Mason Funk was born and raised in Santa Monica, California. Growing up, he was passionate about sports, music, reading, and his Christian faith. He also knew from an early age that he was gay, and had no idea how he would reconcile his seemingly conflicting identities. Mason graduated from Stanford University with a BA in English; but it was during his junior year, when he left Stanford and enrolled at Oxford University, that he fully embraced his love of language and writing. From that point forward, words and stories (both real and imagined) would form the cornerstone of his personal and professional life.
After Stanford, Mason worked a wide variety of jobs from teaching school and waiting tables to picking apples and birthing sheep, while roaming from the Pacific Northwest to Maine. Along the way, he wrote his first poems and short stories and enrolled in an MFA program in creative writing; but his life take a sudden turn when, on a solo writing trip to Portugal, he met a man on a train and fell in love. He moved to Lisbon, Portugal, and although the relationship quickly ended, Mason made Lisbon his home for seven years, acting and modeling, immersing himself in the Portuguese language, becoming a professional translator, traveling widely through Europe and Africa, and eventually starting his career as a film and TV writer. At 35 he moved to Los Angeles to pursue a screenwriting career, but found a home instead into the world of non-fiction TV and film. Over the next 20 years, he wrote and produced dozens of programs for the Discovery Channel, Fox Sports, the National Geographic Channel, and other networks, garnering multiple awards and Emmy nominations. He also produced the documentary film Anchor Baby, as well as several short
films about the landmark Supreme Court lawsuit to overturn California’s Prop. 8. During these years, Mason also became an avid marathoner, completing races in New York City, Havana, Death Valley, and many other locations.
Over the course of his TV and film career, the aspect of every project that Mason loved most was finding and interviewing people who had played important, often overlooked roles in history, such as the pioneering Black golfer who defied the PGA’s Caucasians-only rule, the Disney animator who created the character of Aladdin, or a former President who helped investigate the JFK assassination. In 2014, Mason’s passion for interviewing people came together with his personal life as an out and proud gay man, and he resolved to create a project to track down and interview the earliest pioneers of the LGBTQ+ movement, who had now become elders. The project was called OUTWORDS, and over a ten-year span, Mason and his team recorded more than 400 in- depth, professional oral histories with this extraordinary generation of activists, visionaries, and everyday heroes. By 2026, OUTWORDS interviews had been viewed more than seven million times at theoutwordsarchive.org, via social media, and through online and live events.
In 2026, on the occasion of its 10th anniversary, Mason handed the reins of OUTWORDS off to new leadership. Now living in Palm Springs, California with his husband Jay Edwards, Mason continues to travel widely sharing stories and insights from OUTWORDS, teaching, trekking, and seeking out labyrinths remote locations.