Two-thirds of countries have reported gonorrhea cases that resist all known antibiotics. Now scientists are trying to hold the line against the disease as they look for a new way to treat it.

Mark King has had the clap so many times he’s renamed it ‘the applause’. The first time King had gonorrhea, he was a teenager in the late 1970s, growing up with his five siblings in Louisiana.

He had the telltale signs: burning and discomfort when he urinated and a thick discharge that left a stain in his underwear.

King visited a clinic and gave a fake name and phone number. He was treated quickly with antibiotics and sent on his way.

A few years later, the same symptoms reappeared. By this time, the 22-year-old was living in West Hollywood, hoping to launch his acting career.

While King had come out to his parents, being gay in Louisiana was poles apart from being gay in Los Angeles. For one, homosexuality was illegal in Louisiana until 2003, whereas California had legalized it in 1976.

In Los Angeles there was a thriving a gay scene where King, for the first time, could embrace his sexuality freely. He frequented bathhouses and also met men in dance clubs and along the bustling sidewalks. There was lots of sex to be had.

“The fact that we weren’t a fully formed culture beyond those spaces… was what brought us together as people. Sex was the only expression we had to claim ourselves as LGBT people,” King says.

When he stepped into the brick clinic just a few strides away from the heart of the city’s gay nightlife in Santa Monica, King, with his thick sandy blond hair with a tinge of red through it, looked around the room. It was filled with other gay men.

“What do you do when you’re 22 and gay? You cruise other men. I remember sitting in the lobby cruising other men,” King recalls, laughing. “My Summer of Love was 1982. It was a playground. I was young and on the prowl.”

Like a few years earlier, the doctor gave him a handful of antibiotics to take for a few days that would clear up the infection. It wasn’t a big deal. In fact, as King describes it, it was “simply an errand to run”.

“It was the price of doing business and it wasn’t a high price at all.”

But it was the calm before the storm, in more ways than one.

When King picked up gonorrhea again in the 1990s, he was greatly relieved that treatment was now just one dose.

Penicillin was no longer effective, but ciprofloxacin was now the recommended treatment and it required only one dose. In King’s eyes, getting gonorrhea was even less of a hassle.

But this was actually a symptom of treatment regimens starting to fail. The bacteria Neisseria gonorrhoeae was on the way to developing resistance to nearly every drug ever used to treat it.