Michael Shernoff

Michael Shernoff (March 31, 1951 – June 17, 2008) was an openly gay psychotherapist who specialized in serving the mental health needs of gay, lesbian, and bisexual people and was author of several influential publications on the topics of HIV/AIDS prevention and the mental health concerns of gay men.

Shernoff was born in Queens, New York, on March 31, 1951. He attended New York City schools. He graduated from the Harpur College at Binghamton University and in 1977 received a master’s degree in social work from the School of Social Welfare of the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

As a licensed clinical social worker, he offered outpatient mental health services in Chelsea in New York City. He also taught at Hunter College from 1991 to 2001, and from 2002 until his retirement in 2006 he served on the faculty of the Columbia University School of Social Work. From 1997 until 2004 he was the online mental health expert for the HIV/AIDS website TheBody.com.

He was diagnosed as HIV-positive in 1982, but lived free of AIDS symptoms. At the time of his death from pancreatic cancer in Manhattan in June 2008, his brother Jeffrey Shernoff told The New York Times that he found it ironic that after years of living with HIV infection, "He died of pancreatic cancer, which may not even be related."

Shernoff was an early volunteer for Gay Men's Health Crisis and became one of the first social workers in the United States to address AIDS in a private psychotherapy practice. He wrote many articles and offered training for both mental health professionals and patients on dealing with mental health aspects of gay sexuality and living with HIV and AIDS. In 1985 he and Luis Palacios-Jiménez created the workshop "Hot, Horny and Healthy: Eroticizing Gay Sex" for a Gay Men’s Health Crisis conference. The workshop, intended to teach gay men how to continue to engage in sexual activity without risking HIV transmission, was eventually presented in cities across North America. A pamphlet that he co-authored, When a Friend Has AIDS, was translated into eight languages.

Shernoff produced, following the AIDS death of a partner, an anthology entitled Gay Widowers: Life after the Death of a Partner that ten years later was described as still being the only book to address the specific challenges of grief for gay men having lost their partners.