On our walk in Chelsea, Robinson, smoking and drinking another giant diet soda, denied that his role as a gay-movement hero-martyr damaged his marriage or his personal relationships, just as he pushes back on the idea that the pressures of his public role sent him in 2006 into treatment for alcohol abuse. He went into rehab, he told me, simply because he was an alcoholic, not because he was too stressed or too busy. All people suffer, he pointed out. All families suffer. Why should he be any different? Well, I suggested, because to be a movement hero is to be focused on a greater good, sometimes at the expense of more intimate demands. No, he responded: �Mark was very much in this with me. He understood this greater good, and I think he was certainly making as many sacrifices as I was. How we managed that is up for grabs, but generally speaking we were pretty simpatico.� It was Mark, in fact, who kept him from believing too much in his own importance. �He never quite said this, but his attitude was, �I don’t care if you are the bishop. Take the garbage out.’ �