The article reports on observations made at meetings in New York of support groups for gays and lesbians who identify as sexually compulsive. It examines the participants' – mostly males – narratives and its language, the social relationships they develop at meetings, and the impact of that experience on their lives. The article's major premise is that these meetings do not initiate a curing forum to reform an ‘addiction’. Instead, they evolve a compassionate community that engages its participants in a performative discourse on sexual behaviour and gay life style. My purpose is to extend the field of ethnographic research into unvisited domains of experience and association in contemporary urban life.