Once you've won a car on a game show, been an actor, owned a phone sex company, been infected with HIV, slept with a movie icon and developed a drug addiction, you've pretty much done the Hollywood thing.

In this true, first-person account of the 1980's, Los Angeles transforms an all-American boy from an actor in commercials plugging fast food to a gay phone line worker pushing fast sex.

King experiences firsthand nearly every gay social milestone of an astonishing decade-drug use, the phone sex trade, the onset of AIDS, Rock Hudson, assisted suicide, anonymous encounters, the early...