Michael Shernoff, gay-health therapist
NEW YORK - Michael Shernoff, a psychotherapist who, beginning in the early years of the AIDS epidemic, wrote widely on its emotional toll on gay men and who organized an early safe-sex workshop, died June 17 at his home in Manhattan. He was 57.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, his brother Jeffrey said.
In his practice and in his writing, Mr. Shernoff confronted the realities of homosexual life with bluntness and compassion. In essays and books and as a mental-health columnist for the website TheBody.com, he cast a sympathetic but analytical eye on individual behavior that was both common and potentially injurious, taking on subjects like gay promiscuity, gay Internet cruising, gay body image, and the muscle culture.
He wrote about losing a partner to AIDS and edited a book on the subject, "Gay Widowers: Life After the Death of a Partner" (Harrington Park Press, 1997). In his latest book, "Without Condoms: Unprotected Sex, Gay Men and Barebacking" (Routledge, 2005), he examined the growing phenomenon of gay men returning to the pre-AIDS practice of unprotected sex.
"As HIV ravaged the gay community in the 1980s, people with AIDS wasted away and frequently looked gravely ill," he wrote in a 2001 essay for The Gay and Lesbian Review called "Steroids and the Pursuit of Bigness." "It's no coincidence that the interest in pumping up by gay men began during the early days of the epidemic, at least in part as a response to what was happening in our community."
Mr. Shernoff, whose eldest brother died of AIDS, learned in 1982 that he himself was HIV-positive (he lived symptom-free for a quarter of a century), and in his practice was a proponent of the idea that the specter of AIDS need not curtail anyone's sex life.
In 1985, he and a coauthor, Luis Palacios-Jimenez, created a workshop for a conference sponsored by the Gay Men's Health Crisis that counseled men in ways to change their habits and still lead a sensual life. The whole body can yield intimate pleasures, the workshop taught, emphasizing imagination and creativity in sex and methods of mutual fulfillment without the exchange of fluids. Eventually, it turned into a traveling road show, with Mr. Shernoff and Palacios-Jimenez, who later died of AIDS, presenting it in cities across the continent.
"He and Luis were very happy to be known as the 'Dr. Ruth of gay sex,' " said Mr. Shernoff's companion of nine years, John Goodman.
In addition to Goodman and Mr. Shernoff's brother Jeffrey, who lives in Brooklyn, Mr. Shernoff leaves another brother, Jerome Feldherr of Queens, and a sister, Barbara Safchik of Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y.
Mr. Shernoff was born in Queens. He attended city schools and went to Harpur College, which has since become the State University of New York at Binghamton. He received a master's degree in social work from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
