The New York Times - June 21, 2008
Bruce Weber

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 Web site 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 H.I.V. 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 H.I.V.-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 co-author, 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 Mr. Palacios-Jimenez, who later died of AIDS, presenting it in cities across the continent. The workshop, which was later revised by Mr. Shernoff and another partner, Daniel Bloom, was called "Hot, Horny and Healthy: Eroticizing Gay Sex."

"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 Mr. Goodman and Mr. Shernoff's brother Jeffrey, who lives in Brooklyn, Mr. Shernoff is survived by another brother, Jerome Feldherr, of Queens, and a sister, Barbara Safchik, of Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y.

Michael Jon Shernoff was born in Queens on March 31, 1951. 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. In the 1990s he taught at Hunter College, and from 2002 to 2006 he was on the faculty of the Columbia University School of Social Work.

"It's such an irony," Jeffrey Shernoff said in an interview on Wednesday. "All these years of H.I.V., and he died of pancreatic cancer, which may not even be related."

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Editor's Note:

Corrections - June 26, 2008

An obituary on Saturday about Michael Shernoff, a gay psychotherapist who wrote widely on the emotional toll of AIDS on gay men, misstated the diagnosis he received in 1982. Although he wrote that he learned that year that he had tested positive for the human immunodeficiency virus, a virus was not established as the cause of AIDS until 1983, and the term H.I.V. did not come into use for a few more years. His precise diagnosis in 1982 remains unclear.

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