For Mark Orintas, pursuing stand-up comedy was more than a creative gamble. It was a decision to meet chronic illness with laughter.
Orintas, 60, lives in Fort Lauderdale and serves on the board of the OUTshine Film Festival. He also hosts bimonthly comedy shows, using performance to bring people together while continuing to develop his own voice onstage.
He considers his decision to pursue comedy despite chronic illness one of his proudest accomplishments. The choice brought him more than material for a set. Orintas said it also gave him a greater sense of self and a level of nervous-system regulation he had not experienced before.
His relationship with identity was shaped much earlier by growing up in a conservative Christian church, where he said being gay was “literally demonized.”
“Coming out and knowing the truth that your sexual orientation is not just ok but celebrated gave me the building blocks to truly define myself.”
That process of self-definition informs how Orintas understands pride. For him, being out means living more loudly and openly with every part of oneself. Self-awareness, love and acceptance begin internally, he said, but they should eventually expand into the broader community.
“It's increasingly more important to be out and let all people see us and that we're not that different from them.”
Orintas’s outlook does not deny hardship. Instead, it treats struggle as something that can produce strength. His favorite quote compares personal growth to a moth larva becoming a butterfly, arguing that the effort required to escape the cocoon is what strengthens its wings.
“Without that struggle, the wings would come out, but they would be deformed where it matters the most-inside. Pretty, but no strength.”
It is an apt philosophy for a comedian who has chosen to laugh in the face of illness rather than allow it to narrow his life. Orintas’s own motto makes the approach even plainer: “Life is short! Laugh with and at it and yourself. ”
His message to LGBTQ youth carries the same insistence on visibility and self-possession.
“You never need to feel unseen or erased. Live boldly in your truth and personhood.”
