Born and raised a Minnesota farm-boy, Mark Abramson has lived in San Francisco so long he’s a native. Not only did he survive the worst of the AIDS years in California, but also the Reagan era AND both Bush administrations. He is thrilled that the Beach Reading series, his first foray into fiction, has been so successful and he is grateful to the loyal fans of Tim, Aunt Ruth, Artie and the rest of the gang.

Like Tim Snow, Mark Abramson grew up in Minnesota and once worked as a waiter in the Castro, but Mark is better known as a bartender and a co-producer with the late Jim Cvitanich of “MEN BEHIND BARS, the Bartenders’ Folly” an annual AIDS benefit, as well as “PIER PRESSURE” and “HIGH TEA” both mega-dance parties on the piers of San Francisco.

Like Tim Snow, Mark had an Aunt Ruth Taylor, but Mark’s late maternal grandmother wasn’t a psychic. His other grandmother might have been, but she died before he was born.

In addition to the Beach Reading series, Mark has also written several non fiction memoirs recounting true tales from the great mecca before AIDS-including adventures with old friends such as John Preston, Rita Rockett, Randy Shilts and Al Parker.

From the introduction to Sex Drugs & Disco:

    Eager young men had flocked to northern California for the Gold Rush of 1849. A hundred years later San Francisco hosted the beatniks, fueled on cigarettes and coffee, followed by the hippies in the 1960s with utopian dreams of peace and free love while they got high on pot and LSD. That same sense of freedom must have lured us in the 1970s, stoked on beer and poppers and libidos running wild. I might have told my family I was heading to graduate school at San Francisco State, but like the thousands of other gay men who arrived here during those years, I was going west in search of one thing – thousands of other gay men.