right now. Let’s stir it up. Let’s tell somebody else.” He says he set out to mine those experiences for material.
Since the column debuted, Friess has had 20 or so regular pen pals, many whose lives paralleled the developments in his own. Gernhardt says Marc Foster is by far Gay Chicago’s most popular columnist.
Late in the summer of 1993 Friess had a tiff with “Mother Superior” (a lesbian activist named Mary McCauley), the Windy City Times’s former gossip columnist. Calling him “Barfola,” McCauley lambasted his “self-hating drivel.” She even mailed a copy of her column to Friess in Kansas, where he was doing a newspaper internship. “Kiss, Kiss,” she scrawled across the top of the page. He responded in his column by calling her “a futile old dyke who watches too much bad TV and writes absurd, offensive, and always malicious drivel in another Chicago magazine.”
