Mark traveled
overseas with his high school rugby club—breaking
several of his bones along the way—and was
recruited to play for the University of California,
Berkeley, where he helped the school win two national
championships. But when 19-year-old Mark met 38-year-old
Mark Wilhelm, his athletic accomplishments must have
paled next to the seemingly insurmountable task of
keeping his sexual orientation a secret.

Wilhelm had
placed a personal ad in a San Jose, Calif., newspaper, and
Mark was one of the men who responded. His letter reflected
a tug-of-war between the gregarious, confident young
man everybody knew—the guy who could roll over
any foe on the field while winning the friendship of any
face in the crowd—and a private life he was only
beginning to accept himself. “I’ve got
no idea what I want to do with my life, but I know
I’ll be a success at something,” he wrote
Wilhelm. “I’m naïve but smart,
funny but shy. I’ve lots of friends, but I’m
lonely for a buddy that can share my secret.”

Mark, who Wilhelm
said was in the physical shape “few of us ever see
past 19,” shared more about himself after the
two of them met in person. He told Wilhelm that he had
known he was gay since he was 12. He also said, while
probably adding a dramatic bent to what was undoubtedly a
very real fear, “If my family or friends ever
found out, I’d have to kill myself.”
Wilhelm adds, “Mark was very closeted, but it was
almost as if he was leaning against the door.”

In fact, it was
less than two years afterward that Mark came out to
Sarner, who laughs now when he remembers his initial
reaction: “When did that happen?” And
only months after that, Mark came out to his mother
when they were driving around California’s Sonoma
County.

“I was
just loving being with my son that day,” Hoglan says,
pulling her long hair back with one hand. “Then
he said, ‘Mom, I have something to tell you,
and I’ve promised myself that I was going to tell you
before the sun went down.’ And when he said
that, the sun was streaming into our faces—it
was setting.

“I was
really astounded [when he told me]. I hadn’t any idea
that my son was gay, and up until that time I had been
vaguely antigay,” Hoglan says. “So with
those words, I began a journey.”

Mark was on a
journey as well. His best friend and mother knew he was
gay, but to most people Mark was still the outstanding rugby
player, the Chi Psi fraternity president, and the guy
who would get so blasted on vodka and orange juice at
Cal football games that he sometimes dashed onto the
field in often-successful attempts to tackle the opposing
team’s mascot. His softer side was no less
remarkable. Friends say he had a Clintonian ability to
bring people out of their shells, to make them feel
like no one else was more important. He made a concerted
effort to be both the life and the lifeblood of all
his social circles.

He was also a
mama’s boy who, along with some college friends,
parked in front of his mom’s house a car that
was painted from front fender to back bumper with the
words ALICE HOGLAN IS A GODDESS. “I don’t know
where he got that,” Hoglan says, still
blushing, with a mixture of embarrassment and pride.
“I never told him that I was a goddess!”

Mark was fresh
out of college and in classic form when in December 1993
he met Paul Holm at a Christmas party. “I noticed him
standing at this table, where he proceeded to eat a
whole bowl of shrimp,” Holm says. Mark noticed
Holm too and walked over, stuck out his hand, and with a big
grin said, “Hi, I’m Mark Bingham. Who
are you? ” The two of them spent the rest of
the party talking about a number of things, not the least
among them Cal Berkeley, where Holm had also gone to
school.

At 7
o’clock the next morning a telephone call and
Mark’s voice on the answering machine woke Holm
up. “I don’t know if you remember me,”
the voice said. “It’s Mark from last
night, and I wanted to see if you wanted to get
together today.” The two of them were together for
the next six years.

“We had a
very intense and wonderful relationship,” says Holm,
who shared with Mark his home in San
Francisco’s Castro district for five of the
years they were together. “We did everything from
sitting in front of the TV watching football to
traveling to France once or twice a year.”

The couple also
had a fondness for feasting on fine food and wine while
chewing on each other’s hopes for the future. It was
during one such meal that Mark first mapped out an
ambition to start his own public relations firm.
“We spent hours and hours talking about everything,
including business,” says Holm, who started his
own firm, the Holm Group, when he and Mark were
together. “When I was going through some memorabilia,
I found an old menu where, on the back, we had written
the potential names for our companies. And there was
THE BINGHAM GROUP in big letters among all the
others.”

Upon graduating
from Cal in 1993 with a degree in social sciences, with
an emphasis in international relations, Mark went to work
for high-tech PR powerhouse Alexander Communications
(now Alexander Ogilvy) and later took a job with 3Com.
High-tech PR, like rugby before it, was a perfect fit
for Mark, who as a teenager knew his Commodore 64 inside and
out. And there was no better place to ride the rising
high-tech wave of success than San Francisco in the
mid ’90s.

Soon the going
got so good that Mark decided to realize the dream he
first outlined on the back of a restaurant menu. The Bingham
Group officially opened for business in 1999 in a loft
space Mark shared with a friend’s Web-design
firm. By focusing on what he knew best—high-tech
PR—Mark was able to secure a number of clients, hire
several employees, and, in May 2000, open his own
office on San Francisco’s Lafayette Street.

“At the
office-warming party there were probably 200 people, and it
took me 20 minutes to get in the door and another 15
minutes to get a spot inside,” Hoglan says.
“But by that time in my life I had become much more
accustomed to having Mark be a larger-than-life figure. He
wasn’t famous, exactly, but he was extremely
popular, and I kind of basked in his
reflection.”

Derrick Mickle
was playing in a flag football game at San
Francisco’s Dolores Park when he first ran
head-on into Mark. “Here was this huge guy who
was just tearing people up,” he says. “And it
was kind of frustrating because I had played a lot of
pickup football growing up and there was always an
unspoken rule that you didn’t showboat.”

Mickle soon
learned that Mark wasn’t showing off but that he just
“never dumbed down his game to placate
anyone.” It wasn’t long before Mickle,
who played rugby at Vassar College, tossed the idea of a gay
rugby team Mark’s way. When the idea was no
more than a “what if,” Mark was
enthusiastic, he says. But when Mickle got serious, Mark
became “dead against” the prospect.
“He said, ‘You’ll never get accepted by
the [rugby] union’; ‘The guys out there
will tear you up’; and ‘You won’t
ever find enough players.’ ”

Mickle went ahead
without Mark’s blessing, and just two months after he
first fielded a “rag-trap of rugby players”
for the San Francisco Fog’s first practice in
October 2000, Mark had a change of heart. “He came
out for a practice and proceeded to act the same way
as when I met him. He just plowed through the field,
leaving a sea of bodies,” Mickle says, adding
that after the team’s initial response of
“What the hell is this guy doing?”
Mark’s intensity eventually helped raise the level of
everyone’s game.

And after
practice, “Mark’s great, nurturing spirit came
through,” says Bryce Eberhart, who was among
those Mark ran over on the field that first practice.
“He went up to everyone and patted them on the back
and told them they were doing a great job.”

Once again Mark
had fallen in step with a program that was just right for
that point in his life. And in the summer of 2001, when the
Fog was accepted as a permanent member of the Northern
California Rugby Football Union, he didn’t
hesitate to share his enthusiasm in an E-mail to his
teammates:

“When I
started playing rugby at the age of 16, I always thought
that my interest in other guys would be
anathema,” he wrote. “I loved the game
but knew I would need to keep my sexuality a secret forever.
As we worked and sweated and ran and talked together
this year, I finally felt accepted as a gay man and a
rugby player. My two irreconcilable worlds came
together.

“We have
the chance to be role models for other gay folks who wanted
to play sports but never felt good enough or strong
enough,” he continued. “More
importantly, we have the chance to show the other teams in
the league that we are as good as they are. Good rugby
players. Good partyers. Good sports. Good men.”

Despite the tone
of his E-mail, Mark never considered himself a gay
activist. In fact, he thought of himself more as a man of
action than a man of example. He supported John
McCain’s 2000 presidential bid, for instance,
despite the Arizona senator’s stand on gay
issues—he opposes hate-crimes legislation and
the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. McCain, who
spoke at Mark’s September 22 memorial service and
calls him “an American hero,” tells The
Advocate he won Mark’s support in the campaign
because “I was straightforward and not your typical
politician.”