During the 1970's thousands of gay men - "refugees from Amerika", as the late Carl Wittman called them - left their hometowns and moved to San Francisco to be gay. What these men created when they got there was a community based on sexual freedom on a scope and variety never seen before or since. Most of these men are dead, victims of an epidemic that was an unforeseen product of that heady time.

Those who survived that era -- as well as those who came after -- tend to dismiss that golden age between Stonewall and AIDS as a period of reckless self-destruction. In fact, the men who populated San Francisco in the gay seventies were responsible for many of the institutions that we now take for granted; and for a healthy attitude towards sex that is now all-too hard to find.

D.O.C.: Lust Letters by Paul Beckford and Kevin Dax ($12.95) is a collection of graphic e-mail messages sent between two of the biggest sluts (and I use the term kindly) to ever occupy the pages of a book. D.O.C. stands for "Drunk On Cum", and Beckford and Dax are certainly in that condition for much of this book's 180 pages.

Tender souls will be shocked by the heroes' frank language and almost-addictive penchant for promiscuous and unprotected sex, only partly excused by the fact that they are both poz and their sex is mostly oral. To enjoy D.O.C.: Lust Letters we must throw political correctness out the window, shed our literary inhibitions and sit back to enjoy a good, hot read. The fact that this is a "true to life" story only makes it more exciting.