Robert Taylor begins his lecture with a warning. "The pictures are pretty graphic." he tells the high-school students, calmly. "If you don't like them, all you have to do is close your eyes."

But as the doctor holds up each photo, there are no closed eyes in the audience, just the occasional groan and some nervous laughter.

The pictures are close-up shots of penises and vaginas, and they are far from erotic. The first shows a yellow discharge dripping from the tip of a penis, the result of gonorrhea. The next shot displays testicles at a more advanced state of the disease; they have swelled to the size of tennis balls. Another photo shows red, oval shaped genital warts lining the outer lips of a vagina. One of the more gruesome pictures is of a bright-pink open sore on a black man's foreskin. Perhaps the most unsettling image is of the 30-plus pills an AIDS patient might take in a day.

"I don't do it to scare the students,' Taylor explains. " I look at it as a taste of reality. People hear about herpes and syphilis, But how many people really see what it looks like? Very few kids fall asleep in my class.

Supported in part by small grants, Taylor has been giving this lecture on sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) to Boston's public high school students for three years now. But his unconventional medical career has seen him help a wide range of people-from some of the nation's earliest AIDS patients to the residents of the Nashua Street Jail to Jerry Garcia.

Taylor graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1977, but gained his expertise in sexually transmitted diseases as the physician in charge of the VD clinic (now the STD clinic) at the Fenway Community Health Center. In 1980, a coworker suggested the two open their own practice but took a job in New York just before their clinic was to open. So there was Dr. Taylor, starting "a private practice that I had never really dreamed about having." He's been running his general practice, which specializes in STD treatment, at his two-room office on Beacon Street, in Brookline, ever since.

For the past 12 years, Taylor's also been on call as a doctor for the Don Law Company, Boston's major concert promoter. "When (Don Law is) taking care of a group, and someone in the group is sick or just wants to see a doctor for some reason, they'll call me," Taylor explains. If someone wants to have their throat looked at, I'll be there.

Often he'll give a rocker the curiously popular but medically questionable B-12 vitamin shot. "It's just a vitamin shot, but some people swear by it," he says. A few such fans were the members of Fleetwood Mac, who once called on Taylor to give a round of B-12 shots to the entire band.

"They brought me into the men's dressing room," Taylor recalls, "and there's Mick Fleetwood and all the guys, and they say, 'Can you give the shot to one of the ladies first?'"

Taylor was then directed to the bathroom, where one of the female singers (he won't reveal whether it was Christine McVie or Stevie Nicks) immediately pulled down her pants.

Taylor reenacts the moment: "Whoa! Wait a minute. Pull your pants back up. I just got here. Let me take off my coat, wash my hands and prepare the needle."

The butt, adds Taylor, is not the usual spot to receive this particular shot. "I usually give it in the arm," he says, "but since she had already pulled down her pants once, I figured I couldn't tell her that."

Listening to the grinning, casually dressed doctor talk about his patients-Smashing Pumpkins, Counting Crows, and Stone Temple Pilots- one gets the impression that he'd do his job just for the free backstage pass.

Recently he was on call at a Wallflowers show. When he says, "It was cool because I got to meet and hang out with Jakob Dylan," he sounds almost like one of the teenagers he teaches.

His hipness helps him in the classroom. Today's lesson is at Another Course to College, an alternative high-school program on Newbury Street. As his hour-long talk comes to an end, Taylor jokes to the students: "You've got Condom World 30 steps from your door, so there's no excuse. They've got 85 different brands and flavors."

The kids laugh. This time the laughter isn't a sign of immaturity-it's a sign that the class is still listening.

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(c) 1998 Robert Taylor, M.D.