Through a break in the thick surrounding woods, the city unfurled itself below me. Low-lying gray, dun, and pearl-white buildings covered undulating hills beneath the achingly blue autumn sky. Just beyond the hilly neighborhoods, a single red-orange tower pierced a heavy veil of incoming fog: the Golden Gate. A bird keened in the oaks above me, a fog horn moaned in the bay, the low swoosh of traffic drifted up from the streets. Wild roses splattered red blossoms on the hillside. The air was fragrant with the scent of leaves and earth and ocean.

San Francisco at its most beguiling; the kind of view that either broke or mended hearts. As for me, suicidal drinking followed by bare-knuckled sobriety had shattered my emotional gauges. I knew if I stood there one moment longer I would burst into tears, so I jogged to another clearing where the woods blocked out the city.

From there, I detected a few faint trails in the brush. The park was a famous cruising ground for San Francisco’s gay men. It was they who had made these trails as they stalked each other. On a beautiful, sunny afternoon like today, the park should have been buzzing with covert activity but the woods were empty and still. Something else was stalking the city’s gay men, a virus that bludgeoned them with grotesque diseases, leaving them blind, demented and emaciated before it killed them. It passed from body to body in the naked intimacy of sex, so that, while all of us were at risk, none of us knew for certain whether or not he carried it.

I had never played in the park—the police sometimes raided the woods and I wasn’t about to risk my law license for an outdoor blowjob—but I’d had sex in bathhouses and bedrooms all across the city. I assumed I was infected. Every morning I woke up and wondered whether this would be the day the virus struck. That anxiety lasted only until I called Larry Ross, ten minutes after I opened my eyes, as he had ordered me to do when he became my AA sponsor five months earlier.

He invariably opened our conversations with, “Have you prayed yet?”