San Francisco Chronicle - July 11, 2006
David Wiegand, dwiegand@sfchronicle.com

"I am a working writer, in the way that there are working actors who take whatever part is available," says the 37-year-old San Franciscan. "And I've been criticized for that. People think if you write something fast and you write something popular, it can't be all that good.

"I feel like those people who believe those things have lost sight of what the point of writing books is," he continues. "Is the point of writing a book to record what is happening in your life and society at this moment, or is the point of writing a book to create this string of beautiful words that ultimately doesn't have a lot of purpose outside of being pretty? I feel that more and more these days, things that are beautifully wrought and pretty are being valued over things that capture what is going on in people's lives."

Ford, who lives with his partner of five years, Patrick Crowe, and four dogs, is perhaps best known as the author of a series of gay-themed novels, including "Full Circle," published last month by Kensington Books. Weighing in at 400-plus pages, the book is the story of two boyhood friends who begin a physical relationship as teenagers and find their lives inextricably linked well into adulthood, despite taking different romantic and career paths. Beyond that, however, the book is pretty much a gay cultural history of the United States over the past several decades. The plot of the book is set against a kind of gay cultural time line, from the pre-Stonewall '60s, to the sexual revolution, the cultural free-for-all of the pre-AIDS '70s, the political challenges of the post-AIDS '80s, and survival.

"This book is about gay friendships," he says. "I think they are very unusual because they do span long periods of time and they do tend to be more intimate than other kinds of friendships."

What is also true about "Full Circle" is that the friendships increasingly make Ned and Jack part of a larger network, part of the gay community, a term that has been around for a long time but perhaps has less meaning today than it did in the post-Stonewall years and at the beginning of the AIDS era.

"It was like the community was going through these things together," Ford says. "We don't really have that issue right now to bring them all together. Gay marriage isn't quite it. I feel that the notion of gay community is becoming more and more watered down, which for people my age or older is a little sad."

Ford was born in Liberia, where his father, who worked for the government, was stationed. Later, after a time in what was then called the Belgian Congo, his father decided to relocate the family to the upstate New York town where he'd grown up. Not only was it a place where everyone knew your name, Ford says today, it was also a place where a lot of people were related to you. That made it hard for young Mike to figure out his own identity as a child. It didn't help that he was the youngest in his family and his sisters were at least 10 years older than he.

Feeling alone and apart, Ford found comfort, not to mention adventure, reading at a very young age. He not only read children's books but the books his teenage sisters were reading. It didn't matter: If it was in hardcover, he read it.

At the time, he didn't think much about where books came from.

"When you're a kid, you think books come from the same place cereal comes from," he says. "You know, somebody else makes it in a foreign land and it magically lands on the shelf."

Later on, in school, his class studied short stories, beginning with Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery."

"The next day, the first question on the quiz was 'who wrote this story?' And I had no idea," he says. "Then it dawned on me that there were people who actually wrote these stories."

From insular small town life, Ford was thrust into an even more confining world after high school, when he was sent, at his Baptist mother's insistence, to a "Bible college" a half hour north of New York City, where everyone was required to sign "the Pledge."

"It listed all the things you were not allowed to do. You could not have pictures of the opposite sex on the wall, for instance," he says. "My favorite was 'I will not attend the theater as a way of life.' "

Pledge or no pledge, Ford was beginning to realize that he was gay, but a Bible college housed in a former hotel wasn't quite the perfect setting for coming out.

He did, however, benefit from guidance and support from the woman who headed the school's English department. She was one of several key mentors in his life. But when he came back for his final year after summer vacation, the woman was gone: She'd been outed by a male student under pressure from school administrators, who said they wouldn't expel him for being gay if he agreed to say he'd gone to the woman for counseling and she had "turned him homosexual," Ford says. The student was Ford's best friend at the time.

A few months later, another mentor came into his life, the author Isabelle Holland, whose "The Man Without a Face" became a Mel Gibson movie in 1993. Holland was hired to teach at the college for a semester and it was Ford's job to go into New York and bring her up to campus. During that time, they became friends and Holland thereafter took an interest in his writing. Through "a friend of a friend of a friend," she helped him get a job as an editorial assistant in the children's publishing division of Macmillan.

When Magic Johnson revealed he was HIV positive, Ford thought the company should try to get him to write a book on the subject for younger readers. Turned out, Johnson was already signed by another publishing house, so Ford's boss said, "Why don't you write it yourself."

The result was "100 Questions and Answers About AIDS: A Guide for Young People," and, beyond that, a thriving career of writing children's books, books for young adults, essays and collections such as "Alec Baldwin Doesn't Love Me," "That's Mr. Faggot to You" and "My Big Fat Queer Life," the latter a kind of Michael Thomas Ford's greatest hits.

When he began to write gay-themed essays, he started receiving letters from men who expressed gratitude that someone was finally writing about "people like us."

"It became clear that there was a whole segment of the gay population who were not being written about, and they were guys who consider themselves normal, average guys," Ford says. "They don't live in L.A., they don't know what 'the circuit' is, and they really don't care what Madonna is doing."

Over time, Ford has made those "normal, average guys" the subjects of his fiction and nonfiction -- quite a departure from the first gay-themed book Ford ever read, a novel by Gordon Merrick.

"I read it and I was terrified. I thought, this is what I have to do? I have to do drugs and I have to coerce these young boys to have sex with me?" he laughs.

Today, Ford, Crowe and their canine quartet live in a modest home in the Avenues. The place is tastefully but modestly furnished. The kitchen is very white and every surface is clean and completely uncluttered. From the outside, the place is just another pastel stucco house in a row of similarly designed stucco houses.

But this house has a history. After World War II ended, a group of gay soldiers returned to the United States and one of them bought this house. He and his lover lived there for 40 years until the former died, leaving the house to another gay war buddy who, in turn, rented it to a third comrade. Ford thinks it's fitting that the house has remained in the family, so to speak.

Maybe he'll write about it someday.

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