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politics and lobbying as its chosen means. These organizational transformations involved only a small fraction of the gay community. Most gay people remained closeted and apolitical.
    What did attract hordes of adherents were the slogans and practices of sexual liberation. A segment—according to most estimates, about 20 percent—of the gay male population redefined “promiscuity” as “adventuring,” and the baths, the “trucks,” and the back rooms of bars and bookstores became jammed with the tangle of eagerly experimenting bodies. Many of those bodies came down with hepatitis, herpes, syphilis, gonorrhea, shigella, amoebiasis, and an assortment of other sexually transmitted diseases. The stricken multitude kept Sonnabend’s waiting room packed.
    A caring and compassionate man, Sonnabend was widely admired for his brilliance as a diagnostician but was no less notorious for his disorganized, eccentric ways. He was devoted to his patients but not to keeping a tidy or time-efficient office. When Mike would refer friends to Sonnabend, he’d tell them to “take War and Peace because you might finish it in the waiting room before you get seen.” Mike himself had to wait four hours on one day and was then subjected to watching Sonnabend eat his lunch in front of him during their consultation—some of the food dripping into his beard, while the loud, ancient air conditionerdrowned out part of what he was saying. Mike decided it was time to look for a different doctor. But one visit to another well-known gay physician, “Phil Williams,” sent him fleeing back to Sonnabend. Williams proved not only “imperious” but moneygrubbing. When Mike called him back into the examining room to ask a belated question, the good doctor added $25 to his bill. Sonnabend, by contrast, saw his patients as part of an unfairly ostracized community—“the health and well-being of gay men were of little concern to society at large”—not customers to be bilked for maximum profit, and he would often forget to bill them—to the admiration and irritation of his beleaguered staff (according to Abby Tallmer, who worked there for several years).
    By then Mike had finally landed a job doing office work for the Bradford National Corporation, and he’d switched to a more livable apartment as well. He kept reminding himself that he had to make contacts, find an agent, get his singing career going. But he loved sex and spent much of his spare time hunting for and having it. During his first two years in New York he took to heart the popular gay lament “so many men, so little time” and cheerfully referred to himself as a “slut”—a label he would proudly proclaim all his life. Disliking alcohol and disdaining the chitchat of the bars, he opted for the gay baths (St. Mark’s was his favorite) and the stalls at the Hudson Street Bookstore in Greenwich Village.
    At all times—who can predict a street encounter?—Mike carried with him a jar of lube, 25-cent packets of K-Y to ease entry, a bottle of poppers (amyl nitrate, which produced a disinhibiting rush), two (before and after) five-hundred-milligram pills of tetracycline as anti-STD prophylaxis, and Handi Wipes for the cleanup. Though Mike hardly resembled the muscled gym-built physique then coming into fashion, he had no trouble attracting partners. He was delicately, willowly, handsome: six feet tall, olive skinned, green eyed, and thin (around 135 pounds), with naturally curly dark brown hair—through the right kind of spectacles, something on the order of a Renaissance cherub (minus the wings). Mike wasn’t interested in most of the “extreme” sexual practices then in vogue (fist fucking, water sports, scat, or S/M). His single-minded focus was on getting fucked. When he totted up his sexual scorecard in 1982, at age twenty-seven, he figured that since coming out, he’d been “penetrated by an average of 3 men once every 3 days.” Deducting for sick days, that put him in