Mark and his Saxophone

My name is Mark and as you can see from the picture, a somewhat dilapidated antipodean – 66 years old. In earlier, more healthy times, I remember feeling joyous and grateful to be growing up in a large family of seven, in New Zealand’s ‘Big Smoke’ – Auckland city. We all inherited a love for music, singing in harmony and some of us playing instruments. I myself completed a Bachelor of Music in Performance, on the bassoon and at 19 years old managed to score a prestigious position in the NZSO, down in Wellington.

Being a classical musician was the easy part – knowing myself was harder. After a series of fickle affairs and liaisons – some live-in – and the loss of loved ones – I ended up losing the plot and was incarcerated in Hell – an acute psychiatric ward. Nine weeks seemed like an eternity but coming out as gay helped me secure a release which is ironic, considering homosexual acts were only declassified as evidence of mental disorders, in 1973. I headed north, back to the big smoke.

In Auckland, now my playground, I found myself in and out of work, playing music, answering phones, washing dishes, waitering – meeting secret lovers, locals or travellers from the White House to the Queen’s ship Britannia. I became a bit of a gay activist, protesting for the sake of my gay brothers and sisters to get the Homosexual Law Reform bill passed. Despite the Salvation Army mounting a petition against us, which was signed by a quarter of the country’s three million people, to keep homosexuality a crime, the bill passed in 1986. I learnt then that the majority is not always right.

Returning to music, I taught myself, and others, how to play the saxophone, piano, flute and bassoon. I taught at Kings College and privately. I gigged at a few weddings, parties and even for a Lord from England. How I ‘Forest Gumped’ my way onto the Royal Society Payroll I will never know! Unfortunately, God had other challenges for me and after getting my students through their exams, I entered the new millennium with a heart attack, compounded with an HIV diagnosis. I was going to die.

I am still waiting to open the portal to the next life, as we all are. Thank you science – thank you, God. I feel more focussed now. The brilliant photographer, Ilan Wittenberg, saw me playing in the dunes of Long Bay (saxophone!) and so here I am, immortalised on these pages. I have had serious bodily challenges lately and live in the CBD where Otara meets the city, in some kind of Maori haven for the crooks of their culture- Grey’s Ave. Daily I am called Poofta and Faggot in this proletarian abyss. Sometimes I can hardly even walk, yet doggedly I sing waiata * in the local Street Choir, run by the dynamic Rohan McMahon.

So it seems I have come full circle and I am negotiating the ghetto of ostracism again, surrounded by the nasty and nice. As Bette Davis said ‘Old age ain’t no place for sissies’. Wish me luck – I am going to need it!

*In Māori culture, waiata refers to songs, chants, or the act of singing. Deeply woven into Aotearoa’s heritage, they serve as powerful expressions of history, emotion, and identity