A Place Like This: A Memoir

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 development of AIDS organizations and activism, Magic Johnson's announcement-and shares his experiences with disarming humor and startling candor.


AIDS eventually converts King's plunge into sex and drugs to an increasing awareness of mortality-and a renewed search for meaning.