They found themselves cruising the streets, frequenting gay bars, having sex everywhere from the privacy of their homes, to the orgiastic atmosphere of the bathhouses, to semi-public sexual meeting places like the trucks and the piers. At some venues such as the Continental Baths on the Upper West Side performers such as Bette Midler wowed towel clad audiences. Paradise Garage opened its doors. A heaven for young men and women of all colors and gay men, it birthed disco music. Other clubs soon followed – from the famous ‘Studio 54′, to the infamous ‘Saint’. Men danced their nights away in an intoxicating communal brotherhood. How did drugs fit into all this experimentation? Even though HIV had not yet become a threat, what kinds of STDs were being experienced? What were the challenges of all this available sex? In this new birth control age antibiotics were consumed in ever increasing amounts and as long as you were ready to party for the next weekend in the Pines, that was considered a clinical cure. By the 1970s Fire Island had become the summer paradise of choice for gay men. People from all over the world flew in to enjoy the outlandish parties, partake of sex on the beach and dance under the moonlight. But as the late 1970s partied on, there came to be talk of antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria and some men privately began to wonder ‘had they gone too far too fast?’ The election of the conservative Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980 as well as Disco Demolition Night which helped bring about the decline of Disco music in the United States and the rise of the Religious Right in the early 1980s seemed to signal a backlash against the liberal atmosphere of the previous decade and the sexual revolution. In June 1981, just twelve years after the Stonewall Riots, an article appeared in the New York Times that would soon put the brakes on this unprecedented era of sexual freedom. It was by Dr. Lawrence Altman about an unusual cancer seeming to affect gay men – a cancer that soon came to be known as AIDS. While at first many simply brushed off the new reports and continued to party on, by the mid-1980s with the rising death toll it became impossible to ignore and one of the results from the new disease was the New York City Health