Now a senior faculty member at Mount Sinai Hospital, and recently named New York City's assistant health commissioner in charge of HIV, Daskalakis, 40, has undeniable gravitas lurking beneath his boyish features. He recently began to collate lessons learned from those odd office hours at Paddles into a research paper published last month in LGBT Health, which shows that men at high risk for HIV may misjudge their vulnerability to the deadly disease.

“HIV risk has been swept under the carpet by medical providers,” Daskalakis says. “This study informs providers that HIV risk assessment needs to be a priority.”

But long before Paddles and published papers, the Harvard-educated infectious disease doctor was a public health advocate, searching for better ways to help the growing number of men who engage in high-risk sexual behaviors.

“Demetre works 24/7,” says Michael Macneal, Daskalakis’s husband of three years. “When I met him, he was already doing outreach in the gay community, passing out condoms and performing HIV tests.”

Macneal, a wiry fitness instructor with no formal medical training, helps out by sorting through piles of paperwork and following Daskalakis into nightclubs, standing guard outside his husband’s private medical consultations.

Daskalakis grew up in Arlington, Virginia, but felt drawn to the big city from a young age, so he enrolled in Columbia University immediately after high school. Daskalakis recalls the day that his parents drove him up to Columbia. “We crossed the George Washington Bridge, there was a car on fire and a dead dog in the gutter. My father said, ‘Are you sure?’ and I said ‘Keep on going!’”

As a student, Daskalakis’s maverick taste for the unknown brought him to Manhattan’s East Village on many a weeknight, where his brushes with LGBT nightlife would ultimately shape his perspective in caring for a diverse patient population. “I learned my bedside manner from East Village drag queens,” he jokes.

Although he followed a pre-medical curriculum while at Columbia, by his senior year Daskalakis was still unsure of what field of medicine he would pursue. But that changed once he became involved in a student-run campaign to bring AIDS awareness to the campus. The centerpiece of the event was the display of a patch from the NAMES Project’s AIDS Memorial Quilt, and the task of flying to San Francisco to pick up the artwork fell to Daskalakis.

Daskalakis says he felt as though he was transporting the legacy of the millions who had succumbed to HIV and AIDS. “It was a surreal experience. Here this quilt was just a rug, but I was carrying it through the airport [as] a shroud,” he says.

Only days later, still jet-lagged from his cross-country flight, Daskalakis attended the memorial ceremony at Columbia. “I remember being very tired, and just saying ‘This shouldn’t happen any more. I have to make sure this doesn’t happen any more.’”