About

I’m Joe Clark, a writer in Toronto. I use this blog, which I started on 2015.04.05, as an archive of information on Mark Leduc (1962–2009), the Canadian gay Olympic silver medallist in boxing.

I was an acquaintance of Mark’s, albeit a very distant one. To illustrate how close we weren’t, during the months when Cinderella Man was being filmed in Riverside (Queen St. East in Toronto just past Broadview Ave.), I remember walking down the street, seeing out of the corner of my eye a well-built strawberry blond in tank top, shorts, and steel-toed boots on the other side of the street, looking over, recognizing Mark, and sharing a nod of recognition. We were not remotely “friends,” and I suspect he had long since forgotten my name (even my first name) by the time we nodded to each other.

Still, as I have explored on the Eldergay Suicides blog, gay men of my and Mark’s generation have suffered multiple holocausts already. We can’t afford to lose even one more eldergay. Everyone’s an individual, but there was but one and only one Mark Leduc. He needs to be remembered.

He particularly needs to be remembered because the entire apparatus of the press lied about the circumstances of his death. He actually collapsed in the St. Marc Spa, a now-defunct gay bathhouse, in October 2009. He was never remotely near “a hotel sauna,” as the press knowingly misreported and which doesn’t make sense anyway.