Aging into Authenticity in Recovery ft. Mark V

Hey there, Super Sober Heroes! This week on Gay A, I’m joined by returning guest and podcast favorite, Mark, as we dive into the transformative power of sobriety and how it’s helped him embrace his authentic queer self.

From growing up in a Catholic family with strict gender norms to navigating the complexities of being openly gay in the workplace, Mark shares his journey of self-discovery, healing, and unapologetically owning his queerness—brooches, skirts, and all!

We also discuss:
🌈 Reconnecting with queerness after decades of societal and self-imposed barriers
🌟 How sobriety teaches us to relearn lessons we’ve forgotten
💔 The impact of loss on sobriety and self-growth
💪 Why authenticity is a practice, not a destination

Whether you’re navigating your own queer identity, seeking inspiration to live authentically, or just here for Mark’s fabulousness, this episode is a must-listen!

Connect with Mark:
Follow him on Instagram: @HeyMarko8

Join the Conversation:
🌟 What steps have you taken to live your most authentic self?
🌟 How has sobriety helped you reconnect with your identity?
Let us know! Email us or connect on socials @GayAPodcast.

Don’t Miss Out!
Follow Gay A wherever you listen to podcasts for new episodes every Thursday!

#GayAPodcast #QueerSobriety #LivingAuthentically #LGBTQRecovery #SobrietyJourney #QueerCommunity #SoberLife

Transcript

Steve: 0:04

Hey there, Super Sober Heroes. Welcome to Gay A. I'm your host, Sober Steve, the podcast guy, and I'm here today with Mark. Welcome back, Mark.

Mark: 0:12

Hello. Hey, everybody.

Steve: 0:15

And Mark has been on the show plenty of times. I almost forgot, I am 1, 315 days sober today. So I am very excited and I am grateful to have you back on the show, Mark, because you have been on, this is your fourth or fifth time now, I want to say? Yes. Yeah, you're just a part of the family now. So what's been new in your life since, the last run? I think it was probably in the spring or last year.

Mark: 0:40

Yeah, it was last year sometime, I believe. Life is lifey, very busy. Generally good, right? Work, things of that nature. I lost my mom in June, which was probably the biggest test of my, Not just sobriety, but my sober thinking, sober actions, and all of those kinds of things. If anybody listened back to the first podcast where I told just my story, she was a very big part of me getting sober. And a huge piece of my early recovery. She was integrally involved. And knowing that it's a funny tangent story, we found her step work from away as we were cleaning her apartment and my sister was like, what is this? I'm like, don't you read that bag? We're throwing it away.

Steve: 1:30

Yeah,

Mark: 1:31

none of us need to know what was in her step work at this point.

Steve: 1:34

Yeah. No good can come from that.

Mark: 1:36

No good can come from that.

Steve: 1:38

No. I love that. And looking back on your life today, what is your favorite part of being sober?

Mark: 1:46

I think my favorite part of being sober is that I keep learning new parts of. what it means to be sober. I'm still teachable, right? Just because I have 19 years does not mean I know everything, right? Like I continue to find pieces to work on. I continue to find new ways to do that work and find new ways to especially the apply these things to all of our affairs part.

Steve: 2:14

Yeah. And I've been learning as well as not only am I learning a lot of new things, It's more now than like I would year after year when I was in my addiction, like I'm growing a lot quicker in sobriety, but I also am having to relearn a lot of lessons that I've I learned something like, Oh wait, I knew that a year ago, or I knew that two years ago, like a life lesson or a moral, or that we have that built in forgetter. I feel like happens with more than just alcohol, but a lot of times it's the things that we should know about ourselves or feel about ourselves that we forget.

Mark: 2:39

Posted on New Year's Eve. That my biggest lesson learned was that when things get really tough and heavy, the fake friends shake out of the tree and run and the real friends solidify their place in your life. And someone commented, you taught me that 10 years ago when I got sober and I was like isn't it funny that I had to relearn it myself.

Steve: 2:59

Yeah we forget and then we remember.

Mark: 3:01

Somebody helps us remember when they show up in our lives in a certain way. And, you have to relearn the lesson.

Steve: 3:08

Yeah. Excellent. And what is your favorite part of being a member of the queer community today?

Mark: 3:14

I am still learning and that's what we're going to talk about. Yeah. How to authentically participate, in my queerness without hangups and just not worry about what other people think, which was the big part of. Why I got drunk, why I got high, right? Worrying about what other people think. Is my third year out of Catholic education, right? I worked in Catholic education for a long time. So being able to reconnect with, my queerness in a new way that I never had that experience before, right? Is something that continues to broaden and deepen as I really begin to like, and it all stems out of being sober, right? Because one of the goals of my sobriety is to really be the most authentic version of myself that I can possibly be, which gratefully keeps evolving and changing, right? It's not Oh, I found this great Mark, and I'm going to stick with him right now. But because I continue to do work and connect with people and go to meetings I continue to find new ways to develop. And I think particularly for people of a certain age who had so much, placed upon them that somebody who maybe is burgeoning queer now wouldn't have to deal with as much. Yeah. It's been quite an experience this past couple years.

Steve: 4:56

I can only imagine because my experience in some ways is so very different. I was even talking with someone recently who said. I think 40s and this in the closet and like married and with kids and I'm just like to me with my shared experience of being a very flamboyant child. So when I started telling people in high school that I was bisexual, they all knew it was a gateway to the coming out as gay. And I was fully like out as gay by senior year like everyone but my family and then the family knew and everyone knew it was very much like I've known now and I've been out for more of my life than I was in the closet. So when I hear these stories about people that are in the closet or. It's just, it blows my mind. But like I also know that there's different generations have different things as well. Different parts of the country have different, things that you have people feel like they have to like, have these rules that they were raised with by their parents or their grandparents that like, this is how it has to be and you have to break those rules in sobriety.

Mark: 5:45

Yeah. So I was born in 1970.

Steve: 5:47

Yeah.

Mark: 5:48

The generation directly ahead of me was super queer, right? Because they were out on the front lines fighting for the rights. Of the community. And then that's also the generation that was the AIDS epidemic. So I'm just shy of that. So like the AIDS epidemic was during the like my college years. So I was still not out and didn't really know how to identify with any of that. So like I grew up in the suburbs of New Jersey, New York city adjacent, but far enough away That like old norms, right? Like you got to figure I'm the youngest of eight. So my parents were in their almost forties when I was born. Yeah. So they grew up in the thirties, forties, fifties, right? That was their coming of age. Very different. My father was Italian American, former Marine, guy's guy, right? There were very specific gender roles in the family. We were also Catholic. We were not like, ah, crazy Catholic, but we were Catholic. So there were certain things that were, that were just were. And then when I also look at that, there's this time period, cause I'm also behind five sisters where. Nobody cared if I put on a pair of high heels. Nobody cared if I threw on I did, I mostly snuck around. But, there was this very brief period where if I did something that was feminine or was girly, it wasn't immediately corrected. And then my mother started correcting that and shaming it right before I went out to school. And she would say she also killed my imaginary friend. She got hit by a bus. I couldn't send you to kindergarten with an imaginary friend. They would have made fun of you, these things happened and in their minds. It was for protection. I was talking to my sister at Christmas and I was like, there was this pair of clip on earrings that I. Had hidden in my desk drawer, and I would wear them to do my homework. And, my mother must have been cleaning, and she found them in the desk drawer one day, and then they were gone, and I never saw them again. Funny story, cleaning her apartment after she died, guess what I found? Oh, you found them, wow. And I just, I was in the apartment by myself, and I just cackled and was like, I got them back! Yeah. So it's. Knowing that there was this little boy who before really understanding because I believe that my addiction began before I ever picked up a drink, before I ever picked up a drug, right? It was the hiding. It was the shame. It was the make believe. It was the fantasy. All of those pieces really started to fall into place after I was told you can't be this. Yep. So I had this epiphany when I left Catholic education. I was watching an episode of we're here on HBO and then we're in Florida and it was the old guy whose mother still thought ah, she just had a friend. I was 60 something years old and he's still afraid to live his truth. And I was like, Whoa, holy shit. And I realized that even after coming out after college, I was still under my family, to a certain extent, where I wasn't being fully myself. Then I had this brief time before I began to drink alcoholically, where I started to connect with some gayness. But then that immediately led to discomfort, feeling uncomfortable compare and despair, being around all these other gay men. I wasn't used to it. I didn't know how to do it. I didn't know how to connect for sex in any other way than going on a phone line and showing up at someone's apartment and having sex. I didn't communicate and how to meet people. And so I just drank myself to oblivion. So like when that piece happened, and then I went from that into drug addiction. And then I went from that into I had this very brief glimmer where I was a teacher in a Catholic school, and I worked for these 2 amazing nuns who didn't give a shit. They were like, they knew everything about my life and they loved me more for it because of that. So I had this brief glimmer. I still was a little bit careful because families didn't know kids didn't know. So there was still an element of closeted ness to it. Into becoming a Catholic school principal where within my first like week, someone told me that this woman had seen my Facebook and was trying to tell people that I was gay and get me fired. Right? Which immediately was like wall went up. My niece and I immediately were like, how do we shut it down. And I became unsearchable and I loved my job. I really fucking loved my job. I was really good at it, too. So I made this, again, sacrifice to not fully be. I wasn't fooling anybody, let's be honest. But it was just I think what it became was people liked me so much that it was like, this is the unspoken, we don't talk about this. For his protection.

Steve: 11:35

Yeah, I feel like that's why I strive to be like, and so many of gay boys, I have that good old boy syndrome, we try and be as perfect as we possibly can and every other thing in our life, because it was make an excuse for the one thing that everyone knows, but they won't look if they see the other.

Mark: 11:49

But anytime I had to discipline a child, have an argument with a parent discipline, an employee. Somewhere in the back of my head for three days after that thing, it would always be like, is this the person who's going to try to get me fast forward into COVID? Spent a lot of time by myself, it really became the topic of therapy. Authentically being all of me and not being like, you're allowed to know this, but you're not allowed to know that. And this and that, and understanding that like this career paths got to change because it's holding me back from being this authentic self that I've done all of this work in sobriety on all of this work in therapy on, and I knew it was, The day it was numbered, like it was got, it had to change. And then as I go back, like parents are getting younger and cooler and wanting to be like, Hey, let's fix you up with one of my friends. And I'm like, we're not having this conversation here. Yeah. You know that I can still be fired for this. And they'd be like that's ridiculous. And the more I had to go, yeah, you're right. The more it was like, okay, got it. Got to move. Yeah. Okay. So now I'm out, I'm out of the place. Everybody knows nobody was surprised, et cetera, et cetera. But then I had that aha of through all of that, I'd say I connected with my gayness, but never really with my queerness. And there's a very subtle difference there, right? Gay sex, no problem. Gay bars, no problem. But fully participating in expressing myself exactly how I want to. Yeah. However I want to. Whether it was piercing my ears at 53, or wearing a fucking Tom of Finland shirt, right? Or, painting my nails, The first time I did it, I was so nervous. I was like, Oh, what are people going to say? Yeah. Hey, I'm wearing a skirt, which is like fashionable. Also, comfortable, lots of male models and famous male stars who are not gay wear skirts now. But like in my head there I had that battle with Really trying to unpack and discard like old ideas that were set upon me that had become inner monologues of, it's not okay for you to do that, right? It's not okay. So it's interesting also to have this discovery in your 50s because people are like. What's going on with you? What are you doing suddenly? And for the most part in my gay community, especially in my recovery community, you're on my Instagram, you see the outfits I put together, right? I'm not afraid to put on a high heel.

Steve: 14:59

We all get it though, because we're all sober and we're all growing like crazy.

Mark: 15:04

I have a ginormous brooch collection, which I, to this day, it is my way of honoring that little boy who wanted to wear those fucking earrings to do his homework.

Steve: 15:14

Yeah, and the brooches get bigger, yeah, as the event gets bigger.

Mark: 15:18

Love it. Just not being afraid to just do things that make me feel happy and gay and queer. And also like just being able to connect to the issues in our community, right? Speak up, speak out, try to volunteer and show up and help organizations, so that the world is fucked, especially this country in 2 weeks, right? It's like, how do I show up for my community as a gay sober male, right? I didn't have the luxury until I was much later in my 20s. Of having gay role models.

Steve: 16:05

Yeah, I was so honored like last year when the place that I volunteer also youth, it's like for youth that are queer in our community ages, I think eight through 18 or like 12 through 18 or something like that. But they do after school programs and things like that. And they had me speak to talk about what it's like doing your own business type of thing as like an entrepreneur, as someone who's out and gay in Florida or Sarasota. So it was just interesting having like them hope. And like I mentioned my surprise and they're Oh because it's cool. Cause they're like, Oh, my uncle's like sober. Cause it's cool. And I guess now some of their friends, that can drink, that are in their twenties identify as sober, but they weren't alcoholics who blew up their life. They just didn't like the time that they won drank that one time. And they were like, stopped. I'm like, that's awesome though. That's socially acceptable and cool now. I remember when I was younger, it was like, If you were 21, I expected that you would be drinking and everybody throwing drinks at you. And with a lot of these kids now, it's okay if you say no or that you're not interested. And there's not, that's doesn't seem to be that same type of peer pressure. Or expectation.

Mark: 16:59

Yeah. And it, look, I still have times where I worry about safety, right? We all do, walking to and from the train here in Jersey City to get into Manhattan, in an outfit. Sometimes people are like, yes, and sometimes people are like, what the fuck are you doing here?

Steve: 17:21

bright blue hair. I get it where I get cheered on by most people or I'll get the looks and I'm just like, yeah, we'll try and mess with me at this point. But that depends on how I'm feeling that day. Cause if I'm feeling insecure, then I'll be thinking about that look that one person gave me for the next hour and a half. But if I'm in a good head space, I can just know that's not about me. That's about them. It's just really depends on me at that point.

Mark: 17:41

Yeah. And honestly, I'm trying not to be that compartmentalizer anymore. It isn't always easy, right? Because I still work with kids, right? So as much as I'm out at work, kids don't even ask. Like I have one kid that I'm very close to and we had a pride celebration, so I had on a Rainbow T-shirt and one of the kids at the table was like, so are you gay? And I looked at him and was like, what do you care? And the kid who's my buddy at the table was like, and I texted his mom and was like, did he ever ask you? And she's no, he never asked. So I'm not saying anything. Yeah. And to see fifth, sixth and seventh graders experimenting with their, am I a they? Am I a them? Am I queer? Am I not queer? Am I bisexual? Am I going to kiss a girl? Am I going to kiss a boy? It's good for you. Yeah, the change of.

Steve: 18:40

Work I'm sure helped with a lot of this, but like what else socially changed were some of your aha moments where you would say you went from being more gay to being part of the queer community?

Mark: 18:52

Amazingly enough, like that realization of watching that episode, right? So like having representation, right? Like it's so important for me now to watch queer TV, queer movies, read queer literature, right? To just, Continue to see examples, right? Of people living their authentic. My best friend is Frankie. Frankie, you can't escape queerness when you're hanging out with that one. And that's a motivator, right? Like I, I just like sobriety, right? Where your tribe, your true tribe becomes people who sobriety you admire. It's a very similar vibe for me. People who are being authentic, people who are authentically themselves and in their queerness are inspiring to me and push me. To do more and take more risks and push more boundaries for myself within a comfort zone, and it's sometimes still uncomfortable.

Steve: 19:59

Yeah, but I think that's part of it. At least I was reflecting back anything good that happened to me last year. I was scared beforehand and I was uncomfortable beforehand, but I did it anyway and it was awesome.

Mark: 20:08

Yeah. In that bedroom back there, when I'm putting the outfit on, I will second guess. I will be like, am I really going to walk to the train? Do I have a bigger coat? Should I drive instead? Like I'll go through all of that. Cuckoo bananas shit in my head and then at the end of the day be like fuck it. This is what I want to do. I think I look amazing right now, right? I'm going to a queer space.

Steve: 20:34

Yeah, I think that it's so important to share that because a lot of times people see what we post Because both of us were cover out loud But we're also ourselves out loud on social media and they see you out with the brooches and looking fabulous And they see like me doing my like things online and they think oh wow This person's so brave because they must have no fear and they don't know what, like the back story is like when you're in your room, having those concerns and having those fears. So I think like being able to share it's not a matter of that people who are living their truth, aren't afraid of living their truth is that we've just learned that we just have to do it anyway, because that freeing feeling is worth it.

Mark: 21:11

Correct, right? I'm 19 years away from a drink or a drug. But I live with this thing every day. Oh, yeah. And I think one of the biggest aha moments for me in all of my step work was realizing that and I don't know if I've ever told this story before, but reading the more about alcoholism chapter, like our whole lives, we wish you could drink like normal people, our entire drinking careers, we were this, we were that. And my sponsor at the time was like, hold on, I want you to reread that paragraph. And I want you to change wherever it says drink to thinking, think, and wherever it says drinking to thinking. Yeah. And I was like, Oh, all of a sudden, I wish I could think like a normal person.

Steve: 21:54

At least like once a day, like one of my sober friends, I'm like, I had this thought to this situation. And thanks to sobriety, I know this thought is batshit crazy balls to the walls. Why would that be my gut reaction? Yeah, I'm like, thank God. I know now I can think it through and then text you and laugh about it rather than acting and thinking I was being normal.

Mark: 22:14

Yeah, this exact same sponsor. I would be like, listen, I've been thinking and he'd go stop right there because that's the first mistake. So I still live with my own head and like sobriety, being my authentic self, being my authentic queer self. Is a practice, right? And pushing a boundary is a practice and it's a practice that luckily I've learned through sobriety, right? I can take the principles that I've learned in the 12 steps and apply them to anything. And. If I've learned anything, it's that life is short, right. In losing my mom this past year, really hit home to life is short and I have to do whatever I have to do. Like she was the most accepting person in my life, which is why her calling me a dirty motherfucker was my breaking point. Even in talking about Advancing in Catholic education, even in her later years were like her thinking wasn't always sharp. I remember having that conversation and her grabbing my hand at the table and going, you can never advance there because you can't be you. You need to go. Yeah. And knowing that, like that whole thing started with my coming out was very weird because I told my brother first and he told my mother when he wasn't supposed to. And she asked me and I dropped a bowl of peas on the ground. I was like I guess you got your answer. Yeah. And she went through all those phases of you're my son. I don't care to I hate this and I hate you. And then back. And same happened with my dad. It was a very weird conversation. He offered me 25, 000 to marry a woman. Asked me if I'd ever had sex with a, it was very strange. Again, everything that was wrong with me, he would tie back to cause you're gay. And then fast forward into sobriety and I'm driving their car and we're going somewhere. And he goes, I hope you can meet a nice rich guy one day. And I was like, I've arrived.

Steve: 24:29

Yeah, there you go. That's what we all want,

Mark: 24:32

And like knowing that at that point, the pressure valve from family was released. I still lost time because of other choices I was making career wise. And now I feel like there's no way I am going to be sacrificing any more of my time for anybody.

Steve: 24:57

I love that. And I think that is a great place to end it for now, but we'll have you back on real soon. If people wanted to connect with you and follow all your fabulous fierce adventures online, how would they do that?

Mark: 25:09

It's HeyMarco, H E Y M A R K O and the number eight, cause I'm the eighth child in my family.

Steve: 25:17

Excellent. Sounds good. Yeah. I will link over to all that in the show notes. So thank you listeners for tuning into another episode of and we'll see you next week.