Bay WindowsBay Windows - June 13, 2002
Peter Cassels, Associate Editor

Folsom travels the Greater Boston area speaking to school students about homophobia and HIV/AIDS. She always carried her most precious possession, an AIDS Quilt panel dedicated to her son, which she displayed to students at the conclusion of her talks. She last showed it during a visit to South Boston High School on Feb. 28. When she went to speak at Beverly High School a week later, she discovered it was not in her car. Now she is hoping someone who knows where it might be will read about her loss and reunite her with an important connection to her son.

In an interview, Folsom reported that she was devastated for weeks after she discovered she had lost the panel: "At first, I couldn't believe it. I thought maybe I took it upstairs at home. Occasionally, when I was parking my car overnight I would get paranoid. I'd say to myself, 'I don't care if I lose the car, but I don't want to lose Mark's Quilt.'"

Her feelings of disbelief turned to devastation. "I couldn't do anything about it," she recalls. "I couldn't even pick up the phone to call the teacher at South Boston High School for a week." It took her three phone calls to get a call back, but the teacher told Folsom she hadn't left it in the classroom where she spoke. In late March, Folsom prepared 25 posters offering a reward and the teacher put them up in the school and local stores, but thus far no one has found the panel. Fearing it may have been accidentally discarded, Folsom returned to the school weeks later and talked to a custodian. He conducted a fruitless search. She also contacted the Stoneham Police Department, because the town's name appeared on the back of the panel, but that, too, bore no results. The local chapter of the Names Project, which administers the AIDS Memorial Quilt, recommended that Folsom contact the news media.

Folsom sewed the Quilt panel after Mark's death with the help of friends in Credo, the liturgical dance group she is a member of. It includes a timeline of photos depicting her son's life, connected by a cyclamens vine. There's Mark as a 5-month-old baby, and photos of him at 6 and 13, one taken at his high school prom, and one of him scuba diving. She also included a photo of a birthday cake he had made. "He liked to cook. I tried to capture different aspects of his personality."

The panel also has a sonnet she wrote with some help that explains the significance of the cyclamens. It reads in part: "Like butterflies their form, they speak of freedom. From captivity in his failed body, from hateful looks..."

The sonnet continues: "A heart is stained [i]nto the middle of each leaf. The petals point downward, then turn themselves inside out, exposing their innermost [p]arts in a trustful way. Powerful and fragile, like a dancer. He was a dancer."

Folsom believes she left the Quilt panel by a telephone pole outside South Boston High School as she was packing up her car that February day: "I have a box of literature and I carry the panel folded up, along with a fairly large framed picture of Mark, together in a paper department store shopping bag. I must have set it down next to a phone pole and forgot to put it in the car."

She took the panel to Washington, D.C., in 1996, the last time the entire AIDS Memorial Quilt was displayed. "I wanted Mark to be a part of that event," she explains. She turned the panel over to the Names Project. When she was preparing for a memorial marking the first anniversary of his death in January 1997, she asked if she could borrow the panel. At first, the organization denied her request, but on a third try, it reported that the panel had not yet been sewn into the larger Quilt. She received a box in the mail, with a note reading "Here's your baby."

Rather than returning Mark's panel to the Names Project after the service, Folsom decided to use it in her talks to students: "I didn't ask for permission to keep it. I thought it was doing more good more often by showing it in the schools. I would end my talk by holding up this powerful visual."

On Mark's birthday this past January, Folsom was on a retreat with the Credo dance group: "I put the panel on my bedspread. It's the only time I've ever slept under it, not knowing that a month later I wouldn't have it."

Folsom is one of about 100 volunteers who speak at schools under the auspices of the Massachusetts Department of Education and Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG). She also works 16 hours per week in the Boston PFLAG office as engagement coordinator. She devotes most of her days to the effort during the school year and also teaches math at Northeastern University.

Speaking to students, she discusses the harm that putdowns like "Oh, that's so gay," can do: "It really has more lasting hurt than sticks. Names do hurt and go to your soul." She explains that Mark felt the impact of homophobia and never truly came out of the closet. "On a subconscious level, his refusal to be tested for HIV when he could have been treated, the way homophobia affected him, maybe his death was a quasi-suicide."

Folsom explained that he and her other two children grew up in a conservative Christian family in Stoneham. The family attended the Evangelical Covenant Congregational Church in Waltham, an offshoot of the Lutheran Church. He attended Lexington Christian Academy, a right-wing Protestant school. "He probably learned pretty quickly that he was an abomination," Mark's mother acknowledges. "He had the societal homophobia and on top of that he had the religious homophobia."

When Mark graduated from high school, he enrolled in the University of Minnesota. It was while he was there in 1981, when he was 19, that his mother learned he was gay: "I was a nosy mom. Cleaning out the wastebasket in his room, I noticed a crumpled-up letter in his handwriting. It was to Michael, a friend. He was pleading with Michael not to tell anyone that he was gay. It says twice, 'I hate myself.' It also says, 'I'm going to a counselor to set myself straight. I am afraid I would be exiled from my home if my parents found out.'"

The family sought advice from a counselor to decide how to handle the revelation. "Are we going to invade his privacy further?" Folsom remembers asking. "After that meeting we decided it would be better if he knew. We decided to write to him, rather than talking to him, because that would give him a little space."

It took Mark a little time to write back. His mother quotes from the letter in her talks to students: "I don't want to talk to you about it, not now at least. You've done things a little unexpectedly, so I get uncomfortable. ...You may be nosy, but you're neat in the way you handled this matter."

Mark returned home and enrolled at Boston University, where as a psychology major he graduated summa cum laude and was a member of the honor society Phi Beta Kappa. "He was the brightest of all our kids and the kindest, I think," his mother recalls. Mark thought about going on to earn a doctorate, but had taken a drama course "for fun" and instead moved to New York City to study at the Shakespeare Institute.

He later appeared in numerous plays and TV commercials and did modeling in Japan for a year. He met his second partner, James Duff, and they moved to Hollywood, where Duff started a film company. Mark was chief financial officer. His mother said the couple "would go to the wall for each other."

Mark eventually was tested -- his first partner found out he was HIV positive years before and told Mark to get tested, but he ignored the warning, his mother reports. By the time he was diagnosed it was too late to take advantage of the new drugs like AZT that were starting to prolong the lives of people with HIV. His mother visited him in Germany where he had gone to receive ozone infusion treatments for Kaposi's Sarcoma. "He had KS lesions on his face," she remembers. "It made him feel like a leper. He was very good at covering it up with theatrical makeup." He had come home for the holidays in 1995 and then returned to Los Angeles. He was due to return to Germany for more treatment, but the night before he had a seizure and was hospitalized. He was 34 years old when he died.

For one of her speaking engagements, Folsom visited Tufts University, her alma mater. "One of the students asked me if I had any regrets. I hadn't thought about it. I said, 'Yeah. My regret is that I didn't work with Mark to help him accept himself and come out of the closet more.' Others in the family said 'Leave him alone. Mark's a private person,' but if I had helped him, I kind of wonder maybe he would have been more accepting of himself, maybe he would have taken better care of his AIDS. But he never really became out and proud, to my knowledge, certainly not with his family."

Peter Cassels is the Associate Editor at Bay Windows. His e-mail address is pcassels@baywindows.com.

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