Research

• I have research on Mark Leduc reaching back to the 1990s, when I was writing a lot for magazines and newspapers and covered gays in sports as kind of a beat. I wrote a couple of pieces about Mark for the Village Voice, which I still have and republish here.

• Though articles in the gay press are hard to track down, mainstream newspaper coverage is not, and I include some of it here. Perhaps curiously, both times Mark was arrested were actually reported in the Toronto Star.

• I knew Mark distantly. Perhaps very distantly.

• After he died, I spent some time very delicately trying to talk to his last boyfriend. I did manage to have one phone call with him, which we agreed would be off the record. I called back a couple of times (and contacted him other ways) and tried, again delicately, to set up proper interviews, but it never happened.

  At this point I’m not even sure it is permissible to name this former boyfriend. Further, I must say I am skeptical of the entire concept that Mark Leduc would have a boyfriend, given what appears from a distant remove to have been a straight-up sex addiction. (Mark was also an alcoholic and did too much coke.) Yet despite my beliefs here, Mark’s death certificate listed his marital status as “common law.”

Still to be done

As I write this (on 2015.05.28), I see several things I still need to do.

• Look up people named in various articles about Mark; somewhat separately, look up his surviving family. I have really come up against my limitations as a gumshoe in this project. If I were a private investigator I would have no real problem tracking these people down. As it is I barely know where to start.
• Find out more about Mark’s time in jail.
• Talk to the places he worked, like the PWA Foundation.
• Find out who bought Mark’s boxing belt at a CLGA auction in 2013. I remember reading the winner’s name, actually.

I really don’t think I’m going to do any of the above, or anything else on this project.