Mark Merlis born 9 March 1950Mark Merlis is an American health policy consultant and novelist.
Born in Framingham, Massachusetts, Merlis was six years old when his father, a doctor, moved the family to Baltimore. Here Merlis attended a Quaker school.
After completing a BA in English at Wesleyan University in 1971, and an MA in American Studies at Brown University in 1976, Merlis returned to Baltimore where he took an entry-level position at the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene to support himself while writing.
His efficiency as a health policy analyst, however, earned him a series of promotions, allowing him to move in 1987 to the Congressional Research Service at the Library of Congress as a Specialist in Social Legislation. Here, he was closely involved in most of the major health legislation that emerged from three successive Congresses, inclusing involvement in grant allocation formulas for AIDS healthcare.
Since 2001, Merlis has worked as an independent health policy consultant, while living with his partner in New Hope, Pennsylvania.
Alongside his successful career he has produced three highly-regarded novels which view contemporary gay concerns through the filter of historical parallels.
In American Studies (1994) the elderly victim of a brutal beating by a hustler he brought home late one night, spends his time while recuperating in the hospital recollecting how Tom Slater, his college mentor, was driven to commit suicide when outed during the McCarthy era.
In An Arrow's Flight (1998), Merlis sets the events of the Trojan War in a late twentieth-century Mediterranean or Caribbean milieu, adapting the ancient myth of Philoctetes - who was abandoned under miserable circumstances by his fellow Greeks en route to Troy when a leg wound festered so badly that no one could bear its rank odour - to illuminate American attitudes towards the gay body in general, and towards AIDS-sufferers in particular.
And in Man about Town (2003), a middle-aged civil servant specialising in health care issues who has just been abandoned by his longtime partner, searches for a swimwear model about whose image in a magazine he fantasised as a youth. Only by deconstructing the illusions of his past is he able to address and move beyond his present alcoholic inertia.
In all three novels, Merlis examines how the chains of power that render gay men second-class citizens can be broken. These chains include the power that the past has over the present; the power that straights have to intimidate gays; and the power of desire to make one vulnerable.
He is currently at work on a fourth novel, tentatively titled The Anarch.
Merlis lives in Pennsylvania with his partner of 26 years, Bob.
Mark Merlis Official Website