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. Early life Mark Thompson was born on the Monterey Peninsula in California. He graduated from San Francisco State University, where he studied journalism. While in college, he became a gay activist and joined the Radical Faeries. He was also the co-founder of the Gay Students Coalition with Professor John Paul De Cecco as the faculty advisor, and started a gay newspaper on campus. Career 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. Thompson was the author of four books about gay culture, including a history of The Advocate. He also wrote his memoir. Additionally, he was an amateur photographer, and he exhibited his photography of Harry Hay and others in San Francisco. Thompson was the recipient of the Pioneer Award from the Lambda Literary Foundation in 2008. Personal life and death 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 joined the Radical Faeries while in college. He was a cofounder of Black Leather Wings, an organization for spiritual gay leather folk, a mostly pagan group affiliated with the Radical Faeries. 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